April 15, 2009 We received an advanced copy of Anchor Bay's new "Hellraiser" Blu-Ray hitting stores next Tuesday. Although the film has obviously been reviewed ad nauseum by sites across the Webosphere -- it is a must-see classic, we all know this -- what about the Blu-Ray? Does it measure up to past Anchor Bay horror releases?



Anchor Bay, it should be known, is cranking out the very best horror Blu-Ray releases. How so? Well, they are putting out some old cult classics -- some as far back as 1978 ("Halloween") -- and they look awesome in the new format. Many old horror releases frankly don't look any better on Blu-Ray than they do on DVD. Such is the case with most of the stuff that Blue Underground is cranking out. Some other titles -- "Black Christmas" and the original "Texas Chainsaw Massacre" come to mind -- look like standard DVD in the format as well. Botton line is the source material they companies had to work with was simply too old. And remastering old negatives is expensive. Very expensive.

Well, apparently Anchor Bay has the money to burn, because they obviously did a bang up job remastering the negatives of George Romero's "Dawn of the Dead," John Carpenter's "Halloween" -- and now Clive Barker's "Hellraiser." Like those other two classic titles, Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" looks like it was filmed yesterday -- aside from all the '80s haircuts. This Blu-Ray looks phenomenal.

Is it on par with Anchor Bay's "Dawn of the Dead". Not quite, but close enough. It is probably going to be the must-have horror Blu-Ray release of the year, simply because it is a must-own, classic movie and the work Anchor Bay did on restoring it from its original negative was fabulous.

In short, it's worth shelling out the money for this new edition of the film.

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