Hellraiser

Minor grisly fun, but don't expect the movie to linger when it's over.

[Writer/Director Clive] Barker's dazzling debut as a director creates such an atmosphere of dread that the astonishing visual set pieces simply detonate in a chain reaction of cumulative intensity.

This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination.

It's a dark, frequently disturbing and occasionally terrifying film that suggests Barker's vision hasn't quite made the conversion from paper to celluloid.

"This isn’t for your eyes”", says the demonic Cenobite –- but he is so very wrong about Clive Barker'’s must-see horror.

Not only did it revolutionise horror and force mainstream critics to accept that it could ... have real artistic weight, it captured a moment in time when social and sexual mores were shifting in a fascinating way.

For all that it is an incredible, and incredibly disturbing, film to look at, Hellraiser doesn't entirely click as a narrative.

Gore-torture-horror-ghoul fantasy from the '80s.

Sharp grim direction and tight writing from Clive Barker who turns his story of a puzzle box invoking the forces of hell in to an experience rather than doing the work for us...

Clive Barker's virtuosic De Sadean satire

Barker's vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser's overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can't disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis.

...an entertaining and downright creepy piece of work...