Hellraiser: Revelations

 

This is absolutely fucking terrible. This is the absolute nadir of the entire series, the lowest point, one of total creative and technical bankruptcy. This is the sort of franchise-killing movie that usually means the total death of a series. It’s so bad it makes the other straight-to-video Hellraiser mistakes look much better in comparison. Still not good by any stretch of the imagination, but at least they’re not as insulting, as painful, as absolutely awful as this garbage. Revelations sucks.

Revelations was made in about three weeks with a budget of about $300,000 dollars, rushed into production at the last minute and existing solely for business reasons. The only reason the film was made at all was because if it wasn’t made then Dimension films would lose the rights to the Hellraiser franchise. This movie is a fucking obligation, and it shows. There’s no passion or care, it’s just there so they could keep the rights to something they clearly don’t give a shit about, but want to hoard anyway. And it really shows – Revelations is cheap, lazy and soulless.

Two idiot friends, Steven and Nico, go to Tijuana to get drunk and screw prostitutes (which they accomplish). Nico then randomly kills a hooker because he’s a dick. Freaking out the two of them run away…to a strip club to get drunk. A hobo turns up and gives them the Lament Configuration, telling them that if they can solve it, it’ll make them feel substantially better. Because they’re idiots they take the box and go and solve it, summoning the Cenobites who take them to hell.

Since then they’ve been missing, presumed dead with no apparent leads, with the only record being the footage caught on their camera and a mysterious puzzle box found amongst their belongings. A year later the families of the two boys get together to try and reconcile and get closure. They mostly get drunk and argue, with Steven’s sister and Nico’s girlfriend Emma being critical of both families not doing enough to find the boys. Suddenly Steven shows up, bleeding and injured. As the family try to piece together what happened and get answers, Steven acts strange as the past is recalled.

The movie is cut 50/50 between flashbacks to Steven and Nico in Tijuana (complete with awful ‘found footage’ styled shooting) and the family in their house mostly hanging around and being drunk. It sucks. It’s barely over an hour long, clocking in at only about seventy minutes, including credits. Its short length is probably the only good thing about the movie – its brevity means the torture of watching it is over faster. There’s fuck all of a story there so it doesn’t matter.

It begins with found footage because it’s a cheap, easy and lazy way to do horror. Two idiots in a car are talking about how they’re going to screw whores in Mexico. Then their car gets stolen and it suddenly cuts to one of the idiots, with his shirt off, solving the Lament Configuration. Bells ring and then fake pinhead shows up and tells him he’s going to take him to hell. The acting is god awful, the effects laughable and the cinematography, even for found footage, is a blurry, poorly shot mess. In the other half the two families get together to have fancy dinners and get drunk. They don’t want to talk about what happened, preferring to yell at each other, get even drunker and smoke heavily. I don’t even know what the point of it all was. Throughout the film we get constant flashbacks and cuts to Steven and Nico being drunken dickheads in Tijuana, shown as a messy mix of found footage stuff and normal footage. They get drunk, chat to prostitutes and are just unlikeable douches in general.

Unlike the last four movies, Revelations was written as a Hellraiser movie from the very start, and not as some unrelated horror script being edited. Not that it means anything – the plot is completely awful with absolutely terrible writing. Half the film is made up of flashbacks. Think about that – there’s really only about thirty five minutes of plot, and even that is mostly characters standing around while flashbacks play until the end.

There’s a twist. There always has to be a fucking twist with these. It turns out that Steven isn’t really Steven at all! No, he’s Nico! Nico eventually killed Steven and stole his skin, and is now on the run from the Cenobites. He’s returned home to get the puzzle box so he can trick somebody into opening it to hopefully take his place in hell. He gets a shotgun and takes the families hostage. He makes Emma open the box, the shitty Cenobites (including a transformed Steven) show up and then kill some of them and take Nico to hell before leaving on their own accord. At the very end Emma, the only one alive, is a total idiot and goes to open the box again.

Holy fuck, Nico and Steven are fucking horrible assholes. They’re sexist, racist fucking shitheads who drink and screw prostitutes because they’re idiots. Their behaviour goes beyond being just dicks, these are cartoonish morons. Nico kills a prostitute for absolutely no reason and then blackmails his friend about it. Nico then opens the box and the Cenobites come and take him while Steven films it. He then stays in Tijuana for some reason, banging and killing prostitutes so he can try and bring Nico back to life. No idea why he would considering how much of a tool Nico was.. The rest of the cast are just as horrible and the acting is atrocious. Emma, Steven’s sister and Nico’s girlfriend, is the absolute worst. She wants them all to talk about what happened to her boyfriend and brother and whines for a long while. But when her brother turns up, she’s the absolute last person to talk to him. Then she starts to flirt with her boyfriend’s dad and becomes obsessed with the box (apparently being near it makes you horny?). Nobody acts like a person. Nobody has anything approaching a clear motivation or personality. In fact nobody does anything that makes sense.

The filming itself is horrible, with constant shaky-cam, regardless of whether or not it’s meant to be found footage. It’s as though they didn’t bother to use a tripod, or just couldn’t afford one. It looks ugly, it sounds ugly, the acting is atrocious and it’s a shoddy mess overall. This movie sucks badly. Tijuana is a shadowy place full of prostitutes, scum bars and dirty motel rooms. The new Cenobites look awful as well. There are three of them – shit Pinhead, a female version of Chatterer and an even shittier version of shit Pinhead.

Speaking of shit Pinhead, Doug Bradley no longer plays him. While Clive Barker washed his hands of the film franchise a long time ago (when Americans got their hands on it and drove the franchise into the ground), Doug Bradley continued to appear as Pinhead in all the previous sequels, doing his own makeup and being just about the only good thing about those horrible movies (his appearance is really the only thing that lets those movies use the ‘Hellraiser’ title. Revelations is significant because it’s the first Hellraiser to not have Bradley, for him to refuse to be in it, and the first to replace him. And the new guy and the new make-up are both completely horrible. The makeup is noticeably slack and lazy and he doesn’t look monstrous at all (he’s also got a butt chin which looks silly). His acting is god awful, with his delivery and lines both being way too try-hard. They basically just wrote variations on his lines from the first few films and had him say them lazily. He sucks.

Revelations is horrible, and is where the Hellraiser legacy ends. A contractual obligation lazily spewed out with no passion or effort. And that’s where we leave the series. It’s a bit strange to consider just how bad most of these are, weighed against just how iconic Pinhead is. The character and designs had such an impact that they basically buoyed the entire series. Not that the movies started out bad – while rough around the edges the first is great, and the second and third are fun in their own ways. I’d say only the first three are really worth watching, with the first being the best (in sheer purity of purpose). Bloodline is watchable as long as you don’t think about it too heavily, but after that point the series is a total wash. But the impact and inspiration it’s had is strangely large compared to what were essentially smaller, weirder horror movies (emerging from the UK no less). The series has spawned a lot of comic book adaptations (many with Barker’s input) and the fashion reflexively inspired the same fetish community it sprung from. There are rumours that Clive Barker is penning a proper Hellraiser movie, reboot or otherwise, with the man himself confirming it at one point (and perhaps directing again), but it’s all been silent on that front for a long time. Also Barker has a bad habit of saying he’ll do something and then never actually doing it (he’s almost notorious for failed projects).