Hellraiser: Deader Review
The Direct to video film Hellraiser: Inferno was a disappointing mess that hit all the wrong notes. I enjoyed the first four films to varying degrees, and I relish the Cenobite mythos and the disturbing charm of Pinhead, so I had hoped that somehow things could get better again. After watching the next film in the series, the incredibly goofy Hellraiser: Hellseeker after it came out on DVD (directly), I told myself I wouldn’t watch any more Hellraiser films by its director Rick Bota. In 2005, when I read that Hellraiser: Deader, the seventh film in the franchise, and third to go directly to video (dvd), was also directed by Rick Bota, I kept my distance for six years. The other night, something in me decided to watch the damn thing, and while I can say that it was an improvement over the last two entries, as a fan I was still unhappy. I suppose one can say that I seek out pain in the hopes of finding some pleasure. Hellraiser fans will get that tongue-in-cheek reference, and they’ll probably groan (sorry). Other people will just think I am either some kind of masochist (still kind of relates to Hellraiser) or that I just got really bored that night.
Z-list overactress Kari Wuhrer plays Amy Klein, a reporter with tons of banal attitude, who is drawn to the seedy and sleazy things the world. After taking some pictures of people doing various illicit drugs, high on various illicit drugs, or just unconscious, Amy returns from a crack house to the offices of the British newspaper or magazine at which she works and is told by her sleazy (sensing a theme?) editor Charles that she needs to watch a video. Amy and an all too enthusiastic Charles sit back and watch the video, which chronicles a suicide cult’s ritual in which Eurotrash is brought back from death by a long-haired weirdo in a loose white shirt. Charles then sends Amy to Bucharest (convenient that the package in which the video arrived had a return address) to investigate the world of the “Deaders.” That’s what members of the cult are called. Get it? They die, and come back. They’re dead…er. The name is explained later by an English club rat and pussyhound with his own subway train on the rails under Bucharest.
Once in Bucharest, Amy finds the apartment used as the return address, and inside, the dead body of the woman who filmed the ritual she and Charles watched. She also finds Lemarchand’s puzzle box. She grabs another package from the room where the woman has strangled herself and pries the box out of her rigor mortised fingers, only to cause her to briefly come back to life, shriek and reach out for Amy and/or the box. Amy escapes by kicking the superintendent in the balls and returns to her hotel room to drink vodka and open the second package, which, tadaa, contains a second video. And it just so happens to be a video of the now dead woman warning whoever is watching to not open the box. So…Amy then opens the box by mistake and is brought into a world of choppy, sloppy editing, blood, breasts, and stupid.
Bota’s directing style leaves a lot to be desired (so does the acting, writing, production value, etc.) He uses odd camera angles in combination with confusing choppy back and forth editing to ineptly convey confusion about what is real and what is not, and hopefully, in turn, some paranoia and even fear, as well. Normally this would make sense for a film like this: Amy is confused and paranoid and afraid, so we should be, too, right? Wrong. The formula is not that simple. Better film makers, such as David Lynch or Jacob’s Ladder director Adrian Lyne, have used this technique to yield much much better results, and Bota has had three attempts (I have yet to watch the next installment in the Hellraiser franchise, which Bota also got to direct) to either get it right or to figure out that he can’t.
I’m going to gloss over the rest of the “story” here and just kind of jump to the end. This would normally be considered some kind of spoiler, it but really isn’t, especially if you saw the last two movies, and if you consider that the whole movie is already as spoiled as an apple that’s been left out in the sun and humidity of southern Florida for six months: Pinhead (played by an aging and kind of chubby Doug Bradley) and other cenobites appear at the climax (can it have one if it’s all over the place, and the story is totally incoherent?) of the film, tears the cult leader to pieces with chains, kills the Deaders once and for all, and likely sends their souls to hell.
The movie (in script form) started out as just another crappy horror film, but the producers decided to turn it into a Hellraiser film and apparently had the third act rewritten. Pinhead, the Cenobites, and the Hellraiser mythos were forced in, and it’s pretty obvious. Hellraiser was literally tacked on, and it has the feeling of something akin to shoving Ralph Kramden and Ed Norton into the last few scenes of the shark jump episode of Happy Days. Alas, this series jumped the proverbial shark several movies earlier.
And yet, no matter how bad these movies have gotten, Bradley’s performance as Pinhead remains immaculate. The man knows the character as well as Clive Barker by this point, he manages to do a stellar job with what he’s given, and apparently was even given the chance to work on Pinhead’s lines so as to better fit the character. He’s certainly the best thing about this movie, and since the sequels began skipping theaters and dropping numbers, his appearances have sadly been all too brief and even kind of harmless. No wonder he retired.
If you’re bored, there are probably worse ways to spend 88 minutes, but there are also much better ones (sleeping, staring at the wall, squeezing your fingers with a pliers…), especially if you’ve read Clive Barker’s “Hellbound Heart” novella and/or became a Hellraiser fan some time between 1987 and 1996. Barker, himself, was more than displeased with the direct to video sequels and I can’t imagine anyone liking this damn thing…not even the people who made it, really. Hopefully, next time, I’ll think of something better to do instead of watching Hellraiser: Hellworld.
