Every horror movie is about pain, but only the “Hellraiser” series is about sadomasochism — the electricity and agony of it, the higher calling of it.
“Hellraiser,” a reboot of the franchise that began in 1987 and has given us nine sequels (time flies when you’re having fun imagining yourself being tortured for fun), is a movie that honors the transgressive tug of Clive Barker’s 1986 novella “The Hellbound Heart.” But it takes a long time for the new “Hellraiser” to get to what devotees of the series would call the good stuff.
When it does, however, the movie doesn’t hold back.
Flesh is torn and flayed, flesh is peeled and sliced, flesh gets split wide open with mystical mechanical devices.
The film’s brutal final act may put you in mind of such queasy landmarks of cinematic mutilation as “Audition,” “The Cell,” the “Saw” series, the 2018 remake of “Suspiria,
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