Horror Challenge #3: "Hellraiser: Revelations"

As you can probably tell from the poster, this movie was less than stellar.  I mean, Pinhead looks constipated, not scary.  Come on, people.  This movie has been universally panned by horror fans for being terrible, so I figured I'd finally get it over with and watch the dumb thing so I can get the worst movie of the challenge out of the way right at the beginning.  I expected less than nothing from this movie.

Probably because my expectations were so low, I actually found myself enjoying the beginning of this movie, and I even entertained a fleeting thought that this might not be as terrible as everyone said it was.  I mean, yeah, the actor who played Nico was horrendous (and no one bothered to tell his dumb ass how to pronounce "Tijuana," so he sounded like an idiot every time he said it, which by my count was like 742 times in the first 20 minutes of the movie) but the actor who played his friend, Steven, wasn't bad.  The two start the movie making a video of their road trip to Mexico, where they appear to have no plans except to get laid a lot, and then we discover they somehow stumbled upon the titular puzzle box which opens a gateway to hell in these movies, and being a couple of complete idiots, they of course open it, and bad things happen.  Then we're at some indeterminate date in the future, where they've both disappeared and all their families have left is the video of their road trip and the puzzle box, the implications of which they don't understand.

Now of course this movie is ripping off about a million other movies, but it still had some promise.  Making a "found footage" type Hellraiser film could have been pretty cool if people with, you know, talent had been making it.  As it is the only people in the movie who can really act are the guy who plays Steven and the girl who plays his sister, Emma.  Everyone else is pretty terrible, and they all do some of the stupidest things I've ever seen characters in a horror movie do (which is saying something) and when the movie starts to look like it was trying to copy the movie "Funny Games," I started to really get irritated.

I know the story is that Dimension studios had to make this installment in order to retain the rights to the Hellraiser franchise or something like that, but that doesn't excuse them from spending like, $12 to make a really shitty Hellraiser film when they could have done a lot better even with the resources they had.  Yes the actor playing Pinhead in this movie is horrible, but that's not my biggest problem.  the scenes with Steven and emma actually worked for me, and those two could have done a lot better if this were simply a better movie, but it was like the filmmakers didn't care, which pisses me off.  If you don't care, give the project to someone who does, someone who will actually TRY.  I know a lot of people don't like the later Hellraiser sequels, but I liked them all, and the franchise still had some promise lurking in it.  "Found Footage" type movies can be cheap without being horrible, and this movie could have been a lot better, which really irks me.  My friend said after watching this movie that we could have made a better one in the backyard, and I have to agree with him.