Franchises: Hellraiser. Hellraiser: Deader (2005)

Surprisingly, Hellraiser: Deader is the franchise's most obscure entry, mostly because, to this day, it's only been released on Blu-Ray once, and said Blu-Ray has long since gone out of print. It was inexplicably left off of a set that Echo Bridge released with Bloodline, Inferno, Hellseeker, and Hellworld, and it also doesn't tend to pop up on many official streaming sites. Thus, the only way you can see it, without resorting to pirating, is by buying the old DVD, but the question is, would you want to see it? Along with Bloodline, this was the last Hellraiser I saw before Revelations came out (and I didn't see that until after I saw Judgment, but we'll get to that in a couple of days), but, until I began prepping for this series of reviews in October of 2023, I'd only seen it once and remembered almost nothing about it. Back then, if you'd asked me to describe anything about Deader, I would've probably said something to the effect of, "Kari Wuhrer searches Bucharest for about 90 minutes, and Pinhead is involved... somehow." Even after I watched it for the second time, it had almost completely fallen out of my head after a few days, resulting in a friend and I joking about how, while it may not be the worst, it's definitely the most forgettable Hellraiser. Now, having watched it for a third time right before beginning this, I can say that, like the two previous movies, it has some effective elements but, in the end, is still a misfire. It's not nearly as ho-hum or milquetoast as Hellseeker, as it not only deals with taboo subject matter but also gets down into the filth and nastiness in a matter we actually haven't seen since the first two movies. Also, our protagonist isn't a complete bastard from the get-go or ultimately revealed to be one, and is fairly well-acted by Wuhrer; Rick Bota brings a bit more flair to his direction this time; and Pinhead, despite, again, not having much screentime, has some memorable moments and lines of dialogue, particularly the climax. But, not only is the movie, yet again, painfully low budget and, for the most part, generic-looking, with some awful visual effects, but like the previous two, the filmmakers are going for a type of horror that this series wasn't about, and with a similar plot, no less. Here, it's especially egregious, as this script's original concept clashes badly with the Hellraiser mythology, and the third act is virtually incomprehensible.

Amy Klein is a reporter who isn't afraid to go above and beyond in order to get a good story. Following one where she became involved with a group of crackheads, she meets with her editor at the London Underground, Charles, and is shown a videotape that was mailed to them recently. It depicts a ritual performed by a cult known as "the Deaders," one that involves a victim willingly shooting herself, only for the leader, Winter, to literally breathe life back into her. Intrigued, Amy heads to Bucharest and tracks down the apartment belonging to Marla, the person who sent the tape. But she finds it in a state of disgusting squalor, and Marla herself dead in the bathroom, having hanged herself. Taking a package sitting near her corpse, Amy also takes a puzzle box she's holding in her right hand. To her horror, Marla's corpse gasps and reaches for her, sending her running out of the building in terror. At her hotel room, Amy finds a videotaped message from Marla in the package, where she warns whoever finds the tape not to give in to Winter's temptation to join the cult, and also not to open the box. Amy then fiddles with the box, and has an apparent nightmare where hooked chains come out of it and pierce into her face, and Pinhead appears, telling her that she's in grave danger. Following this, and a phone call that seems to be from Marla, asking her for help, Amy follows up a lead from the tape that sends her to a bizarre train car at a subway station, full of people engaging in very lascivious behavior. She meets Joey, who points her to the Deaders' hideout, but warns her not to get involved with them, that once she does, she'll never be able to escape. After she gets off the train, she sees Winter appear in the station and jump in front of an oncoming one, but the security team find nothing when they investigate. Though this gets her in hot water with the authorities, Amy carries on with her investigation. Once she encounters the Deaders, she not only finds herself caught up in their shadowy world between life and death, but also learns of their connection to the Lament Configuration and how she herself figures into it.

While it's debatable whether or not Inferno started out as a Hellraiser film, and Hellseeker began as an unused idea for the fifth film, it's well-known that Deader did indeed begin life separate from the franchise. A spec script written by Neil Marshall Stevens, it was bought by Dimension in 2000 who, after rejecting an idea by screenwriter Peter Briggs due to costs, decided to retool it into the seventh Hellraiser film. They hired Tim Day, one of Hellseeker's two screenwriters, to do so, with Bob Weinstein suggesting he take inspiration from the Japanese horror films that were growing in popularity in the West during this time. While both Day and Stevens got credit on the final film, the latter was not at all happy when he heard what his script had become. Also, before Dimension bought the script, Stan Winston had intended to make it into a movie, and he's credited as a producer here, along with his production company, though I don't know if he had any real input or if that credit was mostly just ceremonial.

Like with the previous film, Dimension tried to get Inferno-director Scott Derrickson to return to the series but he declined. However, Rick Bota was interested in having another go at Hellraiser, and would, in fact, have two more, as he shot both Deader and the next film, Hellworld, back to back. According to Gary Tunnicliffe, while Bota didn't consult with him hardly at all on Hellseeker (which was why he had barely any memories about the making of that film), on Deader, he actually got to shoot second unit, and also has a cameo at the beginning of the movie. Also, because they filmed entirely in Romania, with a good number of Romanian actors and crew-members who spoke little to no English, including the cinematographer, Bota found this shoot to be rather challenging. Regardless of those issues, Tunicliffe feels that Bota was really on his game while making Deader, whereas he would describe Hellworld's production as much more slapdash and problematic. As I said, I do think he got a bit more down-and-dirty, and was able to do some good work with Kari Wuhrer. I also have a feeling he may have consulted with Clive Barker again, as Barker has a "Special Thanks" credit here. At the same time, though, as we'll get into, I have more fun with Hellworld, whereas Deader is slow and has some major story problems. But in the end, even though both of them were shot and completed by late 2002, they wouldn't be released until 2005, within several months of each other.

