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"The way to a woman's heart is along the path of torment." The key to Clive Barker's bravura De Sadean satire of subterranean kinks is a cube found as a bazaar novelty, once triggered "it opens doors" and summons forth chain-and-hook-wielding, leather-clad demons (or perhaps saviors). The reprobate (Sean Chapman) uses it and meets his match in the Cenobites, pierced S&M monks from a parallel universe with a swirling atelier of body parts. His old lair is now home to the former mistress (Clare Higgins) who's married his brother (Andrew Robinson), it's got maggots crawling over erotic figurines and Catholic paraphernalia but is still "better than Brooklyn." The accelerating cutting between the wife's exaltation at a remembered ravishment and the squeamish husband slicing his hand on a nail shows nothing less than a novelist becoming a filmmaker, and Barker is just getting warmed up. Blood on the floorboards revives the disemboweled lover as a bundle of sinew, flesh on his bones comes gradually courtesy of the clods his lusting cohort lures to the attic. "I thought this kind of stuff made you sick." "I've seen worse." The Invisible Man, Little Shop of Horrors, Don't Look Now, Salò. The festering verticality of the house versus the horizontality of corridors into new dimensions, the gory uncle's homecoming plus the blossoming of the inquisitive heroine (Ashley Laurence). A droll British eye on grisly effects, chief among them Robinson's inspired loony gleam as his character uses the camera as a mirror to adjust a pouch of skin while ignoring the mass of viscera oozing from under his scalp. Borges' La Casa de Asterión, "I thought I'd gone to the limits..." Pinhead (Doug Bradley) becomes the sequels' wisecracking boogeyman, but nothing beats the original's portrait of the gruesome sublime. With Oliver Smith, Robert Hines, and Kenneth Nelson.
--- Fernando F. Croce |