Thursday, May 16, 2013

Hellraiser: Revelations

When it comes to horror, Hellraiser is definitely one of my top 3 movies.  Pinhead being one of my favorite all time movie monsters as well you could say that Doug Bradley is definitely up there as far as iconic actors in the genre go.  So why would I watch a Hellraiser movie that chose to forgo Mr. Bradley as his alter ego Pinhead?  Well I choose to watch certain movies just for the purpose of having the information needed to form an educated opinion.  I could blindly hate Hellraiser: Revelations and leave it at that.  I could be a purist and write the whole movie off because it had nothing to do with Clive Barker or Doug Bradley, or I could watch the movie and now be able to form an educated opinion.

I chose to watch the film. (I've been sick and with the amount of horror that I haven't watched on Netflix dwindling why not?)  I may catch some flack from the purists and that's perfectly fine.  I sure can't be loved by everyone so why not be hated by most?  So let's dive into this film.

Let's live in a fantasy world for a minute.  Let's imagine that instead of the Pinhead you see at the top left, you actually see Doug Bradley.  Yes he jumped on board with this film and now you're in the theatre seat ready to watch the next installment in Hellraiser.  With that in mind and all your predisposed anger at his replacement gone, let's figure out this film.  While there are lot's of problems with the film I think it actually came closer to the formula of the originals than most of the 8 some odd sequels did.  My main gripe with this film (remember we are imagining Doug Bradley is playing Pinhead lol) is the feeling that we get when we see the Cenobites.  The world they are living in just doesn't feel dirty and evil enough.  I really thought they were in this families basement for awhile.  Actually I'm not quite sure that they weren't even after seeing the whole film.

The acting wasn't all that bad when you're considering how rushed I'm sure this film was.  I've heard this film was just thrown together so that they could keep the rights to the name if I'm not mistaken.  We get a couple skinless folks thrown in which were done pretty well..  Not completely skinless of course because that would be expensive but you get the point.  I would have liked a bit more over the top bloody scenes but I'm hard to please in that area so we won't fault them for lack of gore.

With all that I can safely say that I enjoyed the film a lot more than 70% of the Hellraiser movies.  It just felt like it belonged in the same world as the first couple films, and it didn't drop us into a video game or a gothic mansion party, so that's refreshing.  With sequels and remakes being a really touchy thing recently I really think that people should probably pump the brakes and take a step back and see these things with new eyes.  Maybe without those anger shaded glasses we all have on we might be able to enjoy a couple movies for what they are instead of expecting them to live up to our sense of nostalgia that we have for older films.

You can send all hate mail to:  info@gorenoir.com  just expect a reply to all the hate mail and also expect it to be posted to our facebook and possibly our blog. 

1 comment:

  1. Just a few lines on this. No hate here, I promise ;-)

    I admit REVELATIONS does have its moments but for me, the pseudo-Pinhead is a huge mistake. Actually, the HELLRAISER universe can get along quite well without Pinhead (the Epic comics are a good example as is the collected fiction in HELLBOUND HEARTS) and I wish this direction could have been taken at some stage with the later movies.

    REVELATIONS is definitely a lot better then the previous one (HELLWORLD) and has some good scenes here and there but overall its a sad reminder of how low the franchise has sunk.

    I do take your point about giving it another chance - I've watched it twice but not since it first came out. DEADER (7th movie) and BLOODLINE (4th) are my favourites of the sequels (apart from HELLBOUND, which is simply awesome) and I'm glad I gave those another chance. Maybe its time to break out the DVD again!

    Peter and Phil did a review on Revelations when it first came out, which you might find interesting:
    http://hellraiserpodcast.libsyn.com/episode-9-hellraiser-revelations-2011-

    I really hope you don't get hate mail on this and fair play to voicing your opinion on this movie.

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