November 28, 2008 Anchor Bay, which has been putting out some of the very best horror Blu-Ray releases, is slating "Hellraiser" for release in the format April 28.

Anchor Bay's releases of "Dawn of the Dead" and "Halloween" both look absolutely stellar. It will be interesting to see just how excellent "Hellraiser" is in the high-def video format.

A flawed film, but a real classic, "Hellraiser" came along just as the horror genre was looking pretty moribund in the late 1980s. We'd already gone through such classics as "Return of the Living Dead," "Evil Dead 2," "Fright Night" etc., and not much else was being released. Along came Barker, a novelist who decided to make a movie. "I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker," Stephen King was quoted as saying in "Hellraiser" ads.
As far as low-budget movies go, "Hellraiser" delivers plenty of punch, with an amazing amount of effects squeezed out of a film with a small pocketbook. Barker tackles the intersection of pain and pleasure with a vision of a hell populated by demons that are obsessed with order, kinky to the extreme and ready to "tear your soul apart" if your'e stupid enough to summon them via a puzzle box that's been floating around for the last several centuries.


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