Reviewer: Chunkblower Review Date: October 31, 2012 Format: Blu-ray Released by: Arc Entertainment Release date: October 18, 2011 MSRP: $22.99 Region A Progressive Scan Codec: AVC, 1080p Widescreen 1.78 | 16x9: Yes 2011

Well, here we are. It’s the end of the line for our Hellraiser retrospective. If you told me after concluding the Children of the Corn series last year that our next “Franchise Harvest” would have me pining for the good old days of Final Sacrifice, I would have laughed in your face. Yet here I am, a year later, and man, do I wish I was reviewing Final Sacrifice right now. Instead, I have to talk about Hellraiser: Revelations, the cynical and depressing final nail in the coffin of the Hellraiser franchise. Unlike Julia or Frank, no amount of fresh blood is going to be able to bring this series back from the pit of hell.

In 1987 when Pinhead told us he’d tear our souls apart, I didn’t realize just how prophetic his words would be.


The Story

Is there even a story? Not really, but here’s the premise: Two teenagers, Steven Craven (Nick Eversman) and Nico Bradley (Jay Gillespie) take off to Mexico for a wild weekend of drinking and whoring, only to disappear without a trace. Steven’s personal effects are returned to his family by the Mexican authorities, including a video camera with the footage they shot before disappearing. The camera offers a few cryptic clues to what happened to the friends but no real answers. A familiar looking wooden box with gold trim is also among the missing boy’s possessions.

A year later, Steven’s family – father Ross (Steven Brand), Mother Sarah (Devon Sorvari) and Sister Emma (Tracey Fairaway) - are having Nico’s parents, Peter (Sebastien Roberts) and Kate (Sanny Van Henteren), over for dinner in their posh LA home when Steven reappears, dazed and seemingly suffering from amnesia. The script makes convenient excuses as to why they don’t call the police right away, the family is assaulted by a familiar looking vagrant, Steve is not who he seems and blah, blah, blah the box is opened and Pinhead shows up to mete out a sixth graders concept of ironic justice.

When the film starts out with the tired found footage motif I sighed with weariness but, by the end of the movie, I wished they’d stuck with the gimmick; at least it would have brought something different to the table. Instead, Revelations is an all-too-familiar trek down a well-trod path; there isn’t a moment in the film that hasn’t been done before and better in earlier films. So many visual cues are lifted straight from the original Hellraiser, yet their appropriation makes no sense. When Steve is forcing Emma to open the box he has her kneeling on a coffee table surrounded with candles? Why? What is the purpose, beyond pathetically trying to ride to coattails of imagery in original film? It’s that kind of pure laziness and lack of inspiration that haunts the move throughout.

The story behind the making of Revelations is pretty well known by this point but here’s a quick primer for the uninitiated. After Hellworld, and with the glut of horror remakes and reboots cleaning up at the box office, Dimension looked at doing a reboot of the Hellraiser series with Clive Barker brought back on board as a producer. Martyrs director Pascal Laugier was tapped for directing duties, and things were looking up. Love it or hate it, Martyrs represented the same kind of visceral gut punch that the original Hellraiser did so many years earlier, and touched on a lot of the same themes in a new way. Under the direction of Dimension, though, the project languished and the key participants drifted away, due to “creative differences” between Laugier and the studio, which want less Martyrs intensity and more teen friendliness. As it stands now, the Hellraiser reboot is in development hell. Bitter irony, no?

Dimension’s options on the Hellraiser franchise rights had a “use it or lose it” clause and were about to run out. With no movement on the reboot, Dimension made the decision to crank out a Hellraiser sequel as fast as possible so they could retain the rights. With a first draft script that was written over a weekend by long-time series FX creator Gary J. Tunnicliffe and a director, Victor Garcia, with a history of cranking out low rent direct to video sequels quickly, cameras rolled and shooting wrapped in eleven days. Doug Bradley declined to participate (yes, the man who agreed to be in Hellworld turned this down), citing the script as his main objection.

Now, I love Doug Bradley. I think he’s a fantastic (and fantastically underrated) actor. He has screen presence and authority, as well as a fierce intelligence. It’s his command of the screen that made Pinhead so scary to begin with (check him out in the recent Wrong Turn 5 and watch him own the screen with a glare or a smirk). That said, the man hasn’t exactly shown a discerning taste when it comes to picking projects and has been more than willing to phone it in for a paycheck. When a gigging actor trying to keep the bills paid takes a pass on a project, it really gives you pause. How bad could it be? Answer: pretty fucking terrible.

Here’s how cynical this movie is: if nobody, I mean literally nobody watched it, if it didn’t generate a single cent in revenue, it still would have fulfilled its purpose. This film wasn’t even made to make a quick buck... its sole purpose for being is to prevent other people from possibly making a good Hellraiser film. This isn’t art. It’s isn’t storytelling and it isn’t filmmaking. It isn’t even commerce. Hellraiser: Revelations is a contractual obligation. It’s a For Your Consideration ad in Variety pimping Green Lantern for best picture. It’s a midnight caterer for Arnold Schwarzenegger. It’s the moral equivalent of a motel room full of hookers and blow. It’s the farthest thing from art, or even entertainment, imaginable.

