Hellraiser: Deader Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		3.5
Audio		3.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		2.5

Hellraiser: Deader Blu-ray Movie Review

Dead End

Reviewed by Michael Reuben April 5, 2013

The Hellraiser films have been steadily losing steam ever since Clive Barker's original, which introduced the iconic demon known as "Pinhead". A fan of my acquaintance maintains that the decline began immediately with the first sequel, Hellbound, when Pinhead talked too much; he was more frightening when he simply appeared and inflicted unimaginable pain. For me, the series sputtered with the third film, Hell on Earth, which expected the viewer to keep a straight face while Pinhead's alter ego, Captain Elliot Spencer, solemnly declaimed about his and Pinhead's "domains". Spirits with clearly defined territories are neither mysterious nor spine-tingling; they're just landlords in dispute.

But no matter at what point one wearied of Pinhead and his Cenobites, Hellraiser had clearly jumped the shark when Miramax's Dimension label (the same folks who brought us the Scream franchise) began merrily writing them into random horror scripts, just to squeeze out a few drops of blood and a couple more shekels from an exhausted franchise. The fifth, sixth and seventh chapters of the series were created in this fashion, the last being Hellraiser: Deader. The film began with an original script by Neal Marshall Stevens a/k/a Benjamin Carr (Thir13en Ghosts) that might have made an intriguingly atmospheric horror film if it had been given a chance. But Dimension handed it off to a former former best boy grip named Tim Day with aspirations to become a writer. By the time Day had finished shoehorning Pinhead and his signature puzzle box into the mix, the result was a confusing mess that never makes sense, despite the efforts of a decent cast, a talented, mostly Romanian crew, and a capable director, Rick Bota, who learned his craft working as a cinematographer on Tales from the Crypt and House on Haunted Hill, among others. They give more value for money than Day's hatchet job deserves.

HR: Deader has a promisingly Se7en-ish opening in a London crack den. A heedless investigative reporter, Amy Klein (Kari Wuhrer), is there collecting material for an exposé. When she shows what she has to her vaguely Mephistophelian editor, Charles (Simon Kunz), he tells her to put it aside and plays her a videotape he's been sent from Bucharest. The tape appears to show a young woman willingly committing suicide so that she can be resurrected by a guru named Winter (Paul Rhys). It's the most concrete evidence seen to date of a rumored cult known as "deaders". Charles dispatches Amy to Bucharest to investigate.

When Amy finds the apartment where the videotape was shot, it reeks of death and decay. Empty except for a corpse, the apartment contains numerous indications that Winter and his followers have been there. It also holds one of the puzzle boxes (known in the Hellraiser mythology as a "Lermarchand box" after its toymaker-designer) that is the key to summoning Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and the Cenobites.

From this point on, HR: Deader is little more than a series of spooky encounters with ghostly figures and paranormal phenomena that are increasingly terrifying (for Amy) and bewildering (for us). The patchwork script leans heavily on the tired device of ending a nightmarish situation by having Amy wake up screaming in a place of apparent safety that we know, with the certainty of dream-within-a-dream logic, will shortly turn sinister. Even Joey (Marc Warren), the anti-Winter cult leader from whom Amy seeks assistance, probably isn't what he seems. How can you trust someone who lives in the last car of a Romanian subway train with the windows all covered, surrounding by quivering naked flesh, self-mutilated bodies, heavy drug use and art that seems alive? As Joey eventually tells Amy, they share the same problem, which is that they never know when to quit. (Joey's wording is more colorful.)

One can see in HR: Deader the outlines of Stevens' original story, which must have involved an effort by Winters to draw Amy into his circle and her struggle to resist. With Bota's direction and the moody photography and production design, that movie might have been genuinely creepy. But the effort to work the Pinhead mythology into the mix is so obviously labored that any illusion is destroyed. Winter is said to a "descendant" of Lemarchand and therefore the puzzle box's rightful owner, but for some reason he needs Amy to open it. (Why? Beats me.)

Some sort of battle is being waged between Winter and Pinhead for control of Pinhead's "domain" (there's that word again), but how Winter hopes to gain control of hell is unclear (yes, hell; isn't that supposed to be Pinhead's "domain"?). Whatever the outcome, it appears that Amy will be the loser. She can either be Pinhead's creature or Winter's. Then again, the final dream sequence before the big showdown suggests a strange form of "escape" in which a younger version of Amy executes her older self. These are the options?

Still, it's a Hellraiser film. Fans will wait a long time if they can be certain that eventually Pinhead will appear and rip people apart with chains. Rest assured that he does. It's just that now he feels like a guest performer crashing someone else's gig. Wait a second—wasn't Amy sent to Budapest so that she could figure out how Winter was managing to resurrect people in the first place? And didn't Pinhead say he has nothing to do with that part of the story?

