The Hellraiser franchise is a series of cautionary tales about the dangers of being way too fucking kinky and/or playing with boxes of unknown provenance. The first two (the best two1) center around Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) fighting off the evil the infamous puzzle box has brought to her family. She is young and cute, she wins, etc. Whatever. We’re not here to talk about Kirsty. We are here to talk about Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins), and more importantly, her box.
(Warning: There will be spoilers in this piece because the movie came out in 1987; you had 39 years.)
Julia is the glamorous but aloof wife of Kirsty’s dad, Larry (Andrew Robinson) who has bafflingly agreed to move into a house she hates with a kitchen full of maggots to give her marriage one last shot. Despite the fact that she openly hates him, Larry is determined to keep her in his life—our first clue that there is something pretty special about this bad bitch with the killer earrings.
When I say “bad bitch” I mean it like “she’s hot” but also like she’s a bad person and a huge bitch. We discover pretty early that Julia would much rather fuck Larry’s brother, Frank (played by Sean Chapman when he’s human-ish and Oliver Smith when he’s … well … not) than do just about anything. She finds his stash of sexy photos, and has a whole orgasm over her memory of getting her back blown out by Frank the day before her wedding. It’s important to note that Frank is the one who left the kitchen full of maggots. Julia does not seem to care. Julia doesn’t seem to care about anything but stealing hot photos of her brother-in-law when Larry comes upstairs bleeding, because while she was taking a trip down memory-mattress, he was moving their furniture in and was injured.
The power of her orgasm and Larry’s blood provide just what Frank needs to come back from the depths of Hell so he can fuck Julia again (and escape the Cenobites, I guess). Unfortunately, he’s mostly just a puddle of viscera, but he convinces Julia to use her raw sexuality to hunt and kill men for him to suck the life out of and become more human. Have we not all done things we may regret for a little ill-advised dick? After he gets a little more body, she immediately resents Larry even more. He’s not hot, he’s not dangerous, and he certainly didn’t come back from the dead to be with her. Julia was an early adopter of “If he wanted to, he would.” Larry’s not getting any of this supernatural snatch if he’s not putting in the effort.
So she kills enough men for Frank to have most of a body, then they kill Larry together so Frank can wear his skin as a suit, skin being the last thing he needs before Julia will fuck him. He could just keep eating horny gross dudes Julia brings home, but he wants her so bad he’s willing to be less hot to do it. Lot’s of stuff happens after this; Frank does kill her (that’s part of the danger with a dangerous man), he gets sent back to hell, etc. Then, we come to Hellbound: Hellraiser II.
Hellbound is where we really experience the power of Julia and her magic muff. First, she emerges from the mattress Frank left her to die on. She immediately seduces the weird ass Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham) who is obsessed with the puzzle boxes and their promise. He is immediately ready to bang Julia, despite her being a bloody, skinless monster. He is speechless and confounded by his attraction to her when she emerges, wearing a white Armani suit that she’s bleeding all over (she’s still a bad bitch, after all). Channard immediately solves this problem and wraps her in bandages, giving her a real Bride of Frankenstein moment. Oh, and he immediately rounds up men to hang from the ceiling so she can suck out their life force to come back hotter than ever.
Kirsty and a hot doctor named Kyle (William Hope) arrive at Channard’s house knowing exactly what is going on, and somehow Julia still manages to transfix him and suck the life right out of him even as he stands in a room full of her victims. Lots more stuff happens (if you want the plot, watch the movie, we’re here to talk about Julia Cotton’s cunning cunt2), and we discover that Julia is so goddamn sexy, so goddamn kinky, so goddamn Julia Cotton, that the Cenobites let her come back to Earth. These are the same Cenobites who were dead set on bringing Frank back because no one is supposed to ever leave. She’s made some deal to gather souls for them and has her heart set on becoming the literal Queen of Hell (we love an ambitious woman).
She introduces Channard to Hell, he quickly becomes a Cenobite, and Julia moves on. We encounter Frank in his own personal hell, which is mostly romantic candlelight and hot, writhing women who disappear as soon as he lifts the sheets. Blueballs Hell is a torture even Dante couldn’t dream of, but Frank is pulled from his misery as soon as Julia enters the room, immediately entranced by that paranormal pussy. She literally rips his heart out of his chest: 10/10, no notes.
Channard, now gleefully running through life as a Cenobite, still wants to kill the girl he used to open the puzzle box, but then along comes Julia. Nothing is coming between Channard-bite and making out with the most beguiling broad he’s ever met. This distracts him, which ruins everything. Now, it may sound like Julia won, but unfortunately, not even Clive Barker can suffer a bitch this bad to live. We discover that Kirsty killed and skinned Julia and wore her skin to fuck up Channard’s plans and save the day. She rips off her hermetic honeypot disguise and we see that she is changed.
Is it because of everything she’s been through and come through the other side? Is it trauma? Or is it that wearing Julia’s skin has given her something she could never gain on her own?
We do know that just the essence of Julia’s bewitching box is enough to seduce a mover right up to a bloody mattress so she can eat him. Unfortunately, she comes back as a pillar and not a bad bitch with the most seductive sugarwalls in history.