One thing that Deader does have over the last couple of movies is a protagonist who, while I may not exactly love her, is much more likable (in fact, she could be the best protagonist we've had since Kirsty): Kari Wuhrer's Amy Klein, a reporter for the London Underground who will definitely go that extra mile and then some for a story. Case in point, in the movie's opening, she awakens in a crack den, having stayed there for research into a follow-up on her latest article, "HOW TO BE A CRACK WHORE." She also has a very devil-may-care, take-no-crap attitude about her, as when she goes to the London Underground's office, she's dismissive over being admonished for not contributing to a meeting, and she also puts one reporter in his place when he acts sleazy towards her. According to her editor, Charles, who's also an old colleague, she was recently fired from the New York Post because of her attitude, though Amy herself insists she was simply "reassigned." Regardless, when he tells her about the Deaders, and shows her the videotape which depicts the cult's reanimation powers, she's intrigued enough to go to Bucharest and investigate. There, she finds the apartment belonging to Marla, the person who sent the tape, as well as her body, after she hanged herself in the bathroom. Despite being horrified and disgusted by the state of the place and the rancid smell that permeates it, Amy takes the time to look through Marla's photographs, which allows her to put more faces to the Deaders, including their leader, Winter. She also finds a package next to Marla's body, as well as the Lament Configuration, which she pries from her cold, dead hands, only for Marla to lunge at her, apparently still alive. Freaked out, Amy escapes the building with the goods, which include a videotape where Marla begs whoever finds it to help them, as well as warns them not to let Winter convince them to join the cult, or to open the box. Amy, naturally, does fiddle with the box, leading to her first painful and horrific encounter with Pinhead, who tells her that she's in danger. But when it initially seems like this is a dream, she continues her investigation, following Marla's directions and finding Joey in the bizarre train car. Though he warns her not to get mixed up with the Deaders, she, naturally, continues her search, which plunges her further and further into a waking nightmare.

Does any of that sound familiar? It should, as it's the same basic story as the two movies: someone embarks on a journey that takes them through their own private hell and is forced to ultimately confront their own demons, all of which somehow involves the Cenobites. Like Detective Thorne and Trevor before her, Amy begins seeing and experiencing bizarre and increasingly horrific events, like Winter jumping in front of a train in the subway; her squeezing her way through a

narrowing, spider-filled passageway in the Deaders' hideout, only to be attacked by a hooded, knife-wielding figure when she gets stuck, and then suddenly finds herself free; meeting with Winter and being held down by the cult in a ritual similar to the one she saw the woman on the videotape go through; suddenly waking up back in her hotel room, seemingly unharmed, only to later find a knife plunged through her back and out her front, which she has to improvise in order to painfully

remove; after another encounter with Pinhead, going back to Joey, and then meeting the seemingly undead Marla, the latter of whom admits to having stabbed her, as she continues to bleed out from her torso; suddenly finding herself in a mental institution, after having seemingly had a psychotic episode, only to see more disturbing imagery and encounter Marla, before finally facing her inner demons and finding herself back with the Deaders. Throughout it all, it turns out that both Winter and Pinhead have plans for Amy. The latter tells her

that she has been recruited in Winter's personal war, but that, ever since she opened the box, her soul has belonged to him and he is her only salvation. Winter, on the other hand, needs Amy to open the box for his plan to conquer and master the Cenobites, as he believes that her nihilistic, self-destructive nature is necessary for it to succeed. To that end, he forces her to re-experience the horrible physical and sexual abuse her father put her through when she was a young girl, which she has flashes of throughout the movie. However, in the

final one, it's revealed that she fatally stabbed him when he attempted it one time too many, and following this memory, she awakens back in the Deaders' hideout, with everything she experienced between now and then having possibly been some sort of waking dream (again, possibly). Winter then tries to manipulate her into taking that final step and become a true Deader by killing herself so he can reanimate her.

After she goes through a lot of anguish, with Winter trying to push her into it, Amy acts like she's about to plunge the knife into her stomach, only to instead stab the face of the table that the Lament Configuration is sitting on. She takes the box and, telling Winter to go to hell, tosses it, which summons Pinhead and the Cenobites, who promptly kill Winter and all of the Deaders. Pinhead then prepares to take Amy back with them, as she opened the box, and threatens her with

her father, whom he says is waiting for her. But, instead of giving up her soul, she commits suicide, which leads to the Cenobites being banished back to hell. The hideout is destroyed in the process and Amy's body is never found, leaving Charles and the others back in London wondering what became of her.

As problematic as this movie can be, Kari Wuhrer does give a pretty damn good performance, especially in the scenes dealing with the terror and sheer anguish she experiences. She really sells the confusion and horror she feels in the hotel room, when she wakes up to find herself bleeding all over her bed, then goes into the bathroom and discovers the knife that's stuck in her back and jutting out her front. She tries to convince herself that it's just a dream, while screaming, "Holy shit!", and, "What

the fuck is going on?!", and flailing around in a panic, especially since she can't reach around to pull the knife out. And speaking of selling something, it really comes off like she's in pain when she manages to remove the knife by closing the handle in a cabinet drawer and sliding herself across the blade. That feeling of terror and confusion gets worse when she goes to see Joey, only for her to suddenly see him and everybody else on the train car dead after she was just talking to him, and then she meets Marla, who lets her in

on how she's neither dead nor alive at the moment, as well as Winter's plans for her. By the time we get to the point where Amy is forced to relive her father's abuse and wakes up back with the Deaders, as Winter tries to persuade her to become one of them, she's so emotionally tormented and exhausted that you may think she's actually going to go through with it. And you got to love how she tells both Winter and Pinhead that they can't have her, foiling their respective intentions for her.

Winter (Paul Rhys) is initially depicted as a very mysterious and sinister figure who, as part of the indoctrination into his cult, has someone commit suicide, followed by him literally breathing life back into them. Described as everything from a guru to not even being human, or existing, for that matter, he's first seen on the videotape that Amy and Charles watch in the latter's office, and Amy also sees him at the Bucharest subway station, where he jumps in front of a train. However, there's no sign of him afterward, and Amy then sees him boarding the train, though nobody else does, including the security. Amy meets him for real at the Deaders' hideout, and he hints at something that Pinhead confirms during the final confrontation: he's a descendant of Phillip Lemarchand. He refers to the Lament Configuration as a "family heirloom," which he believes is rightfully his, and also believes he's destined to take control of its powers. But because he can't open the box himself to do so, he's been searching for a person with enough nihilism and depravity in their soul to do so, as well as the desire to become a Deader. As for the other Deaders, Winter claims that he merely "accepted" them, and possibly intends for them to be his own personal army in contending with the Cenobites. But, despite how intimidating he tries to come off during his interactions with Amy, when the Cenobites are summoned at the end of the movie, Winter proves to be very wrong in his belief that he can rule them. When he tells Pinhead that he can't hurt him, he suffers the same gruesome fate that Frank did back in the original film, and all that smugness and bravado he exhibited before gives way to him screaming in pain and pleading for mercy.

Marla (Georgina Rylance), the young woman who shot and sent the videotape of the Deader initiation to the London Underground, claims on another tape which Amy finds at her apartment that she wants whoever the viewer is to help them all, as she's beginning to feel pain again and wants to end being a Deader. She also warns the viewer not to join the cult, as Winter will try to make them, and not to open the box, before finally telling them where to find Joey. Though Amy found her seemingly dead in her apartment, it turns out she's unable to actually die, as she's now caught between life and death. But because she had doubts about it, she's now a decaying, walking corpse, becoming worse the more she doubts (I think, at least, but as I'll get into, I'm far from sure). She's the one who later stabs Amy, telling her that what's happening at the moment is only a rehearsal so she can know what it's like to be a Deader, as well as what Winter has in store for her. While not stated outright, it seems as though the tape was just a means to lure Amy to Bucharest and that Marla's job is to personally initiate her, to make her face her personal demons before she's to take the final step. Amy meets Marla again in her vision of being in a psychiatric hospital, where she hints at what Winter's ultimate goal is, without going completely into it. However, she also tells Amy that, because she's the one who opened the box, she's also the only one who can stop everything now. She's present at the climax, where she gets slaughtered, along with the rest of the Deaders, by Pinhead, but encourages Amy not to let him take her soul before expiring.

I have to be honest, though: there's so much about Marla I don't fully understand. I don't know if she committed suicide in her apartment in order to end the suffering she was going through from being a Deader or, because she had the Lament Configuration on her, if she died by opening it. Since she didn't look as "dead" on the videotape that Amy finds at her apartment, I'd naturally assume it was the former. But then, near the end of the movie, when she tells Amy about how Winter

needs an exact type of person to open the box, she comments, "That wasn't me," which is why I wonder if it was the latter. Of course, it all could've been part of an elaborate ruse to ensure that Amy would get her hands on the box but then, there's the whole issue that Winter brings up about how Marla's suffering and deteriorating state is a result of her "doubting" being a Deader... whatever that means. I've read that in the original Deader script, it was because she was still clinging onto the world of the living but here, it's very vague and not well

explained. That's to say nothing of why she suddenly looks perfectly well when she appears to Amy in her vision of an insanity ward, how she managed to get in there to begin with, what she even means when she tells Amy that her stabbing her was a "rehearsal" for being a Deader, or what the parameters of this section of the movie even are (as I'll get into, this is another one where it's annoyingly hard to put your finger on what's real).

