Previously posted on blog and written by B. Demeter
Hellraiser: Deader… Man, I really stepped in it this time. Of the infinite films in the Hellraiser series, I choose this one because of its bonkers title. Is ‘deader’ even a real word? Let’s find out!
Full disclosure, although I have seen the original Hellraiser, it was a while ago and I never saw any of the 8 other movies in the series (Is it really only 8?!). Pinhead is one of the all-time great horror movie monsters but I only needed the first, 1987 movie to figure that out. Despite my opinion on the matter, they continue to make Hellraiser movies.
Plot… oh, boy! Newspaper journalist Amy Klein lives life on the edge. She is following a story of a death cult in Bucharest and in doing so finds the puzzle box, Lemarchand Configuration. This takes her down a rabbit hole where she meets the cult’s leader, Winter LeMarchand. Now don’t let that ‘big M’ fool you; Winter believes himself to be the rightful heir of the cursed box and master of the Cenobites.
Cut to the chase, he is not. Try as he might, he cannot open the box. So his brilliant plan is to find people with nihilistic tendencies, kill them, bring them back to “life”, and then see if they can open the box. And he’s got a bunch of people in his group… they’re called ‘deaders’, so now the title makes a little more sense. None of them can open the box, but maybe self-destructive Amy Klein can.
Cut to the chase, she can. She goes to the deader’s clubhouse where she is held down and presumably stabbed in the heart by Winter… yet she wakes up in the bathtub of her hotel room with nary a scratch. Now we start getting into black and white flashbacks of Amy Klein as a child being sexually abused… then she is stabbed in the back.
The scene of Amy in the bathroom trying to get the knife out is pretty awesome and worth watching. As numb to gore as I am, this scene made me light headed.
Then Amy runs around the third act trying to figure out what is going on. The flashbacks establish that the sexual abuse and subsequent murdering of her abusive father have given Amy the ability to open the puzzle box. Shit happens but it doesn’t matter. Everything after her waking up in the bathtub was a dream- she wakes up back in the bed of the deader’s clubhouse. Winter tries to get her to stab herself in the heart but she refuses and instead open’s the puzzle box. This is Pinhead’s cue to zap in and fuck shit up with a lot of hooks and chains. He rips Winter apart and re-kills the rest of the deader cult. Amy gets away by killing herself.
Pinhead pops up in two earlier scenes to warn Amy about Winter for a total of maybe two minutes of screen time. And he owns the final ten minutes. But that’s it. For a movie with Hellraiser in the title, there is very little hell-raising going on. It is no surprise that the Wikipedia entry for this film reveals that this movie was a spec script rewritten to include Pinhead. I felt bad for Doug Bradley, the actor who plays Pinhead. It can’t be easy getting into that make-up and to do so for such little pay off seems like a waste.
This movie did peek my interest in going back and tracking how shitty this series has gotten over the past 8 films. The role of Amy is played by Kari Wuhrer who you may remember from Anaconda or Eight Legged Freaks. She does a decent enough job with the role. I can’t with good conscience recommend anyone watch this movie, save for the knife removal scene. There are boobies but no really worthwhile kill scenes. Outside of a desire to see all the movies in the Hellraiser series, I’d stay away from this film.
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