Oh, never mind.

Hellraiser: Deader Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

In the extras, director Bota discusses the cinematography of Hellraiser: Deader, which was shot by Romanian cinematographer Vivi Dragan Vasile in a dark and atmospheric style that is well represented on Echo Bridge's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray. Vasile's generally cold palette is dominated by blues, greys and whites, and his blacks are deep and solid. Sterile environments like the Bucharest subway have the appearance of a morgue, and messy ones like the crackhouse in the opening, the deader apartment and Joey's subway car resemble a charnel house. Because the image is dark, detail doesn't "pop" off the screen, but it's good, if you look closely, even in shadowed areas (assuming they haven't been deliberately cast into darkness). There's a visible grain pattern, and although the image is somewhat soft, it doesn't appear that any detail has been stripped.

Echo Bridge has mastered the 88-minute film on a BD-50 to accommodate the extras, but they haven't taken full advantage of the space. The bitrate is 21.12 Mbps, which is adequate but nothing special, and there is substantial unused space on the disc. Why pay for the larger capacity if you're not going to use it? Still, compression artifacts were not in evidence.

Hellraiser: Deader Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The DTS-HD MA 5.1 soundtrack provides a functionally atmospheric mix with such classically disturbing effects as dripping water, flies buzzing and voices murmuring for an appropriate sense of unease. Still, the soundtrack's most effective moments are the old-fashioned cuts from the tense and noisy climax of a scary scene to the relative quiet of "awakening" in a safe place. The sound mix does this so often that it gets old (but then again, so does the script). Pinhead's grand guignol finale has suitable icky sound effects to match its onscreen gore. Heinrich Lohner, who did BloodRayne the same year, provided the score, which occasionally quotes the original Hellraiser score by Christopher Young.

For some reason, Echo Bridge has included a DTS-HD MA 2.0 stereo track as well. I can't imagine why anyone would select it.

Hellraiser: Deader Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

In a rare departure for Echo Bridge, the Blu-ray of Hellraiser: Deader includes an array of special features. It does not, however, contain either of the commentaries included on the 2005 Disney DVD, or the commentary on the deleted scenes. There are also reports of a short film called "No More Souls", which was a hidden feature on the earlier DVD. If it's hidden on the Blu-ray, I could not find it.

• Behind the Visual Effects (480i; 1.78:1, non-enhanced; 7:00): Visual effects supervisor Jamison Goei describes how various effects were achieved, with emphasis on the film's finale.



• Deleted/Extended Scenes (480i; 1.78:1, non-enhanced; 25:46): The scenes are not listed separately. The titles and descriptions below are from the Blu-ray but have been edited to remove spoilers.
• Untitled (Marla's tape)
• "I Can't Come Home"—Amy talks to Charles on phone
• "Angel, Devil"—Meeting Joey in the Train
• "Cab Ride"—Getting in Cab to meet deaders
• "Only Nightmares Last Forever"—Pinhead confronting Amy
• "Fear Is Where We Go to Learn"—Amy and Marla at Train Yard
• "My Psychotic Episode"—Amy and Charles
• "The Final Step"—Amy in hall
• "We Belong to It"—Pinhead berating Winter
• "Sweetness of Suffering"—Crazy Cenobites
• "Amy Walking to the Station"—One for the DP



• Gag Reel (480i; 1.78:1, non-enhanced; 0:59): After this film, watching Doug Bradley break character as Pinhead is a perfect antidote.



• Location Scouting (480i; 1.78:1, non-enhanced; 11:32): In the "Making of" featurette, Bota describes how he blocked key sequences using stand-ins and his video camera. This extra places the edited video footage side-by-side with the finished film in separate windows.



• Making of Hellraiser: Deader (480i; 1.33:1; 17:09): This better-than-average documentary is dominated by director Bota and star Wuhrer, but it also features substantial footage shot on set and on location.



• Practical Effects with Gary Tuncliffe (480i; 1.33:1; 1:26): The film's practical effects supervisor describes creating Pinhead's chains.



• Storyboard Comparisons (480i; 1.33:1; 11:42): Storyboards with the finished sequence inset at the bottom.
• Untitled (subway station)
• Hospital Flashback
• Finding Marla

Hellraiser: Deader Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Hellraiser: Deader is neither fish nor fowl. It's not enough of a Hellraiser film to satisfy the hardcore fans, and it has to make too many concessions to the Pinhead crowd to create a genre picture with any semblance of integrity. It's a sad comment that such cut-rate material has received so much care and attention from the talent involved and especially ironic that Echo Bridge appears to have treated it better than more deserving titles I've recently reviewed. It's a decent Blu-ray, but I can't recommend it.