Hellraiser: Deader

(2005) **1/2

Well at least Kari isn't playing second babe banana to J. Lo in this one. Instead she plays guerilla reporter Amy Klein, who writes articles so kickass she never has to show up to work. Lured to Prague by a videotape of an apparent ritual suicide and resurrection, Amy snoops her way into a stinky apartment replete with corpse and Hellraiser brand puzzle box.


After a legitimately icky scene in which Amy has to reach between the corpse and the sink to grab that envelope back there, she sifts her new batch of clues. There's a video of Marla, the dead girl, throwing down a lead and a warning not to open the box.

Since most humans like to do the opposite of what they're told, Amy starts fiddling around with the box after sensibly asking "open?" aloud. I found myself with two distinct, opposite feelings about this scene. On the plus side, Hellraiser's use of the box as a plot element has always been about curiousity, the Need to Know. As Pinhead says in Hellbound (#2) after an autistic puzzle-savant girl opens the box, "hands do not summon us, but desire." As such, this grim, haunted n' hip reporter chick is a great player for this story.

On the other hand, after six movies of seeing this box open again and again and again, I really wish a warning about it would say specifically "don't even touch the damn thing" or "don't even think about opening it" or, above all, "don't press on this circle part like this:


and then move your thumb around the perimeter of the larger circle like this:


Because then this will happen."


Starting with Hellraiser: Inferno, all these straight-to-video Pinhead flicks operate the same way: dream sequence after dream sequence after dream sequence. Inferno was good and didn't abuse it, Hellseeker was awful and used it with mondo stupidity, Deader is ehhh middle-of-the-road with it. In deader, we only see Kari snap out of a hallucination sequence maybe three of four times, so each dream section is pretty long. So long, in fact, that's it's very easy to lose track of what's meant to be going on; each time she "wakes up" you're sitting there saying "wait, hold on -- none of that was real? Going how far back?"

The plot involves a minicult of "Deaders," whose leader has somehow co-opted some power from a Cenobite puzzle box. His initiates off themselves and then he uses his ill-gotten power to resurrect them, as seen on the initial tape. The result is a bunch of followers with fatal wounds that don't hurt or kill them but are constantly bleeding. Kind of hard to see the appeal. Pinhead is honked off about these culties and their shenanigans and recruits Amy to help stop them. After that some other stuff happens (or maybe doesn't happen), and when they get to the end it's all flashy and confusing and soon Pinhead's going "NOOOOOOO!!" while I'm going "huh?"

The best scene is when Amy wakes up in her hotel room with a kitchen knife stuck into her back. She's been Deader-fied, so it doesn't hurt, but Kari Wuhrer does an excellent, totally believable freakout, spreading blood all over he bathroom while she twists around trying to remove the knife.



The decent bits of this movie are too spread out to recommend it, but I'll grudgingly concede it's got some game. But so far each of these straight-to-video Hellraisers all turn the same plot corner -- once the box is messed with, all bets are off on what's really going on. I re-watched a number of key parts in Deader and still couldn't figure it out.