One thoroughly oddball character who I kind of like is Joey (Marc Warren), whom Marla's videotape message leads Amy to, in this bizarre, very depraved subway car he seems to live in, along with a bunch of other characters. When Amy first meets him, he comments, "Ah, now here comes a daring soul. A person committed to a just cause, another seeker of the truth, no doubt." She asks him if he's Joey, to which he says, "I've been called worse," and when she brings up Marla, as well as Katia, the girl on the first videotape, and Winter, he comments, "The plot thickens." After some prodding, he tells her what he knows about the Deaders and Winter, as well as where they all live together, but he also warns her not to get involved  and that she'll never be able to be free once she does. He also senses something about her, saying, "You got this fucked up, self-destructive thing going on," and when she shows him the Lament Configuration, he says it's making him, "Very unhappy." Later in the movie, when Amy comes back to him after finding the knife sticking through her, and encountering Pinhead, Joey, who's in the middle of a threesome that she interrupts, tells her, "You gotta give in, Amy. You're tryin' too hard. Forget about the facts, forget about reality. Just sit back, enjoy the ride. There's nothing you can do about it anyway. We're all just pieces in Winter's puzzle." He goes on to say, "You're a person who's willing to do anything to find the truth... Me and you, we ain't all that different, really. We do anything to go to the edge, to the extreme. You know what our biggest problem is? Neither of us know when to get off the fucking train." He then leans back, stops moving, and Amy sees that him and everybody else in the car is suddenly either dead or seemingly so. Not surprisingly, Joey shows up as part of Winter's attempt to make Amy into a Deader, imploring her to go along with it. But when, like the other Deaders, he gets skewered by a large hook, leaving a huge, bleeding hole in his torso, his last words before he keels over are an incredulous, "Oh, for fuck's sake."

Amy's editor, Charles (Simon Kunz), is something of an old friend of hers, with a framed picture in his office suggesting that they used to work together as reporters. Nowadays, their relationship comes off as a tad contentious, with Amy often snarking at Charles and him, in turn, not only giving as good as he gets but also reminding her that, after she was "reassigned" by the New York Post, he was the only one who would hire her. Despite his sarcastic quips about her talents, he does admire her, but also sees in her an insatiable appetite for knowledge, one which he uses to his own ends, saying, "All that stuff I don't eat, I still want. So I send you in to do the eating for me, so I get to experience it without having to suffer any mental indigestion." To that end, he shows her the Deader videotape, knowing she'd be interested in learning the truth about it, and gives her a ticket to Bucharest, with an already booked hotel room. As she leaves, he says, "Now's the part where I'm supposed to say be careful," and it seems like he's going to when he stops her in the doorway... only to say, "Call me when you get settled," instead. After Amy gets in trouble with the Bucharest police, Charles is good enough to head there and bail her out, though, again, it's only because he still needs her. The scene where Amy, after seeing Joey for the second time and running into the undead Marla, finds herself in a mental ward has Charles being nicer and more compassionate than before, a tip-off that it's actually a waking dream. However, at the very end of the movie, when he hears about the sudden implosion of the Deaders' hideout and Amy's subsequent disappearance, Charles does come off as concerned about what became of her. That doesn't last long, though, as another journalist comes in to meet with him and he assigns her to investigate the Deaders.

Besides being in charge of the makeup effects yet again, as well as shooting second unit, Gary Tunnicliffe also has a cameo at the beginning of the movie as a reporter who, when Amy comes into the office, tells her, "How 'bout you, uh, show me what you learned?" To his surprise, Amy gets right up in his face, asking, "You want me to show you what I learned? Right here, right now?", in a very sultry manner. Taken aback, he suggests, "Um, maybe later?", to which she fake laughs and retorts, "Maybe not," before walking away, leaving the guy dumbfounded.

Like with Hellseeker, while I may not be a big fan of the movie as a whole, Pinhead is still awesome in his few scenes. In fact, despite how poorly the series mythology and that of the original script mesh together, his motivation is easier to figure out. Like in the previous two movies, he makes an initial, brief appearance early on, when Amy fiddles with the Lament Configuration and chains deploy from it and hook into her face. He tells her, "Don't you think for a second you are not in danger," something that Winter later tells her. His first major scene comes when, after Amy finds and manages to remove the knife sticking in her, he tells her that it's not his doing, nor is what she's experiencing a dream, as she's telling herself. He also tells her, "You have been recruited as a soldier in another man's war, a war that he can never win. You opened the box, and your soul belongs to me... as does his," meaning Winter. He adds, "The Deaders have discovered an entry into my world, my domain. But they can only complete their journey through you, Amy Klein, and your only way back is through me now. I am your redeemer. I am the way!" Just as Winter plans to use Amy to open the box and take control of all its powers, Pinhead plans to use her to teach him and the Deaders a painful lesson about meddling in his affairs. During the climax, when he and the Cenobites are summoned at the hideout, he immediately puts Winter in his place: "It seems that evil does run in the family. Your lineage is that of a craftsman, a maker of toys. You should have stayed in the family business. I sacrificed my mortal self to that box." Winter insists that the box belongs to him, but Pinhead tells him, "Well, that's where you're wrong. Painfully wrong. We belong to it," and then, he makes the mistake of telling Pinhead that he can't hurt him, to which he retorts, "You're not the first to say that... and you won't be the last."

Despite how far the franchise has fallen by this point, and how disconcerting it is to see a really good actor like Doug Bradley continuing to slum in dreck, I won't lie and say it's not entertaining to watch Pinhead completely decimate both that poser Winter and his cult. He deploys a number of hooked chains from the walls, which pierce into Winter until he's a complete bloody mess, and after looking at the Deaders with disdain, walks up to him and tells him, "When you attempted to live 

beyond death, you entered into my domain... You should be very careful what you wish for. It just might come true!" With that, he rips Winter apart, then turns his attention to the cult. He tells them, "This world, it obviously disappoints you all. That is why you chose to begin this journey. And since you gave yourselves so willingly, allow me to finish what he started," before deploying more enormous, hooked chains and impaling entire rows of them at once, leaving them with big, bloody holes in their torsos. Once they're all dead, Pinhead

prepares to take Amy back to hell, saying she must now pay the price for opening the box. Chuckling when she grabs a knife and futilely threatens him and the Cenobites with it, he tells her that her hideously abusive father is waiting for her and, referring to how she stabbed him, comments, "It won't be so easy this time." Much to his shock and frustration, though, she instead kills herself, after which the box closes and banishes him and the Cenobites back to hell without her.

