As we reach part seven of the Hellraiser series, it should be becoming clearer and clearer that the films have less and less to do with the actual Hellraiser mythos, even after they inevitably re-write the script to include it. And the scripts being modified to fit into the Hellraiser canon are less and less compatible with it as well. It makes you wonder just what their method of picking scripts to be given the Hellraiser makeover was. Names drawn out of a hat? A blindfolded child throws darts at a list on a wall? A moderately prescient octopus? Regardless, Hellraiser: Deader was - yet again - not originally a Hellraiser movie, and it shows.
Amy Klein is an ambitious and somewhat anti-authority reporter who has made her name writing articles on topics like crack dens from an insider's perspective. Her editor gives her a new story to investigate - there is a strange video tape (video tape in 2005?) that apparently shows a cult performing a ritual where one member is shot in the head and then brought back to life by the cult leader, a man called Winter. These people are called "Deaders" and Amy is sent to Romania to investigate whether the events on the tape are real. When she gets there, however, she discovers her contact already dead and clutching a certain ornate puzzle box. The dead contact left a message before she died telling Amy to under no circumstances open the box... so of course that's what she does almost immediately. Soon enough she's seeing things and getting drawn deeper and deeper into strange underground subcultures, including a ride on a neverending rave subway car where anything goes. Eventually she finds her way to the Deader cult itself, who claim she is the key to some ultimate ritual. Who is the mysterious Winter and how does he have the power to bring the dead back to life? And where exactly do the Cenobites fit into all of this?
Ugh. I am probably more bothered by the title of this movie and the name of the cult than I should be. "Deader" is not a noun; it's an adjective and seeing it used as a noun in this way is really doing something to my head. But never mind, this is just a particular quirk of mine.
Perhaps the most ridiculous moment of Hellraiser: Deader is when one of the "Deaders" tells Amy that she is key to Winter's plan to do... something (I somehow missed what he was actually planning to do; possibly I fell asleep) because she is one of the few people who can open the Lament Configuration. Considering the number of people we've seen open the box in the previous six movies, some even by accident, I find this statement highly unlikely - it's hardly the world's hardest Sudoku puzzle or anything like that. But that's just one of the plot holes in this movie. The other big one is the revelation that Winter is actually another descendent of Phillip L'Merchant - I guess Angelique and Pinhead must have missed him when they were looking for members of the L'Merchant bloodline back in the fourth movie. And oh yeah, spoilers: Winter is a descendent of Phillip L'Merchant who has come up with a plot to steal the box's power for himself to do... something. This leads to the slightly odd situation of Pinhead being (kind of) on the side of the protagonist, if only because he obviously wants to keep the power for himself.
There's one scene in Deader that actually manages to invoke memories of previous Hellraiser films, and that's a scene taking place on the neverending rave subway car, where Amy looks around and suddenly realises that everyone there is dead; slaughtered by the Cenobites (and I'm sure that one Cenobite we see here was last seen in Hellraiser: Inferno). Granted, the film it invokes is Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (the nightclub massacre, for reference), but it is at least one of the films that can be described as, "Okay, more or less."
Hellraiser: Deader is a pretty slow-moving film, which makes for a pretty lackluster film. What's more, the involvement of the Cenobites is the weakest yet in the series. They don't have any relevance to the plot that couldn't have been covered by any other generic evil supernatural force, and so the question has to be, why even bother putting them in in the first place? (the answer, of course, is money) At this point the Cenobites and the whole Hellraiser canon is just a badly-abused cash cow that keeps getting hauled out for another violent milking, and with each film the quality keeps dropping - with the exception of Doug Bradley, who keeps soldiering on regardless in performing Pinhead, even though his role has become that of a Greek chorus or deus ex machina.
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