|
HELLRAISER: DEADER (2005)
Augh! Worst one yet! I'll concede this: Kari Wuhrer is something of a treasure in this genre. She can act, looks great, and is fearlessly willing to get naked even when it's not supposed to make her look sexy. But she can't save this, which is as silly as part 3, as bereft of good ideas as part 4 and even more lacking in true Hellraiser elements than the last two. Wuhrer plays an investigative reporter ("How To Be A Crack Whore") whose editor (Simon Kunz) shows her a sinister video of goth kids committing suicide and being resurrected. My bullshit detector was going off; this is an edited tape, shot by multiple cameras, and is hardly worthy of investigation, being about as remarkable as watching a David Blaine trick on TV. But hers doesn't, so she goes out to Romania to investigate anyway. I was not in the least bit surprised to find out that this seventh Hellraiser movie started on the page as not a Hellraiser movie at all (from my notes: "This has to have started as a non-HR project."). Little of the plot depends on cenobites or the puzzle box (which by now seems so easy to open it might as well come with instructions), and one character is peripherally tied into the Hellraiser mythos just for an excuse to bring in Pinhead and a few of his most unremarkable friends. Instead the story flogs out a standard assortment of hallucinations and public outbursts, though the fact that Wuhrer has to go through almost half the movie bleeding heavily from having been impaled is a nice touch, and the scene where she crawls down an ever-tightening corridor was a little chilly (hardly needed the CGI beetles). It wouldn't be much of a movie if Wuhrer didn't eventually find these "deaders" (and a suicide victim who does a lousy job of lying still - should've taken some lessons from that Saw guy!); and it turns out they've all kept right on bleeding, days or weeks later after their temporary suicides, making for some really disgusting people who don't change their clothes. Director Rick Bota makes some questionable decisions (beyond, say, agreeing to direct), like how the music swells ominously when the camera pans by a big kitchen knife on a kitchen counter, though that's got to be the least ominous place you could possibly find a big kitchen knife. And horror of horrors...yes, Wuhrer is The Chosen One. Curse that chosen-one shit. It was already the worst Hellraiser movie that's actually been made, now it's probably the worst Hellraiser movie that ever will. Count how many times Pinhead makes reference to "my domain!" in his deep evil Pinhead voice, two words and a voice I thought would've had the kibosh put on them when Big Gay Satan started saying it. Guess if he has dialogue like "You opened the box - now you must pay the price!" Oh, and...does the movie end with him, denied his prize, crying out "Noooooooooooooo!!!!!" as he's cast back to the pit? I can't tell you that. That'd be a spoiler. (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE H's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |