...heaven help you if you make a *boring* film. I used to say that constantly when I was younger and full of pep and had just taken a walk into the DVD-Video format that refuses to go away in spite of looking like a dirty dish with a crack in it compared to actual (that is, not "upsampled") HD.
I started writing this "review" as a kind of response to a very surface-scratching and short attempt to defend this film. Because after they once again told us to forgive the film based on how little they had to work with, that is what comes to mind. The film is utterly boring.
It is also well worth noting that this film exists for one reason, and only one reason: to prevent the rights to this moribund franchise from reverting back into the hands of Clive Barker. It is one thing if one makes a bad film with honest intentions. For example, Ed Wood's intentions ranged from pleading for acceptance of transvestites (in the 1950s, I might add) to stopping the nuclear arms race before we ended up without a planet to live on. That his delivery of such messages through cinema was comically inept is beside the point, because although the message gets lost in the unintentional comedy, simply knowing that that was partly what he intended is enough to see he had more in mind than just money. Not the makers of Hellraiser Revelations. All they cared about was money, and it shows.
Stories generally go through a lot of rewriting before they are presented to an audience. Generally, when an author looks at his first draft, he sees mistake after mistake leaping out at him, crying for correction. Characters he was in love with during the first draft might seem like complete nonces whilst rereading, and are thus modified during the subsequent drafts. Actions undertaken by characters that got the basic plot from A to B in the first draft might make zero sense on rereading, and thus the author will rewrite the sequence of events to make more sense. Why am I describing these parts of the writing process? Because it is plainly evident that precisely none of that happened with this script.
The story as it unfolds in this film goes something like two spoiled brats go on a road trip to Mexico looking for booze, sex, and good times. The things that go wrong eventually lead them to sit in a bar where a bum who looks strangely like the bum in the original film offers them the box. Astute readers will note that this is quite a difference from the original, where one brother actively seeks out the box in a South-East Asian market because he is bored and jaded with all the thrills and spills the world can offer him. Dialogue is given in which one brat explains for the audience that he does not want to spend the rest of his life in what I inferred from this speech was a hicksville village (the film itself is not too clear about where they actually live). Although it was not great at doing this, the original gave the audience plenty to imply that one brother was a boring, tepid personality and the other a wild, outgoing man. In Revelations, almost everything is told to the audience rather than demonstrated. That can work with good actors, but the actors here mostly look like they would find it difficult to read out a battle scene from The Phantom Blooper in a way that stimulates interest.
Hellraiser Revelations is only useful for two things. One, to demonstrate there is no low to which the Weinsteins will not sink in order to keep a property, no matter how far they have run that property's value into the ground. Two, as a teaching tool at film schools. One film school teacher quoted in the Plan 9 Companion says one useful teaching tool is to show a student an example when film is not being done well and make them take notes of what is not being done well. Hellraiser Revelations offers a goldmine of material for a class like that.
I started writing this "review" as a kind of response to a very surface-scratching and short attempt to defend this film. Because after they once again told us to forgive the film based on how little they had to work with, that is what comes to mind. The film is utterly boring.
It is also well worth noting that this film exists for one reason, and only one reason: to prevent the rights to this moribund franchise from reverting back into the hands of Clive Barker. It is one thing if one makes a bad film with honest intentions. For example, Ed Wood's intentions ranged from pleading for acceptance of transvestites (in the 1950s, I might add) to stopping the nuclear arms race before we ended up without a planet to live on. That his delivery of such messages through cinema was comically inept is beside the point, because although the message gets lost in the unintentional comedy, simply knowing that that was partly what he intended is enough to see he had more in mind than just money. Not the makers of Hellraiser Revelations. All they cared about was money, and it shows.
Stories generally go through a lot of rewriting before they are presented to an audience. Generally, when an author looks at his first draft, he sees mistake after mistake leaping out at him, crying for correction. Characters he was in love with during the first draft might seem like complete nonces whilst rereading, and are thus modified during the subsequent drafts. Actions undertaken by characters that got the basic plot from A to B in the first draft might make zero sense on rereading, and thus the author will rewrite the sequence of events to make more sense. Why am I describing these parts of the writing process? Because it is plainly evident that precisely none of that happened with this script.
The story as it unfolds in this film goes something like two spoiled brats go on a road trip to Mexico looking for booze, sex, and good times. The things that go wrong eventually lead them to sit in a bar where a bum who looks strangely like the bum in the original film offers them the box. Astute readers will note that this is quite a difference from the original, where one brother actively seeks out the box in a South-East Asian market because he is bored and jaded with all the thrills and spills the world can offer him. Dialogue is given in which one brat explains for the audience that he does not want to spend the rest of his life in what I inferred from this speech was a hicksville village (the film itself is not too clear about where they actually live). Although it was not great at doing this, the original gave the audience plenty to imply that one brother was a boring, tepid personality and the other a wild, outgoing man. In Revelations, almost everything is told to the audience rather than demonstrated. That can work with good actors, but the actors here mostly look like they would find it difficult to read out a battle scene from The Phantom Blooper in a way that stimulates interest.
Hellraiser Revelations is only useful for two things. One, to demonstrate there is no low to which the Weinsteins will not sink in order to keep a property, no matter how far they have run that property's value into the ground. Two, as a teaching tool at film schools. One film school teacher quoted in the Plan 9 Companion says one useful teaching tool is to show a student an example when film is not being done well and make them take notes of what is not being done well. Hellraiser Revelations offers a goldmine of material for a class like that.