Hellraiser

 It's hard to overstate how hard Hellraiser hit back when it came out.
 1987 had an unusually good crop of future cult horror movies: The Hidden, Evil Dead II, Bad Taste, Monster Squad, Near Dark... and that's not even counting more mainstream stuff like Dream Warriors or The Lost Boys. But even compared to that batch of instant classics, Hellraiser was something else - nastier, sleazier, just plain weirder. Its gore is not quite as shocking now as it was back then, but everything around it is every bit as freaky.

 What's sometimes easy to forget is that for all its perversion, gore and cosmic horror, it's a complex, solidly constructed movie, full of wit and (black) humor. Clive Barker adapted his own novella, The Hellbound Heart, which was a natural fit for a feature thanks to its length and relative simplicity. The bones of the book ground it well.

When Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Julia (Claire Higgins) Cotton move back to Larry's family home, they're unaware that Larry's brother Frank (Sean Chapman/Oliver Smith) is still residing there.
 Frank was an... explorer, you might say, in the further regions of experience. Which is a fancy way of saying he was a pervert so jaded he summoned a bunch of S&M pervert demons just for kicks. That, predictably, didn't end well for poor, dumb, horny Frank, and the demons - better known as cenobites - left what little remained of him after they were done under the floorboards of the room he called them in.
 Now I think of it, they did a great job tidying up after themselves; pretty considerate for a bunch of degenerates from another dimension.

 Anyhow! During the move Larry cuts his hand on an exposed nail (ouch!), and his blood splashes (literally - there's a lot of blood) on the floor just above where Frank's remains were figuratively swept under the carpet. Sure enough, this unwitting sacrifice eventually resurrects Frank from the bones up in an amazing and disgustingly gooey scene. With such a pittance of blood, though, Frank comes back as a wretch, a wet rag of a pitiful zombie. Luckily for him it's Julia who discovers him; It turns out that she and Frank had a torrid affair right after she married Larry, and she's never quite forgotten him. Her horniness for Frank, coupled with the film's hilarious insistence on portraying poor Larry as a complete wuss, makes her agree to Frank's request to bring him more blood so he can finish regenerating and put some damn skin on.

 Julia is such an incredible character; a very posh, very British, extremely 80's ice queen that nonetheless displays some real vulnerability when she seduces some poor soul to murder him on Frank's behalf. You can almost see her wondering if maybe it's wrong to lure people to the house and kill them so her undead squeeze can live again...
 And then the victim starts behaving like a douchebag and she steels her expression: No, there's nothing wrong with hammering some asshole's brains out. Just like that, you get a nice streak of gallows humor to an already complex scene. Amazing.

 All of this takes place right under Larry's nose, but he's way too much of an idiot to ever notice anything. It's his daughter from a previous marriage, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) who pieces the clues together, figures what's going on, and inadvertently summons the Cenobites back again for a grand three-way confrontation. She's a fun, resourceful protagonist, but I'm sorry lady, you've got nothing on your stepmom. Neither does Frank, now I think about it; He makes for a remarkably sleazy villain, and is a lot of fun to watch strutting around like an illustration on a medical journal or staining a white shirt pink, but in the end it's all about Julia.
 Julia and the Cenobites.

 For a movie that launched Pinhead the Cenobite to instant fame - a horror icon to rival Freddy Krueger or Jason Vorhees, if not Dracula or any of the elder statesmen of horror - he's not on-screen all that much. His continued pop-culture success was down to a lot of work and talent: an incredible design and makeup job (Bob Keen and Geoff Portass did makeup and Jocelyn James costuming - all worked from a basic design from Barker), coupled with Doug Jones' dour, sanctimonious turn under the mask. His delivery of Barker's endlessly quotable, deliciously lurid dialog is extremely memorable ("No tears, please - it's a waste of good suffering.").  Remember, this was before comic book movies were popular, these sort of flowery, poetic/cheesy lines were not that common outside of fantasy movies.

 None of his hellish colleagues get a lot of love - two of them couldn't speak with all that makeup on, so their lines were reassigned. Open tracheotomy lady is cool, and so is the chatterer - both incorporate the movie's lines and hooks aesthetic into their design. The fat one, though... come on, he's just funny.
 I should also give special mention to the puzzle box, the device by which the cenobites are summoned. It's such a perfect storm of incredible art-deco-like prop design and a cool concept, seamlessly integrated into the plot... no wonder it's just as iconic as Pinhead.
 It's a shame these elements completely overshadow the pervy psychodrama at the heart of the story, but I guess it's also understandable. These are some prime quality elements.

 And then, of course, we have Barker's showmanship and penchant for weirdness. There's a couple of cool monsters that don't seem to be cenobites, just some weird hellish fauna that chase Kirsty for a while and provide some memorable imagery at the tail end of the film - I mean, who am I to say no to a demonic skeleton dragon?

 There are some issues with the acting, which sometimes gets a little soap-opera-ish, and some noticeable dubbing (apparently the film is meant to take place in the US, though I always thought it was set in the UK - I think my interpretation is valid, and the house is so British that I'd struggle accepting the official one). The film sometimes strains against its budget, especially when it gets more effects driven near the end, and Kirsty's love interest is completely superfluous (other than to show that no, she's no virginal figure; Everyone fucks/is horny/is a pervert in this movie).
 All these are fairly small issues, even smaller when set against everything that the movie gets so perfectly right - I haven't even mentioned Robin Vidgeon's excellent, evocative cinematography, or Christopher Young's amazing score, which contains one of the greatest and most recognizable horror themes of all time.

 What else can I say? I love this movie; It was hugely formative for me, for better or worse, and I'll always think of  it as one of the greats.