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.

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