Hellraiser: Revelations (2011)
Hellraiser: Revelations: A low point of a sad franchise 0.5/5 Stars
Written by Noah Dietz: 11/22/2024
We love a shaky camera, don’t we, folks?
I love Hellraiser. I have Pinhead’s skull tattooed on my arm and the original two films are some of my all time favorite horror flicks. Embarrassingly, I’ll even happily defend some of the DTV Hellraiser sequels. But, after 24 years of recycled and repurposed scripts, you can see the wheels have fully come off the bus.
Hellraiser: Revelations, the panic attempt to maintain the copyright on the Hellraiser name. With horrible characters and even worse acting, the ninth installment of the Hellraiser franchise slaps us in the face with a confusing found footage opening. It moves rapidly through two frustrating establishing shots until we suddenly hit the cenobites and our new Pinhead.
Stephan Smith Collins’s Pinhead in Revelations.
Image sourced via IMDB.
Doug Bradley said no to coming into “Hellraiser: the 00s–10s horror remake edition” and was replaced by Stephan Smith Collins for the face acting with Fred Tatasciore doing the voice. Doug Bradley left some big shoes to fill; his performance as Clive Barker’s Hell Priest is iconic even in the later, not as good Hellraiser films.
Unfortunately, the combo of Stephen and Fred were unable to fill them. Between atrocious costuming and shallow performance, we immediately get the sense we’re dead in the water.
The film is desperate to remind us of better things, with direct lines from the book smashed into scenes with no regard for original context. Melodramatic delivery of lines that make no sense don’t help either.
Our edgelord, thesaurus-enjoying antagonist in “Steven Craven” (Nick Eversman) blossoms in the third act into a truly insufferable part of the film. Playing in a similar direction as Billy and Stu in Scream, Nico in Steven’s skin manages to slow the ending of this to a crawl in a way no 75-minute movie should ever feel. With his obnoxious monologue that the families immediately decide to believe is fully true (despite how truly outlandish it would be to hear), we’re ushered into the conclusion of the movie where it simply … ends. I don’t know why it opted to run into a wall like that, but it did.
In a frustrating return to the original film, Pinhead doesn't really show up much until the end. In fact, outside of confusing cutaways where it seems like he’s listening in on the family via the puzzle box, he’s basically not in this at all. Unlike the original though, we don’t get a massive final act where the cenobites are revealed; we just see our annoying Frank stand-in throwing around his attitude for 20 minutes until things abruptly finish.
Revelations suffers from a great number of things. The poor writing does no favors to the painfully digital footage. The poor costuming does no favors for our baby-faced Pinhead. The sludgy gray color saturation brings no joy to a miserable 75 minutes. The true shame is that with better acting and another round or two on the script, this actually could have some solid bones. Instead we’re trapped with this: a cut rate Hellraiser entry that feels every second of it being the ninth installment of the franchise.