“Hellraiser: Revelations” marks the first entry in the “Hellraiser” series not to star Doug Bradley as Pinhead. This is a painfully bad horror movie that shows how the franchise has just got worse and worse. Parts of this movie are even done like an awful found-footage flick. It just looks so amateurish, it’s pathetic. Some have even commented that it looks like a mockbuster from The Asylum.

Two young men decide to take a trip to Tijuana, Mexico where one of them accidentally kills a girl. They then come into contact with the dreaded puzzle box and encounter Pinhead (Stephen Smith Collins). Their families try to piece together what happened to them but they too, find themselves facing Pinhead and the Cenobites.

The two friends are just so unlikeable that I didn’t care what happened to them. Their families are so incredibly dull as well. The worst thing about this film is the new Pinhead. He doesn’t look remotely intimidating. Doug Bradley as Pinhead in the earlier films was usually one of the highlights no matter how bad some of the other films were. Pinhead never got loads to actually do but here, he gets almost nothing to do. The other Cenobites are looking a lot cheaper than they usually do as well.

“Hellraiser: Revelations” is anything but scary. The acting is horrendous, the found-footage sections are annoying, the characters are boring, the costumes look cheap and the special effects are unconvincing. This is low-budget shlock and it cannot disguise it. Some “Hellraiser” fans may like the fact that this one follows the mythology of the early films more closely than some of the later instalments but I think they will still find it hard to enjoy this movie. This is just a complete disappointment without an ounce of the creativity that made the early “Hellraiser” films at least somewhat engaging.