Reception
Released in the United Kingdom and United States in September 1987. It grossed $14,564,000 the United States and Canada. Critically, the film received mixed reviews. The UK press championed the picture upon its release. Stephen King hailed Barker, and is quoted as saying "I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker."
However, critic Roger Ebert was less than enthusiastic, commenting "This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination. Maybe Stephen King was thinking of a different Clive Barker."
As of November 2011, Hellraiser holds a 63% "Fresh" rating on review aggregate website Rotten Tomatoes based on 32 reviews.
Read more about this topic: Hellraiser
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To aim to convert a man by miracles is a profanation of the soul. A true conversion, a true Christ, is now, as always, to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)