Director: Clive Barker
Year Released: 1990
Rating: 1.5
A young man experiencing weird-ass dreams (Craig Sheffer) also has the misfortune of being framed for murder by the creepiest psychiatrist in the Yellow Pages (a very fey David Cronenberg, no stranger to violence) - eventually, he kind-of/sort-of dies, enters some hellish realm of oozing mutants, the police and a priest invade a cemetery and the world kind-of/sort-of ends. I find it so deeply ironic that for his gifts as a novelist Barker seems handcuffed by cinematic structure so his movies are generally poorly paced and incoherent and strangely distant - the entirety of his focus here (as with Hellraiser) is on the character design. It's no coincidence that comic artist Seth McFarlane paired up with Mr. Barker to make some outrageous action figures (do a search for Clive Barker's "Tortured Souls") that depict some disturbing meeting point between mutilation and pleasure - one figure says more about Barker's concerns with self-persecution than this jumble.
