42. "Hellraiser: Deader" (2005, Bota)
By Eivind Langdal
27th January 2010

So, apparently, “deader” is not a poorly constructed adjective, but a noun. I did not know that. Does this mean the horror genre can actually be educational? In this, the seventh installment of the Hellraiser saga, that word is used to describe members of an underground cult that specializes in bringing people back to life. Why would they do that? I honestly don’t know. The movie is awkwardly confusing, which is a shame, because it starts out as the scariest sequel yet of Clive Barker’s 1987 original. Oh yes, the film is actually scary, and not just in one scene, but in two. Both scenes feature the main character searching for leads in her news report in extremely underexposed locations. Had the movie stayed at that simple path, it might actually have been good.

Unfortunately, the plot is hard to make sense of, even though it never really is very complex. It didn’t surprise me to learn that the first draft actually had nothing to do with the Hellraiser saga. This is a standard horror film, and as with the two previous outings, Inferno and Hellseeker, Pinhead himself only appears briefly. In Inferno, I didn’t mind that approach, as the anticipation of Pinhead’s inevitable arrival gave the film a strange sense of dread. In Hellseeker, it didn’t work as well, but it was more effective than it was in Deader, where he feels like an afterthought. The last thing Pinhead should feel like is an afterthought.

Here’s the plot: journalist Amy Klein (who looks like Ashley Judd and is therefore extremely hot) has gotten hold of a tape of the aforementioned Deaders. The tape shows a young girl kill herself with a revolver, only to be resurrected by some freaky black haired dude. The tape, which is filmed with a handheld camera, has a lot of cuts between lots of different camera angles. Does that mean that the gal who filmed the ordeal ran around the room and immortalized the séance from every angle possible? Or were there a second and a third camera operator, like in a real movie, that happened to not once get caught on tape? Did someone take the time to edit the thing? Oh, never mind logic. That fellow must have been killed in an earlier installment.

I’ve said it before and I say it again: it’s hard to be engaged in a movie when it requires you to suspend more disbelief than a religious person. Luckily, the aforementioned scene is just a minor detail. The sad part is that the movie has a lot of those minor details. A lot. For instance, there’s a scene later where a guy jumps in front of a train, which seemingly kills him and leaves his body parts all over the place. Care to take a guess if he’s still there when the police go looking for him? I’ll spoil it for you: he isn’t, because apparently that wouldn’t be scary. Here’s a tip to the filmmakers: there’s something else that isn’t scary, and that is age-old clichés that make you roll your eyes so often they’re going to end up getting stuck inside your head. If they learned that, they might have been able to make a film that didn’t - for the lack of a better phrase - sucks.