Hellraiser (1987)
"I've seen the future of horror - his name is Clive Barker" said Stephen King once. Which is high praise in marketing terms, and in literature terms, if you like Stephen King.
A guy plays with a puzzle box, then is ripped apart in FX that would have freaked me out if I was still 8 years old, but looked very goofy now. This was Frank, whose lust for pleasure starts the whole plot in motion.
Meanwhile somewhere in Ameriland/Englica (it's never clear where), a couple move into the same house where the ripping apart happened. It's Frank's brother Larry and his wife. His wife once had a torrid affair with Frank. Larry's very "live and let live" about this. Then he accidentally bleeds in the attic moving some old mattress to the attic, which resurrects Frank as a bloody revenant who needs blood to rejuvenate.
He reveals this to his ex-lover and sister in law, Julia, who instead of freaking out, does this momentarily before deciding that luring innocents to their death by murder demon so she can eventually get another shag off him is a good idea. Claire Higgins is normally quite good in stuff, but she's given worse material than a Chris Chibnall Broadchurch character here. There is no reason for her to exist bar helping the plot along - she has no agency of her own bar Frank.
Meanwhile, Larry doesn't notice any of this because he's so genre blind he's got horror vascular dementia (he also has terrible trouble with the concept of No means No), and his daughter Kirsty (the only decent character in the film) decided before all the stabbing that the house was weird and it was better for her to shack up with her boyfriend somewhere else. Potentially making this one of the only horror films in which a young woman's life is saved by having an active sex life.
The calling card for Hellraiser is of course the Cennobites, and they look great. They also show up for about 3 minutes tops. Pinhead seems impressed by Kirsty's resourcefulness, and hates Frank, because the movie likes Kirsty but hates Frank, because Frank is a bad guy. Look, he's even going to try and rape his niece. No shades of grey here. Pinhead and pals (including the one who looks a lot like a Sontaran) seem more like demonic gatekeepers to the S&M division of Hell, than anything otherwise malignant for large chunks of the film - and if they want to nab Kirsty at the end, it seems genuinely more like its to become one of them than to share her uncle's fate.
As you might guess, Kirsty is the best thing about this film, aided by the fact that Ashley Laurence actually treats it like this is horrific things happening to someone. Frank's attack on her is genuinely more horrific than any demonic pleasure hunter with a pin cushion face ever could be, and the aftermath, when she gets away and is struggling down the street, is momentarily played exactly like it should be. (Although It Follows treats this sort of thing with far more respect.)
Whereas the worst thing is either the poor characterisation Claire Higgins has to deal with, or the direction, which is flat and insipid in all the places you need flair. Barker may be the future of horror, but he was clearly an ideas man, not a nuts and bolts director. And this film needed the latter, because it already had his ideas on board. He's clearly at one with the gore. Now you know I'm of the less is more school when it comes to the more visceral elements in horror, but there are ways to use it. Look at Argento's work, which is artistic. Here, its just blood and gore being blood and gore, and it quickly loses any sense of itself. By being ever present, it lacks punch, and just becomes a bunch of folk in makeup and effects trying to be unpleasant. The annoying thing about this is that the overall subtext of desire overcoming all morals to the point of evil works and would have worked better without the need for buckets of blood. But it needed a better horror direction. To be blunt, it needed a Peter Grimwade and it got a Ron Jones.
You can dig (deeply) into Hellraiser to find all kinds of subtexts which raise the film, and I know lots of people on here love the series, but for me, that textuality is doing a lot of heavy lifting because the basics of the script, character work, and production lay out are a mess. I can deal with a stylish mess, but this wasn't even stylish. It pressed most of the buttons which irritate me in film, with both my writers hat and general viewers hats on.
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