Now, I’m not weeping for Clive Barker. He’s doing just fine, and he’s pretty much washed his hands of the movies and is creating his vision of the continuing Hellraiser story in the comic books from Boom (check them out; while not as good as the Marvel ones from the 80s and 90s, they’re definitely worth reading). And when they crank out one of these DTV shit stains, I’m sure he sees some kind of residual check in the mail shortly thereafter. No, I’m not mad for him. I’m mad for the mythos, rich and complex and pregnant with possibilities, that’s been used as a doormat for nearly a decade. Most of all, I’m mad for the fans of the original film who spend their time hoping against hope that each successive sequel might show a glimmer of the dark genius that first attracted them to the series.

It’s that spark of hope that might cause some hardcore Hellraiser fans to rush and defend Revelations based on the fact that it`s the first sequel actually written as a Hellraiser film since Bloodline, as if that alone absolves it of its responsibility to be at least passable entertainment. I’m not going to let if off so easy; Revelations is just shit filmmaking through and through. The screenplay is a pedestrian effort, clearly aspiring to tread the same perverse territory as the original but, with the exception of one scene of effective incestuous implications, it fails miserably. The actors are all just cashing paychecks, with only Steven Brand giving what can charitably be called a performance. The rest of the cast is just glum, as if they’re entirely aware of just how unlikable their characters are. The gore is competent but entirely of the boilerplate, off-the-shelf Hellraiser variety. People being hung from chains: edgy in 1987, but it doesn’t exactly get the blood pumping nowadays. And Pinhead... if they did nothing else right, they could have at least made Revelations worth watching for Pinhead. Instead, we get a weak actor in ill-fitting makeup playing out poorly written scenes that are so incompetently incorporated into the picture, it seems like Pinhead’s chilling in the basement rec-room. Crow all you want about how Revelations was written as a Hellraiser sequel, this pile of shit is every bit as disjointed as fart blowers like Hellworld and Deader. At least their excuse of being rewritten spec scripts explained their haphazard construction. You know why Revelations' story is so disjointed? Because they didn’t bother to do a second pass on the screenplay. Everything I hear about the production of this film is so sleazy and depressing it makes my skin crawl.

What this film really represents is the need for control, to hoard intellectual property. Dimension wasn’t even using the Hellraiser license, but goddamn if they’re going to let it go. It’s a case of “I don’t want it, but nobody else can have it, either.” If Dimension can churn out a terrible Hellraiser sequel in under two weeks, then there’s no reason they couldn’t have made a halfway decent one in the six years between Hellworld and Revelations. If past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, then we know what we’re in for as long as the Dimension holds the rights. Even in a horror-friendly, remake rich market they were unable to get a theatrical series reboot off the ground. They’ve spent nearly a decade wiping their asses with Barker’s creation and they’re sitting on the rights so they can what? Make more awful direct-to-video sequels? Make a PG-13 theatrical reboot? That’s indefensible on any level.

The very existence of Hellraiser: Revelations is a complete perversion of the spirit and intent of intellectual property laws. Dimension made this movie with little concern for if anybody ever watched it. I say, let’s all oblige them this time.



Image Quality

It pains me to say it but the image on this Blu-ray is close to flawless. Revelations may be a terrible movie but it looks far better than a movie made in 11 days has any right to. Even though it’s only on a single layer Blu-ray, this 75 minute feature doesn’t present any noticeable compression issues, and maintains a consistently high bit rate throughout the feature. The film has a pretty murky color palette so there are not a lot of instances of colours popping off the screen, but the image is sharp and clear and has zero source defects. Unless you consider the film itself a major defect, that is.


Sound

The 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio track is also a bit better than I would have expected, though it’s still about on par with your average direct-to-video feature. The mix is typically front-heavy, with ialogue and most of the sound effects confined to the front channels and ambient noises and score filling out the rear. There are a couple of good surround effects but most opportunities for effective use of the back channels are passed up. During flashback scenes, the mix almost totally collapses to the front channels with the surrounds completely void of sound until the score starts creeping back in. Don’t worry; every line in insipid dialogue and flat delivery of such is crystal clear.


Supplemental Material

A few Deleted Scenes (9:17) are included, mostly character moments developing the drama between the parents of the two boys. Not hard to see why these were cut; even at a Spartan 75 minutes, Revelations feel interminable. The decision to get it over with as soon as possible is one of the few good decisions associated with this movie.

And that’s it. I’m not at all surprised that nobody involved wanted to step in front of the camera to defend or explain Revelations. I wouldn’t if I were responsible, either.


Final Thoughts

I know I’ve said this before, but I give out so few Fs that it bears repeating. Almost every movie, no matter how bad, usually has something in it to admire. Even the direst film will warrant at least a D-. I save the F grade for films that I find not just bad or stupid, but morally indefensible. In the case of Hellraiser: Revelations it’s not the content of the movie but its very existence and what it represents that churns my stomach. Even if you can divorce yourself from the greed and hubris that caused Hellraiser: Revelations to be shat out, and the fact that it’s pissing on the grave of a genre classic, it’s still a fucking awful movie. The only thing that’s revealed here is just how much contempt Dimension has for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser mythos, for art and storytelling, for entertainment and for their audience.


Rating

. Movie - F- Image Quality - A- Sound - B Supplements - D

Technical Info.

• Colour
• Running time - 1 hour and 15 minutes
• Rated R, 18A
• 1 Disc
• Chapter Stops
• English 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio
• English SDH subtitles
• Spanish subtitles

Supplemental Material

• Deleted Scenes

Other Photos