Like Hellseeker, Deader often has that same cheap-looking, generic look to it, with a typically soft lighting scheme and muted color palette, save for the scenes in the subway station, which are saturated in a deep blue hue, onboard the train, which ranges from blue to green and red due to the lights in there, and in Amy's hotel bedroom at night, which almost looks turquoise. However, one thing the film has going for it is that there are scenes with something of a contrasting, European look, as well as plenty of shots where there's an

atmospheric shaft of either sun or moonlight coming through a window or some other opening. Once again, Pinhead himself is filmed very well, often standing in or illuminated by the blue moonlight beams, which I prefer to the way he was filmed in the previous movie, as it makes me think of the way he was shot in Inferno. And in the scene in Marla's apartment, the cinematography accentuates the feeling of filth and rancidness we get from the visuals. In addition, while his direction of Hellseeker was mostly by-the-

numbers, Rick Bota does get a little more creative here. The scene where Amy and Charles watch Marla's videotape is shot in a handheld manner similar to the tape itself, with the camera getting a bit twitchy and sometimes zooming in very quickly and suddenly. When Amy leaves Charles' office to head to Bucharest, the editing becomes non-linear, showing her getting her train ticket, money, and such, as well as heading out the door, while cutting back and forth to her train traveling there and

disembarking at the train station. The flashbacks that Amy has of the abuse she suffered at the hands of her father are shot in black and white and also look overexposed, making it feel more nightmarish, and the same method is used when Marla tells Amy that she's the one who stabbed her, and Amy remembers back to what happened in her hotel room. Speaking of which, after Pinhead disappears following their first true interaction, her trying to clean up all the blood in the bathroom is

done in total silence. And going back to her and Marla, when she tells Amy what's happening to her, Bota suddenly cuts to a far off shot of where they're standing. However, he also sometimes uses melodramatic slow-mo, like when Amy goes to remove the knife using the bathroom cabinet door or when this child in the asylum draws an unsettling picture of her, and to me, that and certain digital sort of "jarring" effects they use on the screen is always indicative of trying to compensate for a low budget.

The most well-shot scene in the movie, as well as quite possibly the most effective, is when, while exploring the Deaders' hideout, Amy heads down a dark corridor that she has to illuminate with her cigarette lighter. As she goes further, she realizes it's getting narrower and narrower, and Bota uses a combination of medium, overhead, and distant wide shots to show just how tight it's getting, until Amy reaches the point where she basically can't move at all. If you're at all claustrophobic, this scene might actually freak you out, and it's made

even worse by her lighter starting to flicker out, threatening to leave her stuck in the dark, and somebody behind her stabbing at her with a knife, which is a very nightmarish scenario in and of itself. Also, this is another moment where Kari Wuhrer's acting is quite good, as she nicely sells that feeling of terror over being stuck, as well as panic upon realizing she's being attacked as well. Really, the only elements of this scene that keep it from being perfect are some bad CGI spiders that skitter across the wall at one point.

Although they moved the story to Bucharest purely for budgetary reasons, the filmmakers did make good use of the setting, particularly in creating a sense of the city's seedy underbelly and subculture. Nowhere is that stronger than in the subway scenes and those onboard the train car, where Joey and a bunch of other people indulge in all sorts of bizarre, unsavory, sketchy, and, in some cases, downright repulsive behavior within its tight confines, beneath lots of neon lights, in front of covered up windows, and amid a lot of ugly set

dressing. The same also goes for the seemingly abandoned and condemned looking house in an eerily deserted neighborhood near a train-yard that acts as the Deader cult's hideout. In fact, it's not the house itself, but rather the dark, claustrophobic catacombs beneath it, leading to their lair, which includes sleeping areas, a sort of office for Winter, and the large chamber where he performs his rituals. It may not feel ideal, but it's definitely more inviting than Marla's absolutely filthy and gross apartment, which is full of flies, rotting food in the

refrigerator, disgusting, unwashed dishes in the sink and on the counter, and the hideous stench that fills it, no doubt compounded by her having attempted suicide in the bathroom. Granted, the movie doesn't ignore the more luxurious, elegant part of the city, which we get through Amy's nice hotel room, but even that gets turned upside down and made horrific when she bleeds all over it after being stabbed. We even get a mental asylum set for the waking dream that Amy has before the climax,

which is about as depressing-looking as any such setting you've ever seen in a movie. Finally, the whole city has a generally unpleasant, uncomfortable vibe to it, not just in all that seediness but also in how unnerving and intimidating some characters are, like the landlord to Marla's building and the disbelieving cops and security teams at the subway station, as well as how you can feel the cold and dampness they put up with when they filmed there.

