Hulu offered this up and I decided to see what made Pinhead a cultural touchstone. Sadly, he and his fellow Cenobites barely appear in it. The movie is more centered around the puzzlebox’s first known victim Frank who is torn apart in the first ten minutes after ‘solving it.’ Then his naive half-brother Larry and sister-in-law Julia move into the house Frank disappeared in, planning to start a new life in England. Little does Larry know but Frank and Julia had an affair some years earlier. Their uneven, brutal relationship comes back into play when Larry’s blood is spilled by an accident in the room Frank was torn apart in, starting the process of Frank re-assembling himself. Now Frank needs more victims’ blood to urgently to finish what was started and Julia complies by luring unfaithful husbands back to the house. This gradually makes Frank whole again. What Frank willfully doesn’t tell Julia is that he is being pursued by Pinhead and the gang. When the puzzlebox is ‘solved’ or ‘opened,’ it opens a gate to where the Cenobites live and they don’t like it when their victims/clients escape.
Overall, Hellraiser is slowly paced and over 80% of the story takes place in the house. The gore is pretty mild by today’s standards thanks to Eli Roth. Still wondering how this rather uninteresting flick led to nine sequels.