Hellraiser: Deader is like Hellraiser: Inferno minus the cliches, plus decent characters and an original story. It’s essentially a hero’s journey set in a hedonistic, deprived underworld with the Faustian undertones that are most prevalent in the Hellraiser franchise. Its production value, dialogue and performances prevent it from being anything on par with the original but out of all the Hellraisers I’ve seen so far, Deader is one of the good ones.

Newspaper reporter Amy Klein (Kari Wuhrer) is deployed to Romania to investigate the origin of a video tape that depicts the murder and resurrection of a young woman. She discovers that the tape was made by a cult who refer to themselves as ‘Deaders,’ people who apparently have the means to achieve immortality.

What I Was Expecting

I’m embarrassed to confess here, in the first of my Hellraiser reviews to use the ‘What I Was Expecting’ and ‘What I Got’ format from my Friday The 13^th coverage, that I had little to no expectations of Deader.

I was pretty sure the protagonist was a woman but apart from that, I went into Deader totally blind. I was just hoping it was better than Hellseeker and not as silly as its title.

What I Got

Deader, like Inferno, was another pleasant surprise. Better than Inferno in fact. Our protagonist is more interesting for one thing. She’s not a corrupt cop or a specific stereotype. Amy is a journalist who specialises in stories about drug addicts and delinquents. She smokes and has self-destructive tendencies but not without a clear reason. Her history is more intriguing in that it has strong thematic relevance and is revealed bit by bit as she progresses through the plot, leaving you unsure of her and often speculating.

The setting is very distinct. No English houses, no big American cities, just the cold criminal underworld of Bucharest. For that quality alone, Deader sticks out.

Pinhead is truer to himself in the original than he was in Inferno. He’s less an antagonist and more an anti-hero as the film’s real villains are the Deaders. We learn that the cult aims to open the lament configuration so that they can conquer the cenobite dimension and becomes its rulers. However, they believe that only an individual with little faith and a nihilistic outlook can actually open the box. While this reasoning may be a little silly, it does give Amy a lot of dramatic influence in the plot as she fits the cult’s criteria for the ‘Chosen One’. Hence Pinhead needs her help. He needs her to open the box so that he and the cenobites can get to the cult first and destroy them, protecting their dimension. This is pretty decent stuff.

Some of the dialogue is a little too on the nose and a lot of the makeup effects are cheap looking but dramatically, out of all the sequels I’ve seen so far, I think Deader maintains the balance of respecting the original’s mythology and telling a new story best. It’s still a straight-to-video sequel but it’s a straight-to-video sequel that really, really tries.

I give Hellraiser: Deader a strong 7 out of 10.

Not long now!