If Bota went too soft with Hellseeker, he more than makes up for it here, as there are some truly gruesome, nasty, and skin-crawling imagery and subject matter dealt with. The movie opens up in a disgusting, rundown crack den, with cutaways showing freebasing going on, half-empty liquor bottles on the floor, and people either passed out, doped up or getting doped up, or shivering from withdrawals. This setting is kind of a prelude to the horrific one of Marla's Bucharest apartment, which we get a sense of before Amy bribes the landlord to

let her in, as she grimaces from a foul smell coming through the door and sees a large mass of flies around the bottom. Then, when the landlord opens the door, Amy recoils from the smell, and as she wanders inside, we see what's causing much of the smell in gruesome detail, with the nasty stuff she finds in the fridge and kitchen sink. The bedroom, which she peeks into, doesn't come off as much better, and then, she makes the stomach-churning discovery of Marla's body in the bathroom, sitting on the toilet in just her bra and

underwear, apparently dead from hanging. The makeup on Georgina Rylance and the milky contact lenses she's wearing really make it look as though she's dead, and it's made worse by the flies buzzing around her, with one even going into and flying out of her mouth. And as if this wasn't already disgusting enough, Amy, spying the package on the small table next to Marla, has to lean in to grab it, getting her face much closer to hers than she would like, and having to deal with

the smell head-on. To make things worse, she drops the package on the floor next to Marla's feet, and now has to bend down and reach for it. Even when she gets it, she then sees the Lament Configuration clutched in her left hand, and has to reach in again and pry her dead, stiff fingers off the box.

That bathroom scene is one of several here that get to me, with another being those set onboard the train car where Joey and a bunch of other oddball people hang out. The first one especially is just uncomfortable, as it's badly cramped onboard the car, which is full of all sorts of bizarre and, for the most part, highly sexual sights. It's not just people in tattoos or leather bondage gear making out but, rather, lots of people who are either half or completely naked (there's one shot of a guy walking around with it all hanging out) making

out or having full-on sex, including heterosexual couples, and a lot of women pleasuring each other as well (weirdly, no homosexual men, as far as I can see). There are also sights like a naked woman wearing a cattle skull on her head, with her wrists apparently tied to the overhead bar; a preadolescent kid standing around, holding a rose in his mouth; a woman with an insane hairdo holding a cardboard cutout of a woman's face and cleavage in front of herself; a pair of grotesquely thin-looking guys; a

mannequin that's missing an arm and made to look as if it's been ripped out, with a lot of blood around where the arm should be; a woman breastfeeding a doll; and the back of the car, where Joey hangs out, papered with all sorts of dirty drawings and a shaded lamp next to where he's sitting, while two naked women passionately make out across from him. In fact, the most normal sights are two guys who are just playing chess and another getting a tattoo. I haven't mentioned even half of the crazy

stuff you see on this train car, and obviously I can't show a lot of it, but this is, without a doubt, one of the most Clive Barker-esque elements in any of these movies in a long time. Gary Tunnicliffe said it had a Midnight Meat Train vibe to it and, having read both that story and seen the movie, I can definitely see where he's coming from, especially later on when, after begging Joey for help, Amy sees that everyone onboard the car is either dead or undead, and the place itself now looks like a slaughterhouse.

This is the first Hellraiser to deal with the subject of cults, which instantly makes it far more bold and daring than anything in the previous movie. I said in another review that, while cults in real life do scare me, I've never seen any depiction of them in movies that have really gotten to me (of course, that could be because I haven't been watching the most effective ones). While this film is no exception, there are brief moments of creepiness concerning with the Deaders, such as the videotape that Amy and Charles watch at the beginning,

which does come off a tad uncomfortably authentic, with the grainy picture quality, the shaky way in which it's shot, and the scenario of the girl, Katia, being made to lie down on a bed, put a gun to her forehead, and pull the trigger, all while she keeps saying, "I'm not real." When Amy looks through the pictures in Marla's apartment, they're not only creepy but they appear to depict the Deaders in the process of murdering someone. And when she meets them at their hideout, it is unsettling how overly happy their expressions are

when they look at her, combined with the deadly wounds that proves they are actually undead, be they slit wrists or the bullet-hole in Katia's head. The film also touches on the very uncomfortable subject of child abuse, in Amy's flashbacks to what she suffered at the hands of her disgusting father. Though there's no dialogue during them, and the flashes are very brief, they're still rather hard to watch, given what a drunken, ugly, fat schlub of a man her father was, and how we see that young Amy took to hiding in the closet, only for him to

find her, pull her out, and drag her down the hallway and into a room. The most explicit flashback we get is when Amy dreams of one before she awakens to find she's been stabbed, as we see her father force her onto a table and begin to remove his belt. Fortunately, that's all we see, and even though it looks like she could've easily escaped, as there didn't seem to be anything forcing her there, it's still disturbing, as this subject should be, and it's actually cathartic when it's revealed that

she ultimately murdered her father one time when he came to get her. That said, though, it's clearly something that has always tormented Amy, and she's forced to face it head-on, down to seemingly re-experiencing it herself, as she's in black and white, wearing a dress like the one she did as a kid. And speaking of child corruption, in her "dream" about the mental asylum, Amy meets a cute, smiling little girl who offers to draw a picture of her... only to do a disturbing, Two-Face-like portrait of her with one side normal and the other side badly deformed, perhaps even rotted.

Much to my surprise, there's also an instance of dark humor to be had in the film. When Amy goes back to the subway station, she realizes that her stab wound is still leaving a trail of blood on the floor, collected in a puddle where's standing. With a security guard approaching, she tries to cover it up with newspapers from a stand, putting more and more on the floor, only for it to not do the job. Finally, when the guy is almost on top of her, she feigns knocking over the entire stand and then picking the papers up. The guy looks at her and she just shrugs innocently, like, "Oops." It's not a hilarious moment, but it does help break up the dour tone and isn't something you often see in these movies.

