"Hello, my friends. I want to put on record that the flic out there using the word Hellraiser IS NO FUCKIN' CHILD OF MINE! I have NOTHING to do with the fuckin' thing. If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker, it's a lie. It's not even from my butt-hole."

-Clive Barker, who had nothing to do with fuckin' Hellraiser: Revelations

Sometimes, there is a single fact about a work of art that's so all-encompassing in explaining what the thing is that it is impossible not to take that fact as a pole star, the guiding principle by which one attempts to understand everything about that work of art. The direct-to-video horror sequel Hellraiser: Revelations, released in 2011, has one of those facts: if Dimension Films didn't release a Hellraiser movie in 2011, it would lose the rights to make any more Hellraiser films at all. And since the company was still in those days trying to put together a remake of the original Hellraiser, that wouldn't do. So a script was commissioned and written in August 2010, in the same month Doug Bradley was approached to reprise the role of the iconic Pinhead for the ninth time, and turned it down instantly - smelling the unmistakable reek of a first draft that was going to be filmed with no further revisions - and the film entered production in September and wrapped in October. On 18 March 2011, it was given one screening at one commercial theater in Culver City, an earnest sacrifice to the Contract Gods. And then, since they already had the damn thing finished and ready to go, the Dimension people released it on DVD on 18 October 2011, because at that point why not.

Sure, why not. I will say in favor of Hellraiser: Revelations - very attenuated, unenthusiastic favor, but it's sincere - that we have before us the first film in the series since Hellbound: Hellraiser II, all the way back in 1988, that is primarily about hedonists pursuing extreme forms of physical sensation so indiscriminately that they accidentally open portal to a dimension where amoral demonic beings live on the far reaches of sensuality, where pain and pleasure have become a singularity. Gone is the Pinhead who murders for sport; gone is the Pinhead who arbitrates morality in an avowedly Christian framework; gone is the Pinhead who torments the damned by making them re-enact the mistakes in life that damned them in the first place. Returned is the Pinhead who simply gives you what you think you want, good and hard.

At least, in the sense that the figure in this film who has nails sticking out all around his skull, covered in necrotic white flesh that has had a grid carved into it, is indeed Pinhead returned. I mean, he obviously is, there's nobody else he could be, but Doug Bradley did say no, and it quite literally took two men to replace him. Stephan Smith Collins plays Pinhead's scowling, deformed body, while prolific voice actor Fred Tatasciore provides his voice, even getting within spitting distance of Bradley's extremely distinctive baritone snarl. Close enough that a charitable viewer would potentially be able to overlook it, should such an unlikely creature as a charitable viewer of Hellraiser: Revelations be found.

Even a charitable viewer would, I think, be taxed by pretending that Smith Collins is a good visual replacement for Bradley, but I don't really see where we could possibly blame the actor for that. All he's really got to to is stand, snarl, and trust that the filmmaking team under the direction of Víctor García is showing off him as a threatening presence, and not overlighting his face to make his eyes really pop instead of looking like the jet-black pools of hate that defined Bradley's Pinhead, nor applying the nail makeup effect a little too unsteadily, to make him look a bit like a puffy-faced doofus. Sadly for Smith Collins, this trust was badly misplaced. The Pinhead of Revelations is a goofy disaster, robbing the character of every bit of the severe authority that he had in the previous eight films even at their most tacky and insufficient. And that can be pretty damn tacky, to be clear. But he still looked wicked. This Pinhead looks annoyed.

He also gets somewhat more attention than he has in a while - after all, Revelations was in fact written to be a Hellraiser film from the very start, something not true of at least the last couple of sequels, so it was easier for screenwriter Gary J. Tunnicliffe to work the character in more smoothly. Tunnicliffe was, for the record, the series' longtime make-up effects designer (going all the way back to its salad days as a theatrical franchise, with 1996's Hellraiser: Bloodline), and Revelations is a good argument in favor of why we don't see more make-up artists-turned-screenwriters. No, I'm sorry, that was mean. There was no getting a good script produced under these circumstances, Tunnicliffe can't be blamed for that. At least there's the bones of an adequate story: a year after the mysterious disappearances of two horrible young men, Steven (Nick Eversman) and Nico (Jay Gillespie), their families have gathered for a quiet night of mourning: Steven's parents Ross (Steven Brand) and Sarah (Devon Sorvari), and his sister Emma (Tracey Fairaway), and Nico's parents Peter (Sebastien Roberts) and Kate (Sanny van Heteren). The family's names are Craven and Bradley, by the way, so we're in that territory, except all weird and wrong: "Bradley" as in "Doug Bradley", whereas Wes Craven had not a damn thing to do with this franchise. I mean, I get not wanting to tempt fate by naming them the Barkers, but still, the series's main recurring actor, and an unrelated director, that's just baffling.

