Hellraiser Revelations: The Revelation - DVD

Film: The two friends Steven Craven (Nick Eversman) and Nico Bradley (Jay Gillespie) have snuck away from home for a wild party vacation. In Mexico, the teens pop the corks and capture their debauchery on a video camera. While visiting a bar in Tijuana, an accident occurs in which Nico kills a prostitute. He forces Steve to carry on with the vacation as if nothing had happened. But then a strange man shows up in their hotel room...

Fortan lacks any trace of the young men. Mexican authorities turn over their belongings, including the video camera and a strange cube, to the families of the two. A year later, Nico and Steven's parents meet at the Cravens' home for dinner. There, daughter Emma (Tracy Fairaway), who was also Nico's girlfriend, demands that the adults finally tell her what happened to her brother and her boyfriend. When she gets no answer, she sets out to find clues herself and discovers the video and the strange cube. As she messes with it, suddenly bloodied Steve is standing in front of her - and the horror really begins...

Hellraiser - Revelations is the now ninth installment in the horror series that Clive Baker began in 1987 with the film adaptation of his own novel. However, Baker has little to be happy with with this ninth installment, which was shot in just three weeks. In a statement, he announced that this work would not have sprung from his mind or even his butt. Fan favorite Doug Bradley, who got to portray the iconic character Pinhead in the previous films, also did not take part in this production.

The reason Hellraiser - Revelations compares poorly even to the many less-than-stellar sequels may be because production on the film had to be driven after the rights holder, the Weinstein Company, ran out of rights, leaving little time to deliver a true quality product. Script, actors, effects - all of these aspects could not be approached with much care. That being said, the final product is actually not that bad. For such a rushed creation, at least some of the gore effects turned out satisfactorily.

The real Hellraiser feeling doesn't want to happen, though, even though Pinhead shows up and the Cenobites and their dimension also play a not insignificant role. But it seems as if they tried to link a conventional supernatural horror thriller with the Hellraiser universe just to profit from the rights of this franchise. If you detach yourself from the comparison, especially to Baker's classic, which has long been indexed in its uncut form in Germany, and if you consider the low budget and the minimal production time, then the film has its moments, which you can definitely enjoy as a genre fan. Whether these are enough to justify the purchase of the DVD, however, remains to be seen.

Picture + Sound: In the technical realization of the DVD, the low effort with which the film was made, is only partly noticeable. The picture is very clean, the reduced color scheme corresponds to the gloomy atmosphere of the action and the image sharpness is also on a good level. The sound can score with well-mixed dialogue and some atmospheric surround effects. For a low budget production so perfectly fine!

Extras: Except for trailers, the DVD has no bonus material to offer.

Conclusion: Hellraiser - Revelations is unlikely to satisfy fans of the popular series. Neither the story, nor the actors can convince in this quickly shot down work. As a simple low budget horror, however, at least the effects can be credited with some entertainment value. But real Pinhead fans will hardly be able to console themselves about the fact that the quality of the first two parts is not even approached

An article by Frankfurt-Tipp