Hellraiser: Deader

And we’re still going. By this point the Hellraiser direct-to-video have proven themselves to be garbage. The first two were almost the same movie. The third, Deader, is a little different but still along similar lines. What’s worse is how dull it is – it’s a total bore and it drags on and on. It gives a different setting, but even that’s a drag, and its attempt at a story is pathetic. The film was produced by Stan Winston, the make-up guru designer of the Terminator and the Predator – I’ve no idea why he’d produce this. I don’t think he did the effects, which are subpar. It’s just another bad movie.

Amy Klein is a reporter doing stories on crack addiction, immersing herself into junkie culture. Her boss tasks her with investigating the ‘Deaders’, an underground cult movement that practice ritualistic murder and suicide, only to be miraculously resurrected by the cult’s mysterious leader Winter. She heads to Bucharest, and immerses herself in Deader communities trying to find Winter. Along the way Amy also gets her hands on a puzzle box.

The story here is somehow thinner than ever before. It’s just Amy tracking down Winter until she finds him, then there’s a few ‘revelations’, half an hour of nightmare sequences and flashbacks until the end. The pace is atrocious, plodding along until the eventual confrontation, and then meandering until the end. They go psychological again with nightmare sequences, fake-out visions, flashbacks and all that nonsense.

Amy isn’t likeable. She’s that tiring sort of ‘maverick reporter who plays by her own rules’ character, the one with attitude and bitchiness that others put up with because her work is apparently really good, though we never see any real evidence of it. She produces an exceptionally thin column titled ‘How to be a crack whore’ which she investigates presumably by becoming a crack whore. She’s really crap at her job as well, considering she’s meant to be such a fantastic reporter. She’s bad at lying, crap at following leads, terrible at protecting herself. The girl sucks. Yet the entire film is filled with characters talking about her, listing off her supposed traits and qualities, but then we never ever actually see her display any of them.

The leader of the Deadites is revealed to be ‘Winter Lemarchand’, an ancestor of Philip Lemarchand, the man who made the puzzle box. For some reason he’s got the power of necromancy (Why? How?). His plan is stupid – he’s decided that, as a descendant of Lemarchand, he should rule hell and the Cenobites (!?) and needs somebody to open the puzzle box for him because he can’t do it. He started the cult to gather up weak minded individuals susceptible to self-sacrifice. He kills and revives Amy, who opens the box, and then the Cenobites turn up and kill Winter and all the Deaders because of course that’s what they’d do. They want Amy to come with them, but she decides to kill herself instead (?) and that somehow defeats them, closes the puzzle box and also causes the entire building to explode, the end. What the fuck?

Winter Lemarchand sucks. He’s a generic cult leader, making great pronouncements, talking in cryptically, speaking in a light whispery tone. There’s nothing interesting about him, and his plan is stupid. There aren’t any other characters of note, with the rest of the cast just there to tell Amy to go somewhere else on her meandering ‘investigation’. Her boss talks about how great she is, a random punk guy talks about how dangerous the Deaders are, and a few others just talk shit.

Now let’s go over this for a second – Winter’s plan is fucking stupid. The Cenobites hate the Lemarchands, why would he think he’d have power over them? Also this makes zero sense in the terms of the series’ logic – if we’re following Bloodline then Philip Lemarchand only built a toy box, which got its demonic powers from the duke summoning demons, so the Lemarchand family had no real link other than that. Also the timeline is a bit off – based on fashions and technology (they still use VHS) Deader seems to be placed in either the eighties or nineties, which is before John Merchant’s story in Bloodline but possibly during Hellraiser 3. So is Winter John’s uncle or cousin or something? That would mean Pinhead killed Winter long before meeting John, and when he met John he was surprised the Lemarchand bloodline was still running after Philip died two hundred years earlier? And why is the puzzle by just around if, by Hellraiser 3, it was either in the Cotton’s possession, in the Pillar of Souls or in the foundation of the building Merchant designed? The more you think about it the less it makes sense.

 

It does have a different feel to the last two, but I don’t know if that’s a good thing. Everything is sorta grey and muted, but Bucharest at least feels like a place and we get to go outside a lot, compared to the perpetual indoors of Hellseeker and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Inferno. The music here is overbearing, playing way too loudly over pretty much every scene. It’s so overwrought and dramatic that it removes any tension or atmosphere. It drowns out the dialogue as well. Seriously what the hell is with the music? It’s not even good music, it’s just generic horror music. I have to mention that the Hellraiser overture/theme hasn’t actually been heard since film 3, while Bloodline had a variation on it. These sequels didn’t even bother using the same music. Again it doesn’t feel like a Hellraiser movie. If you ignore the gore, the focus on chains and the Cenobites showing up this is clearly a different horror movie rewritten to be a Hellraiser sequel.

The movie plods along – it’s not a long movie, but it certainly feels long. The entire first hour is dull and the last thirty minutes is just stupid nightmare imagery. The usual things happen. Fake-out nightmares, odd visions of non-scary things like creepy strangers and random blood puddles, flashbacks, characters acting strange. It’s all so played out. At one point Amy goes to some alternative counter-culture folks who live on a train – it’s not a derailed or fictional train, it’s an actual subway train running on the tracks and stopping at regular intervals. No idea how that’s meant to work. When she boards it, it’s suddenly like a little slum community, or maybe a gypsy commune would be right. There are a lot of naked people, women making out, people with tattoos and piercings (what is it with the Hellraiser sequels equating tattoos and piercings with being creepy?) and stupid random imagery. I think they’re meant to be junkies as well. Once she's dead, Amy returns there and everybody's killed in some gruesome way. It's the same thing that happened in the last two, where they return to a place and find it freaky.

The whole ‘Amy is killed and resurrected’ thing seems to exist only to drag the movie out. After being stabbed she wakes up with bloody wounds and wanders around seeing dead people everywhere and having constant flashbacks to her childhood, where her abusive father raped her.  It’s garbage. It tries once more to go psychological, but we’ve just seen her get stabbed to death so we know she’s been killed and everything is happening in some sort of nightmare limbo. She eventually remembers that she eventually murdered her dad (a repressed memory) and then Winter brings her back to life and then she opens the Lament Configuration. She opens the box by throwing it. It’s stupid, but that’s what happens. It opens in cartoon lightning nonsense, and Pinhead and his shitty Ceonbite friends show up. It’s the same Cenobites from the last film, presumably because it was much cheaper to just reuse the same costumes and make-up. 

 

The Cenobites are here for the ending I guess. Pinhead shows up a few times to warn Amy. It’s the first time he’s been seen actually trying to help somebody. At the end he calls his chains and they kill the Deaders, but otherwise I’d say Pinhead does even less here than in the last two movies. This is literally the movie bringing him out for the end, which is what the last two did as well. You can tell that this was meant to be a different horror movie. You could also tell with the other two, but this one in particular feels as though it was meant to be some psychological horror character study, but it sucked badly so they just threw in Pinhead hoping that’d fix it. It didn’t.

Deader sucks. All these direct-to-dvd ones suck, but Deader manages to be duller than the last two, which is absolutely insane when you think about it. Is it the worst? No. These movies manage to get even worse.