Well, this was inevitable. I was angry when I first read this as a exclusive from Clive Barker's official site Revelations (www.clivebarker.info), I was really upset that Bob Weinstein had contacted Clive to do a remake of the first Hellraiser, right after they had run the franchise to the ground with laughable budgets and shooting the last couple of DTV sequels in Romania back-to-back using local talent.

I was really venting when I found out Clive had said yes to writing it, and might even be involved in the production. It's like asking Picasso to repaint the Guernica! I honestly couldn't (and still can't) understand why he would agree to reshaping his original work. It's like having someone come back to the museum and add a few more brush strokes to a painting in a museum, completely painting over the canvas.

Then the idea has been settling with time. I still reserve judgement as this could go either way, they might do it or not, and it sure will take a long time to get this film project greenlighted and really into the early stages of production.

But Clive still has to finish and publish "The Scarlet Gospels", and after that he needs to get the books 3 and 4 of Abarat done too. I don't predict a very good future for his re-writing of the Hellraiser script, he has a very special pace (sloooooow) of doing things, and I'm guessing that he might lose the train if this project is moving forward. Then we'd be left with a really crappy sequel project for Hellraiser.

I'm excited in a little way because Clive has just been doing the touch ups on the Scarlet Gospels and thus, has this whole landscape of Hell and Pinhead fresh in his mind. For those of you who don't know, Scarlet Gospels is a book where Harry D'Amour meets Pinhead and rescues some people from Hell. That's the good news. The bad news is this Hell is a real Judaeo Christian hell from what has transpired from interviews and such. There's Christ and Lucifer in the mix there too, and this kind of denies everything the movie series and the comics had created over the years (the Hellraiser 'hell' as a parallel dimension where Leviathan rules, there is no moral judgements there or damned souls in the religious term of the word, and only the discipline of flesh in the war for Order).

So I'm sure everything we know and love from the original Hellraiser will pretty much be discarded or repurposed (No Labyrinth, no Leviathan) and probably be replaced with a much more interesting but severely different mythology.

Pinhead has also been said to be a very important character, albeit very different from Doug Bradley's portrayal. It is very unsure if Doug will have any input in this possible remake.

I would like to believe that the franchise wouldn't end on a couple of crappy DTV sequels that are an eyesore to watch. But a Remake?

Like I said, mixed feelings.

I just hope this is a chance to do a good movie, or a couple of good movies (am I greedy aiming for a trilogy?) that bring Hellraiser to a new audience and back into the theatres, and not just another cheap way to milk a franchise with a one shot crappy remake or worse, milking the cow this might bring, following the remake with a couple more crappy sequels, again.