Hellraiser: Deader

There's an unwritten rule in horror cinema that says: you know you're in trouble once they stop numbering the sequels to originally successful genre classics. This is the seventh installment in the Hellraiser franchise and yet they already stopped giving them numbers since "Hellraiser (4): Bloodline". And can you guess where exactly it started to go wrong with the series?? Oh well...the good thing about these Hellraiser movies is that, no matter how mediocre the stories are, there are always some remotely interesting elements in them to satisfy horror lovers. In this seventh entry those elements are the presence of Kari Wuhrer, some sinister settings and really a lot of gore. Wuhrer stars as a chain-smoking, hard ass journalist who's sent to Bukarest to investigate the bloody rites of an underground cult. The leader seems to have a talent to bring recently deceased persons back to life and he promises his followers a world of pleasure once they returned from death. What he really looks for, however, is the one person who's able to open the mysterious puzzle box in his possession. As you can guess, our female journalist is that chosen person and she'll have to fight both the leader of the cult and Pinhead; the ruler of hell. The actual plot of "Deader" definitely shows potential, but it's confusing and it tries to be overly intelligent. Pinhead's share in the story is limited, as it already was in the previous two sequels, and he seems dragged into it simply because it wouldn't sell otherwise. The sequences inside the Romanian subway-trains are nice to look at and there's a lot of gruesome butchering going on. Kari Wuhrer is a talented and beautiful actress but she starred in too many dire, straight-to-video horror productions already. Apart from this failure, she also appeared in two sequels of "The Prophecy", a turkey called "Final Examination" and in the belated sequel to "The Hitcher". Even the bigger productions she starred in recently ("King of the Ants", "Eight Legged Freaks") were disappointments. We have another Rick Bota sequel coming up, namely "Hellworld".

HELLRAISER: DEADER is pretty good, especially in the first half which has two of the more intense and creepy scenes I have seen in a DTV flick in a while. I'm talking, of course, about the first videotape and when Amy explores the abandoned house.

Where DEADER fails is when it tries to tie into the HELLRAISER mythology. As has been well publicized, DEADER started out as an original screenplay by Neal Marshall Stevens that Dimension Films bought for no less than 1 million dollars. Then they lost faith in it and let it collect dust before hiring Tim Day to do a rewrite and turn it into a HELLRAISER sequel. I don't blame the guy, because he probably did the best he could, given such a ridiculous task. But it's a shame that DEADER did end up like this. Without the 30 seconds worth of Pinhead at the end this could have been a minor genre masterpiece. As it stands, it's just a bizarre, schizophrenic film with some outstanding moments, some scenes that really work and some that really don't. Once again, shame on Dimension Films for wasting this opportunity.

In addition to original screenwriter Stevens, director Rick Bota also deserves some praise. He's made a good looking and often tense film that is never less than competent. Hopefully he'll be able to break free from his current job at Dimension eventually. The guy has talent.

Few franchises have nose dived to the extent of the Hellraiser series. What started out as an ingenious memorable horrific set of movies turned into bafflingly bad boring titles with little relevance to what we had learned to love.

Hellraiser Deader is just one of many recent dire attempts at cashing in on Pinhead and though this one does feature Doug Bradley he is on screen for mere moments.

Starring Kari Wuhrer who to her credit is better than usual here we have another confused tale revolving around a cult and the infamous puzzle box. Sadly once again it makes little sense and is immensely boring.

Fans of the series will not be happy with this one.

Hopefully one day Hellraiser will find its way home, for now it's well and truly lost in the desert.

The Good:

One tense scene

Wuhrer is on form

The Bad:

Confusing plot

Practically no cenobites at all

Things I Learnt From This Movie:

When entering a property and finding a corpse that you have no intention of reporting it makes perfect sense to leave your fingerprints everywhere

Alike the real world the term "God help me" has never worked in movies

The Hellraiser film set ended after bloodline. This like the others after bloodline which are less slasher more trying to be some kind of deep psychological horror. Of course like the others its fails miserably and leaves you yearning for something to actually happen. Thats not to say the previous films did not have 'mess with your head' factor, They certainly did. However they managed it on a level that wasn't thought out, it came across more as a by-product of the film. You get to see pinhead about once for a proper scene and its nothing to write home about.

I would not bother even renting this film if you started out as a big fan of the first few. If you're easily scared they get it, why not.

Rick Bota returns as director, and again delivers a film in the form of a mystery thriller. This time about a reporter on an assignment to find a missing woman. In her search for answers, she ends up much deeper than she ever thought possible, and I thought Kari Wuhrer was rather good as reporter Amy Klein. The story was not originally written for the Hellraiser franchise; instead an existing script was converted for the series, and that's evident, as there's very little resemblance to the previous films. Just as with Hellraiser 6, there are way too many dreams and hallucinations. It is almost as if they had different ideas and opinions for the film but didn't know how to incorporate all of them, so they did so via means of the dreams and hallucinations. It wasn't scary, and it wasn't NOT scary. It wasn't bad, and not all that good either, but certainly more enjoyable than 3, 4 & 5 in the series. The stabbing scene in the hotel room was incredibly well done!! Pinhead again only appears very late in the film, and only stays around long enough to convince us this is indeed a Hellraiser film .