It also feels that the gore and makeup effects that Gary Tunnicliffe and his studio created for Deader were much more hardcore than what was seen in the previous movie. The makeup on Marla, both for when Amy finds her seemingly dead in her apartment and when she appears to her at the subway station, is really hard to look at, with how her flesh looks so gross in its pale, slightly green color, and the milky, glazed over way her eyes look. In fact, when she shows up in the subway station, she looks even worse, as there are nasty

wounds on her face, and her eyes, while looking more alive, come off as more unsettling. In a similar vein, the scene where everyone onboard the subway car becomes a bunch of corpses, or undead, in some cases, is really disgusting, and we see them all murdered in a lot of grisly detail, with hooked chains, ugly wounds, hanging body parts and chunks of meat, and, most disturbing of all, a Cenobite sewing into a woman's neck while she's seemingly still alive! Speaking of which, the gore is also really nasty, and poor Kari Wuhrer had

to be positively drenched in it for the scene in the hotel room where she finds she's been stabbed. The sight of all that blood and the appliance of the knife going through her back and sticking out her front, coupled with her performance, really makes it hard to watch, and her having to use her cabinet door as a way of pulling the knife out is truly painful. She continues bleeding afterward, forcing her to tape up and pad her wound, and even then, blood trails across the ground when she heads out to the

subway station. She shows it to Joey at one point and we get a nice close-up of the blood continuously gushing out of the wound. Besides this, when Amy first boards Joey's car, she sees the sight of a woman, possibly Marla, sitting on a chair while wearing a green poncho, with blood pooling around her feet. Like I said, we also see plenty of ugly wounds on the Deaders, but that's just a prelude to the finale, where Pinhead lays waste to all of them. Winter getting hooked and skewered

by all those chains looks far more painful than it has in the last handful of movies, especially when the chains pull tight, with splashing blood against the wall and close-ups of his skin tugging, before he's pulled apart. The aftermath of that is akin to what was seen onboard the train car, with lots of gore and dismembered body parts, and then, Pinhead skewers all of the Deaders with similar weapons, leaving big, bleeding holes in their torsos.

Unfortunately, the other Cenobites are underutilized even worse here than they were in Hellseeker. In fact, besides Pinhead, the only one who gets to do anything at all is the one you see sewing into that woman's throat on the train car (her design is reminiscent of the Wire Twins from Inferno, don't you think?); otherwise, she and a bunch of other Cenobites are summoned with Pinhead at the end, and they do nothing except stand around. Moreover, the Chatterer (Mike Regan), who also appeared in the previous movie,

doesn't even get a close-up or a single shot all his own, but lingers in the background instead, and the other Cenobites you see here are either recycled wholesale from Hellseeker, like Stitch, or are gender-swapped versions, like a male version of Bound. What especially sucks is that there was one really cool Cenobite, named Spike, who had a huge, jagged spike going straight through the middle of his head, but his scenes were cut. Fortunately, the other Cenobites do get to do more in the next film.

Although the shots of the Deaders with the big, gaping holes in them look as though they were done through an effective marriage of makeup and visual effects, there are a lot of really poor digital effects sprinkled throughout the film. The first are these CGI chains that burst out of the Lament Configuration and ensnare Amy's face when she first solves the box but, fortunately, those are offset by some actual chains used in close-ups when Pinhead first confronts her. As brief and obscured as it is, the effect of Winter hitting the subway train

when Amy sees him jump in front of the subway train still looks janky, and the digital spiders on the wall when Amy scooches through the narrowing corridor, as well as the instances of sudden speed that Winter has when he and Amy first meet, are flat-out awful. But the worst special effects are saved for the climax, when the Cenobites are summoned. The digital shots of the box and electrical sparking when they appear are bad enough, but Winter being pulled apart and the CGI chains that skewer the Deaders are absolutely horrendous, as is the explosion when the Cenobites are banished back to hell.

But as bad some of the film's technical aspects may be, what really sinks Deader is the writing and screenplay. First of all, again, like the last two movies, you're watching your protagonist go on an investigation that causes their life to spiral out of control, as they seeing increasingly horrific images and experience nightmarish scenarios. The details are different, Amy Klein is a more likable and empathetic character than Joseph Thorne or Trevor, and the chain of events don't feel as random as they

did in Hellseeker, but still, for the third time in a row, we've had this same sort of Jacob's Ladder-style detective story dressed up as a Hellraiser film, and it's wearing thin, as well as just getting boring to sit through. Also like those movies, the film tries to bend reality, and even before Amy solves the box or becomes involved with the Deaders, like in how she sees this same dog outside of both Marla's apartment and in the Deaders' hideout, and later runs into the landlord, who now

acts as though he's never met her, even though he let her into the apartment earlier (when he let her in, he didn't seem to smell the nasty odor that Amy did, either), and chases her out. It's akin to that issue with the finger that Thorne finds at the first crime scene in Inferno, even though he shouldn't be finding that stuff, since he hasn't yet fiddled with the Lament Configuration. 

