Hellraiser: Revelations (2011)

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Don't listen to the negative reviews

I like movies that are aware of what they are selling... without [any] greater aspirations than to make people laugh and that's it.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

Two friends discover a puzzle box in Mexico, which unleashes cenobite Pinhead. Wanna know why most movie horror franchises suck? It's because films like 'Hellraiser: Revelations', 'Saw II,III,IV,V,VI,VII,VIII' and 'Halloween: Resurrection' were made which led the Series to either die or come back with some sort of reboot or just take it's time to return and this film is the exact same thing. It's badly written, badly directed, the perfomances were terrible and just awful from beginning to end and the actor who played Pinhead was pretty awful as well too....!!!! (0/10)

There was once, way back, a little horror movie called Hellraiser. From the mind of English writer Clive Barker, the movie took place within a dark world in which the Lament Configuration existed: a puzzle-box fascinating to anyone with an affection for mind games, and irresistible to those looking to push the boundaries of earthly pleasures. It also opened a gateway to Hell, in which a gang of sadistic demons named the Cenobites roamed in search of thrill- seeking fools to prey upon. It is now an established horror classic, and naturally spawned sequels, each declining in quality as the movies were farted out by a Dimension Films keen to keep hold of the rights to a franchise they could someday reboot. A matter of weeks before the rights expired, Dimension, now owned by the Weinstein Company, rushed production on the ninth entry in the series. The result, dubbed Revelations, was such cinematic cancer that Barker took to Twitter page to distance himself from the tripe.Steven (Nick Eversman) and Nico (Jay Gillespie) are two young horndogs who escape their middle-class family for the seediness of Mexico, where they hope to guzzle tequila, f**k prostitutes, and generally act like annoying a**eholes. A year later, the boys haven't been heard from, and their two families gather for dinner and drinks. Steven's mother Sarah (Devon Sorvari), via a private detective, has obtained her son's video camera, which shows Nico opening the Lament Configuration and being approached by Pinhead (Stephan Smith Collins) and his cronies. We flash back and forth in time between Steven being forced to lure victims for his friend in order to regenerate his body and skin, and the family's utter shock at Steven's sudden re-appearance and increasingly bizarre behaviour.Series regular and all-round horror icon Doug Bradley turned the movie down. Despite having to straight-face his way through Rick Bota's torturous sequels - which were already taking enough of a dump on Barker's mythology - he took one look at the script and walked away. Newcomer Collins already faced an impossible task of filling such iconic shoes, but with little to do other than rattle a few chains and donning some terrible make-up, he comes across like a chubby kid in cosplay making his own movie at home. The acting is unspeakably bad, with Eversman in particular failing to convince as an actual human person. Director Victor Garcia doesn't seem interested in even half-a****g a set-piece, with the majority of time spent with Steven's cardboard parents fretting over their blood-spattered emo child. There was only one thing in mind when this celluloid sneeze was bungled together: money. A vision that was once so fresh and shocking now represents a studio at its greedy worst, disrespecting the artist who created it all and the fans who love him for it.

"Hellraiser: Revelations" does wonders with its primary limitations: small budget, short set time, and no Doug Bradley. But, as a fan of Clive Barker's world, I got everything I wanted: an expansion of the suspenseful Pinhead, and a formulaic honesty to the original two films before "Hellraiser III" transitioned the lively horror-drama into a pop franchise. Unlike the other 2000-era 'Hellraiser' films, "Revelations" honors the first two films by making Pinhead and the illustrious Box prominent foundations of the plot. It includes other gems of the originals as well: themes of the flesh, a complex family drama, and torturous visual artistry that isn't only gory, but also resonates within a dark part of our primordial psyche. Pinhead's presence is highly rewarding and a lot of fun to observe. But the character's longer dialogue seems written more fitly for an expansive 'Hellraiser' TV series, which makes you miss Doug Bradley's demigod-like presence all the more; with him, less was always more when it came to dialogue. I love 'Hellraiser' films because the fantasy is so intermingled with the conditions of human life. Everything we ever feared about sin, Hell, God, and evil comes to the surface through Clive Barker's themes. This film is conscious of these resonances and does its best to continue them. However demonic and detached he is, Pinhead is more humanoid in his motives and mannerisms than Jason, Freddy, and Michael combined. We want to go deeper with him. "Revelations" is that next step forward into Pinhead's realm since "Bloodline" which marked the conclusion of Barker's direct influence on the films.

...heaven help you if you make a *boring* film. I used to say that constantly when I was younger and full of pep and had just taken a walk into the DVD-Video format that refuses to go away in spite of looking like a dirty dish with a crack in it compared to actual (that is, not "upsampled") HD.I started writing this "review" as a kind of response to a very surface-scratching and short attempt to defend this film. Because after they once again told us to forgive the film based on how little they had to work with, that is what comes to mind. The film is utterly boring.It is also well worth noting that this film exists for one reason, and only one reason: to prevent the rights to this moribund franchise from reverting back into the hands of Clive Barker. It is one thing if one makes a bad film with honest intentions. For example, Ed Wood's intentions ranged from pleading for acceptance of transvestites (in the 1950s, I might add) to stopping the nuclear arms race before we ended up without a planet to live on. That his delivery of such messages through cinema was comically inept is beside the point, because although the message gets lost in the unintentional comedy, simply knowing that that was partly what he intended is enough to see he had more in mind than just money. Not the makers of Hellraiser Revelations. All they cared about was money, and it shows.Stories generally go through a lot of rewriting before they are presented to an audience. Generally, when an author looks at his first draft, he sees mistake after mistake leaping out at him, crying for correction. Characters he was in love with during the first draft might seem like complete nonces whilst rereading, and are thus modified during the subsequent drafts. Actions undertaken by characters that got the basic plot from A to B in the first draft might make zero sense on rereading, and thus the author will rewrite the sequence of events to make more sense. Why am I describing these parts of the writing process? Because it is plainly evident that precisely none of that happened with this script.The story as it unfolds in this film goes something like two spoiled brats go on a road trip to Mexico looking for booze, sex, and good times. The things that go wrong eventually lead them to sit in a bar where a bum who looks strangely like the bum in the original film offers them the box. Astute readers will note that this is quite a difference from the original, where one brother actively seeks out the box in a South-East Asian market because he is bored and jaded with all the thrills and spills the world can offer him. Dialogue is given in which one brat explains for the audience that he does not want to spend the rest of his life in what I inferred from this speech was a hicksville village (the film itself is not too clear about where they actually live). Although it was not great at doing this, the original gave the audience plenty to imply that one brother was a boring, tepid personality and the other a wild, outgoing man. In Revelations, almost everything is told to the audience rather than demonstrated. That can work with good actors, but the actors here mostly look like they would find it difficult to read out a battle scene from The Phantom Blooper in a way that stimulates interest.Hellraiser Revelations is only useful for two things. One, to demonstrate there is no low to which the Weinsteins will not sink in order to keep a property, no matter how far they have run that property's value into the ground. Two, as a teaching tool at film schools. One film school teacher quoted in the Plan 9 Companion says one useful teaching tool is to show a student an example when film is not being done well and make them take notes of what is not being done well. Hellraiser Revelations offers a goldmine of material for a class like that.