On the other hand, I made an honest mistake yesterday evening and decided to re-watch a British gem of a horror, Hellraiser (I was suddenly reminded of the film in one of the recent FB threads and thought: why not?... I haven’t seen it in ages).
Oh, dear reader, what can I say. Well, two things: first of all, the reality (I mean, the *real* one, i.e. yours) keeps changing, and, mysteriously, you are not that timid and impressionable young girl from the 1990s anymore (a shocker, I know), whose knowledge about cheap gore was non-existent, and second, the most important one, stahp it, get some help you’d better not do it (at least, not very often)—which means, you are good without going back to certain notorious cult B-movies, otherwise there is a chance that you might die. Of laughter.
The thing is, everything about Hellraiser is bad to the point that it gets wonderfully wholesome (that odd “Room”/Tommy Wiseau effect, ya know), and, frankly, there are still a few moments that are truly fantastic—mostly, at the very end when Pinhead and Co asked Kirsty, an unfortunate ingénue, to join them in their Cenobite-land of “pain and pleasure” (whatever it means for unenthusiastically confused and mildly amused extra-dimensional entities). Spoiler alert: Kirsty politely rejected their offer. But the rest—a huffy and puffy female protagonist with a ghastly mullet hairstyle (crimpled with lots of spray) and loud makeup (fuchsia eyeshadows/magenta lips, I see you), full of secret (not really) desires, her two male counterparts, a husband, a fairly nice yet simple bloke, and a lover, that bad guy with an attitude, her erotic flashbacks (shot in a recognisable cable-tv manner with fuzzy light and smoke)—were hilarious.
But the cherry on top were their locations and the accents (a bit later about them), of course. See, when I watched it nearly thirty years ago, I had no idea how self-parodying it sounded—I saw a dubbed version (maybe with the voice of the late Leonid Volodarsky, a true legend of voiceovers for a variety of Western movies, from action to romcoms, that emerged onto the post-Soviet cinematic market out of the blue). It’s an open secret that Hellraiser is unapologetically British, with a mostly British cast, but for whatever reason (I am too lazy to check out Wikipedia) the producers thought it would be a brilliant idea to set everything “somewhere in the States” (my understanding is that they wanted to choose between a fictional New England and an abstract “New York area”)—boy oh boy, did it fail spectacularly! Basically, you see Merseyside or the like sceneries with classical Victorian semi-detached/terraced houses, but the film crew is trying hard to persuade you that you are in – Massachusetts? Connecticut? Rhode Island? – with lousy pseudo-American signs, plastered around the traditional Northern/Midlands landscape.
And finally the accents!! They spared the audience and left the main actress with her RP (no shit Sherlock! She’s posh and therefore EVIL!), but the rest were either badly dubbed (?) or, which is more likely, imitated a kinda broad New England twang, and it was painful (pun intended) to listen. I mean, if that was what was meant under “the land of pain,” I guess, the goal was achieved: that was as cringy as it was hysterical.
Overall, if you want to see your memes in their original pristine beauty, go right ahead and watch it: you *will* be disappointed, but for all the wrong reasons, and at the end of the day, it would be worth it.
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