Guybrush

Both the movies, comics and Clive Barker do Pinhead a disservice in my opinion. Some years ago, I read the Scarlet Gospel by Clive Barker in which Pinhead is a (very powerful) free agent, more like in the movies. It's fun and gory, but Pinhead is basically just an evil entity after power. His motivations are entirely bland. They do this in the comics too and it's such a cliche.

The hell in Scarlet Gospel is more similar to the Divine comedy variety and features an angelic lucifer rather than the labyrinthine afterlife overseen by Leviathan (which is just a small part of hell or one of several hell realms).

I much preferred the earlier version of Pinhead and the cenobites and the realm they inhabited. I much prefer them in service to something higher than them. Their god, Leviathan, is an enormous geometric construct, entirely unfathomable and so much more original than your angel/demon/monster. The duality of pain/pleasure, this perverted idea that the Leviathan's labyrinth could be a heaven to some, is interesting. It's cool how they parallell the labyrinth to the folds in the human brain. Leviathan creates these cenobites, like the Channard cenobite, for somewhat mysterious reasons that we don't quite understand. This vision altogether felt so much more fresh and orginal than what it evolved into.

So that's my probably unwanted Hellraiser rant

The third movie may be acceptable for the curious who are prepared for the downwards trajectory. We do get the CD player cenobite and the pathetic Pinhead totem, which I guess is unintentionally a bit like the lackluster Stonehenge from Spinal tap. Fourth movie and on, it's free falling.

I liked it a lot! My wife liked it even more and wants to watch The Remains of the Day which is on netflix here.. Another Merchant Ivory movie with similar casting. I'm definitely game, but I need to wait a little while before I try to digest more Thompson / Hopkins love drama

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