Anyway, on this night, what should happen, except that Steven returns! He's a bit worse for the wear, and seems very off, and we mostly learn why in the form of flashbacks to his and Nico's trip to Tijuana, where a weekend of drugs and hookers turned into a literal living hell when Nico acquired a certain filigreed puzzle box from a cryptic vagrant (Daniel Buran). Before you an say "Lament Configuration", Nico has had all the flesh stripped from his body, and Steven is now finding victims to murder and butcher, to keep his friend alive, or "alive", anyway. The Cravens and Bradleys don't, I think, ever figure this out; they spend the whole movie sitting around a living room, talking at each other with great agitation.

Sure - you have absolutely no time to write a movie, because you have absolutely no time to shoot a movie, so you make that movie manageable by making literally half of it include absolutely no blocking whatsoever, or even really any plot points. It's explicable, but that doesn't make it watchable; at 75 minutes, there's not much to Hellraiser: Revelations, but it still doesn't have close to 75 minutes of content, and all of those living room scenes don't "crawl by", because that implies they're moving at all. It's more like the film simply halts, gives its under-rehearsed cast a chance to trot through their tedious scenes of Steven accusing his parents of being selfish meanies and hypocritical squares, while Emma, at least starts to find all of this suspicious.

Tunnicliffe's script is a grab-bag of whatever things he can find to bloat out the story, and it really doesn't hold together. The opening sequence promises that this is going to be at least partially found footage, but that idea runs dry within minutes, as it turns out that we're just watching Sarah obsessively re-watching the camcorder footage of her son and Nico as they embarked on their journey of debauchery, the only evidence that exists of what happened to them. I'm certainly not sad the found footage angle was quickly abandoned (it's used sometimes in the flashbacks), because it's awful - Steven and Nico are unbearable company, especially the douchily emphatic, gringo-ey way that Gillespie pronounces "Tee-HWAAN-aaaaah!" over and over and over. I presume this is a character choice to make it clear what an unendurable shit Nico is and, well, they made it clear. A very long time before he's removed from the movie.

The point being, the found footage conceit ends up feeling more like a wonky reflex than an actual storytelling choice, and I could say that about so much of what happens in Hellraiser: Revelations's curiously elongated hour and a quarter. It is so very obviously a first draft. Ideas are played with and not developed but then they show up again later at random - or, as likely, they don't. Emma seems to be foreshadowed to be developing in a specific way, but then it's changed to something almost but not quite the same. The finale is particularly ungainly and inelegant, a matter of quickly charging through character deaths like an enraged bull, and it's simple to just start knocking them all off rat-a-tat, because they've all been in that same damn living room the whole time.

That none of this is artful or atmospheric I hope goes without saying. The film didn't have time for fucking blocking, obviously it's not going to have creative lighting and mood-making. Again, that's how you end up with the weird Bozo Pinhead we get here.

That all being said, I do think one can squint and see the version of Hellraiser: Revelations that's good. It's a very far distance form this one - it had more time to craft a screenplay that didn't just lurch between flashbacks of the boys being miserably nihilistic in a manner that's absolutely no fun to watch, and that deadly living room set. It worked more with the actors, and probably recast several of the (Fairaway, as the closest we get to a "lead" is clearly the biggest problem, though I don't know how anyone was supposed to make sense of that character as written). It lingered more on the menace of the Cenobites, didn't make one of them "Pinhead Jr.", and certainly didn't buzz through so many of their scenes with a zippy "hey, we got chains here, who wants ta be ripped apart with chains?" vibe that feels like everybody involve knew the notes but not how to play the instrument. We didn't get that Revelations, but I can imagine it. And hey, it's not like I can even imagine a good version of Hellraiser: Hellworld.

Body Count: Pretty straightforward: 8 deaths, 2 people taken for an eternity of unending, exquisite torment. Presumably they didn't have enough time to write something more confounding.

Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002)
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Revelations (Garcia, 2011)
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018)
Hellraiser (Bruckner, 2022)


Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.

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