Click here to copy URL

Hellraiser

1987

Clive Barker

Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Sean Chapman ...

6.1

12,873

Horror. Fantasy Clive Barker's feature directing debut graphically depicts the tale of a man and wife who move into an old house and discover a hideous creature - the man's half-brother, who is also the woman's former lover - hiding upstairs. Having lost his earthly body to a trio of S&M demons, the Cenobites, he is brought back into existence by a drop of blood on the floor. He soon forces his former mistress to bring him his necessary human ... [+]

	Author	Review
United Kingdom	Bob McCabe Empire	"One of the most genuinely disturbing movies of the last 20 years (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United States	Eric Henderson Slant	"'Hellraiser's overriding ridiculousness (...) can’t disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis (…) Rating: ★★½ (out of 4)"	NEU
United States	Michael Wilmington Los Angeles Times	"Genuinely scary (...) [It] is intelligent and brutally imaginative (...) But the basic problem with 'Hellraiser' is one of balance (...) [Barker] seems to be scraping bloody tongue against gory cheek."	NEU
United Kingdom	Nigel Floyd Time Out	"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."	POS
United States	Jonathan Rosenbaum Chicago Reader	"What ever happened to movie plots? (...) Minor grisly fun, but don't expect the movie to linger when it's over"	NEU
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	"Who goes to see movies like this? What do they get out of them? (...) There are no surprises in 'Hellraiser', only a dreary series of scenes that repeat each other (…) Rating: ½ (out of 4)"	NEG
United States	Richard Harrington The Washington Post	"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."	NEU

Return to movie

We encourage you to check the reviews' original sources. Intellectual property rights of these reviews belong to their authors and/or the correspondent media from which they have been extracted. If you'd like to help us to add more reviews to your favorite movies, just send us a message.