Director: Victor Garcia
75 minutes (18) 2011
Lions Gate Blu-ray
[Released 1st March]
Rating: 5/10
Review by Ian Shutter
Inauspiciously, this starts with a found-footage video sequence of handy-cam style. It’s a low-budget effort, perhaps too hastily produced, reportedly only to maintain the rights to a variable, but potentially lucrative, sub-genre franchise, created by author Clive Barker. This ninth movie in the horror series is directed by Spanish-born Victor Garcia, the maker of sequels Return To House On Haunted Hill (2007), and Mirrors 2 (2010).
American students Steven and Nico disappeared in Mexico, leaving their families with an amateur recording of unsolved crimes, and possessions that include a mysterious puzzle box. The main siege-story unfolds at home with timely flash-backs but there is not much plotting. It’s clear that this is a horror of emotive, agonising intensity, and graphic visuals of gothic sadomasochism. “It’s better than sex” promises a vagrant apologist for Cenobites. There’s no sign of Doug Bradley as Pinhead, but other actors wear punk versions of the same iconic make-ups.
With souls as primal currency, stolen fleshy decor, demonic actions tearing people apart, and twisted human desires turning so grimly obsessive, Hellraiser: Revelations eagerly explores secrets hidden beneath the normality of society, where darkness in supernatural erotica and violence lurks awaiting the absurdly curious or merely foolish. Skinless ghouls terrorise anyone still attached to mortality and the innocence of reason. “It’s not the shirt off your back that I want.” Garcia fails to add startling elements or imaginative scenes to the Hellraiser canon, but this remains (excuse that pun), a basic yet worthwhile exercise in thinly atmospheric gore.