It only gets harder to piece together what's going on during the movie's latter half, when Amy heads into the Deaders' hideout. Following that moment where she gets stuck and is then attacked, she suddenly finds herself out of that tight corridor, and is led to the Deaders' inner chamber, where she meets Winter. After their confrontation, where she, again, flashes back to her father's abuse, she suddenly wakes up to find herself lying on the bed where Katia and others were initiated into the cult, 

and is held down as Winter tries to persuade her to commit suicide so he can bring her back. She then wakes up in her hotel room's bathtub, sees her boots on the floor nearby, and clearly thinks she just hallucinated the whole thing and dozed off in the tub. But after that, she tries to sleep, only to awaken after another dream about her father, and then finds she's been stabbed through the back. This eventually leads her back to Joey's train car, only for her to then see that everyone onboard is

dead, before she runs into Marla. Marla tells her that she's the one who stabbed her, but when did she stab her, exactly? After Amy manages to remove the knife in the bathroom, she remembers when she got attacked while she was stuck, and she also thinks back to the knife she saw at Marla's apartment, so I'm guessing that was real and it happened then. But then, her waking up, then feeling the stab and seeing the blood run down her shoulder and onto the bed suggests it happened there, with Marla having possibly been the one

who took her back to her room. Of course, there's also the possibility that Amy never leaves the Deader hideout once she first enters it, given how, during the climax, she awakens to find herself still laying on the bed like before before, but while the scene with her in the psychiatric ward with Charles is clearly a dream, it's up in the air whether or not everything she experiences after waking up in the bathtub is. And they try to make some connection between the knife that stabbed her and the one she used on her father, but it was lost on me. All I can say is I miss the days when the Hellraiser movies were fairly simple to understand.

The reason why this film is so confusing in its story and concept, as well as its biggest flaw, is because they took a pre-existing script that had its own mythology and tried to apply the Hellraiser mythos on top of it; suffice to say, they don't mesh together at all. In the original Deader script, whose plot and mythology Paul Kane was good enough to summarize in the section on the film in The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy, Winter was not only the leader of the Deaders but also represented

the "Nightworld," or the darkness, where anything is possible; in the final film, however, he's a descendant of the Lemarchand family who, somehow, has the ability to breathe life back into people, and also intends to take control of the Lament Configuration. As Kane says, not only is it unclear how exactly he fits in with the family (he has to be either a previously unmentioned brother of John Merchant or a cousin to Jack), but his motivation is murky, to say the least. While I

speculated that he could be making the Deaders to use as his own personal army for taking down the Cenobites, it's not entirely clear, and he seems to think that, if they succeed, they can indulge in nothing but pleasure from the box, rather than pain. But the biggest mystery is why exactly he needs someone as troubled as Amy to open the box, because he himself can't. No reason for this is ever given, nor for why he needs her to be a Deader when she does it, or why she has to face her demons head on before becoming a Deader. None

of it gels with what's been established in the past, and it comes off as nothing but an overly complicated, contrived reason for Amy to be involved in the climax, and the same goes for how Pinhead becomes involved, despite his clear motivations. It's supposedly because, since she already opened the box, her soul belongs to him, as he says, but it's still so vague. I also don't know what the difference is between her summoning the Cenobites as a Deader and what does happen here,

when she merely tosses the box, causing it to activate. And like Kane says, shouldn't Winter know that opening the box is a really bad idea for anyone, regardless of their intentions? Again, as much as I don't like the idea of these unrelated scripts being turned into Hellraiser movies to begin with, if they were going to do this, Deader was not the one to go with.

When the movie starts up and gets going, you may roll your eyes when you first hear the music by Henning Lohner. While it actually begins with an isolated, melancholic piano piece and some strange atmospheric noises, and the opening scene in the crack den is scored with a subdued string piece, Amy Klein herself has this generic, electronic motif that's kind of reminiscent of some of those smoother sort of tracks heard in Inferno. However, as the score goes on, it not only improves significantly but, when the Lament Configuration and the Cenobites are introduced, Lohner goes for an aesthetic that's very similar to Christopher Young's original pieces, especially in this nice, low string leitmotif for Pinhead, which you hear both when he speaks with Amy after the scene in the bathroom and when he and the other Cenobites are summoned during the climax, where it actually becomes downright sweeping in parts. He even puts in this distant, bell-like sound that's very evocative of that sound which alluded to the Cenobites' presence in the original movie, and also comes up with some effective music for both the more disturbing scenes, like the flashbacks, and the emotional ones involving Amy.

At the end of the day, while it may have more of an edge to it than the previous film, Hellraiser: Deader is another ho-hum, problematic entry in the series. I apologize if this review was messy, but this kind of poor attempt at psychological horror really makes my head hurt. The film does benefit from a likable protagonist and performance by Kari Wuhrer, instances of inspired cinematography, as well as direction and editing, some genuinely well-done scenes, a real sense of nastiness and some truly unsettling imagery and subject matter, another round of good makeup effects, Pinhead having his expected great moments and dialogue, especially during the climax, and an above average music score, but the plot consists of yet another mind-bending, psychological detective story that is often more confusing than it needs to be, and the original script's mythology doesn't meld with that of Hellraiser. On top of that, it has that overall generic look of the previous film, the other Cenobites aside from Pinhead may as well not even been here, the visual effects are truly bad, and the movie is just not entertaining and is quite forgettable. Like I said at the beginning, it may not be the worst Hellraiser, but it's not one likely to linger in the mind, either.