'Hellraiser' review: A reboot of the Pain-Freak Horror franchise is now the world's boldest Disney movie

All horror movies are about pain, but only the "Hellraiser" series is about sadomasochism – the electricity and the agony of it, the higher call of it. "Hellraiser," a reboot of the franchise that debuted in 1987 and gave us nine sequels (time flies when you're having fun imagining yourself being tortured for fun), is a film that pays homage to the transgressive tug from Clive Barker's 1986 short story "Hellraiser." But it takes the new "Hellraiser" a long time to get to what series enthusiasts would call the good stuff. When it does, however, the film doesn't hold back. Flesh is torn and frayed, flesh is peeled and sliced, flesh is ripped open wide by mystical mechanical devices. The film's brutal final act may remind you of unhealthy landmarks of cinematic mayhem like "Audition ", "The Cell," the "Saw" series, the 2018 remake of "Suspiria," and David Cronenberg's recent return to body horror "Future Crimes."

Yet even before reaching that screaming climax under the skin, the new "Hellraiser" could be considered one of the most evil horror movies in recent memory. It's a savage horror movie that's released by Disney, and if you're wondering how Disney - other than they own everything in sight, including Hulu, the platform that streams " Hellraiser" - would now associate its brand with a horror series devoted to the nightmarish assertion of outrageous sexuality, the answer is: "Hellraiser", for most of its two-hour runtime, actually looks like a Disney… except for those moments when it seems to have been taken over by the spirit of the Marquis de Sade.

What marks the characters — Riley (Odessa A'zion), who looks like a rebellious enlightened major , plus her lunkhead boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey), overprotective brother Matt (Brandon Flynn) and boyfriend Colin (Adam Faison) — as 'Disney characters' is that they possess none of the hidden edges or flourishes of the characters in, say, "Body, body, body." These are numbers from youth films; they have almost no intrinsic interest. For about an hour as he sets things up, the movie is near killer. The characters here are truly walking meat on hold. The movie could have been called "Bodies Bodies Bodies (with Chain Hooks)".

Again, the "Hellraiser" movies have never been worth much on this count. Pinhead, the show's solemn S&M ringleader/aesthete/guru (that bald white head, with its perfectly ordered chessboard lines and rows of pins, looked like a scowling art installation), became a figure rascal of Freddy Krueger, an unholy mascot of megaplex terror. But who remembers or cares about the people he infected with his pleasure-pain virus?

In the new "Hellraiser", Pinhead - more correctly called Hell Priest - arrives with a team of companions phantom kink demons, which give new meaning to the phrase “exposed body parts” (one of them has his spine open as if someone were operating on it). One walks around like an alien geisha, another is like a robot with nun's grin-grin jaws, and the other looks like a Francis Bacon portrait of a mouth frozen in mid-scream. As for Pinhead, he's been reconfigured into a soft-creepy-doll version of himself, complete with child star eyes and a sexually ambiguous velvet voice. That the Hell Priest is now played by an actress, Jamie Clayton, brings the film closer, in some ways, to the spirit of Barker's novel. Yet as Pinhead and his fellow specters roam around, they're such a valuable collection of creatures that I half expected to hear someone say, "Collect all five."

The movie stops dead as soon as they are not at the screen, as the only plot seems to be Riley's desire to reclaim his brother after he is absorbed into the cosmic sphere of pain. Trevor, who may know more than he's letting on, says things like, "How did you get it to change, like, from the cube to this?" He is, of course, talking about Lemarchand's Box, the engraved mechanical puzzle box that is the hallmark of the "Hellraiser" series - it unlocks the pain of pleasure, leading your soul into a new world. Even the delicate logistics of the box is, in a way, a metaphor. It starts as a cube which, if you click the correct buttons and turn the correct corners, exposes and rearranges its hidden parts, at which point it is no longer square. Just like that ...