It won't tear your soul apart, but at least it's a drop of fresh blood for a series that didn't deserve to stay dead.“NASA astronaut Bob Behnken poses with a U.S. The new 2022 Hellraiser does some cool stuff when it reaches the back stretch, although the two-hour-long film spends way too long spinning its wheels to get there. Luckily, the true horror fan can find original, bleeding edge frights in more horror-focused spaces, like streaming service Shudder. All very well for the casual pumpkin-carving viewer to drop in around Halloween, but serious horror fans might find this genre tourism pretty lightweight.

14) and streamers are throwing up new takes on everything from Scream to a family-friendly Predator and Hocus Pocus 2. Remember that thing you like? There's a new one! The success of the recent Halloween movies show that familiar horror icons still have legs, especially in spooky season (Michael Myers returns again in the optimistically-titled Halloween Ends on Oct. The current war between streaming services has created an insatiable market for new stuff - but not too new: reboots and sequels and prequels vie to grab your attention with a familiar title.

Seriously, the film can't offer you any reason to care about this cast other than the fact they're on your screen. Who is Riley's brother apart from being her judgey landlord? What was their relationship like as kids? Where are their parents? Is there any unresolved conflict between them? One so-called 'character' introduces herself with the words 'I'm the roommate' and no other information is ever given about her, which blunts the impact when she's imaginatively tortured. Where the original introduced flawed humans with relatably sordid urges, the reboot offers no-one with hopes, flaws, dreams or even backstory. It's a worthy new take on a horror icon, and the film does throw up some flashes of imagination in the design, the gory set pieces and the direction from David Bruckner, who helmed chilling The Night House.īut there's more than a whiff of the '90s as four good-looking but utterly personality-free twentysomethings wind up in a creepy mansion. Jamie Clayton takes over from original star Doug Bradley as the high priest of these soul-chomping sybarites, nicknamed Pinhead for fairly obvious reasons.

Dead space slasher cardboard cutout