A journalist uncovers an underground group who can bring back the dead and slowly becomes drawn into their world.
The series reaches it’s seventh film and it’s at this point that things take a serious dip. It was bound to happen sooner or later, it was inevitable.
With the success of the past 2 films, albeit in the straight to dvd market, it was no surprise that another instalment would be made. Unfortunately the film doesn’t much of a change in it’s content. It sticks very much to the thriller aspect of the last 2 previous releases but it’s nowhere near as good or ‘thrilling’, in-fact it becomes quite boring and often seems very mismatched with series.
You see the problem is the original script by Neal Marshall Stevens had nothing to do with the “Hellraiser” mytho’s, but when it was decided that this would be a “Hellraiser” sequel, Tim Day drastically re-wrote the script, including an almost entirely new third act and plot and making the character of Winter. Now this had been done before and done wel,l but it was only a matter of time before it wouldn’t work.
In my opinion the series still had a-lot of potential going forward but what I think it needed was a fresh script with the Cenobites in mind, it needed to stop using leftover scripts with major re-writes just to add the characters. I’d love to have seen Clive Barker return to the series and give it a new lease of life, just like when Wes Craven returned to the “Elm Street” series (twice), he knew the character inside out and brought back the Horror factor to his villain.
Speaking of villains, the film doesn’t feature much Cenobite action until the final few minutes of the film and even though I’ve said they’re best used sparingly, I do feel this film did need more action from them. That’s not to take away anything from them, the Cenobites are visually chilling as they should be and, as always, Doug Bradley’s performance of Pinhead is fantastic. Even after all the films so far he still has a great presence on screen and can still bring the chills.
“Hellraiser: Deader” did have a-lot of potential but ultimately it just doesn’t work as a “Hellraiser” film, if it were to have been released as a stand alone film without the re-writes for it’s inclusion to the series then we would have a pretty decent thriller film but ultimately it was just a complete let-down.
Miscellaneous facts about the film:
Filmed back to back with Hellraiser: Hellworld
A couple of the drawings/paintings on the editors office walls are actual works by Clive Barker.
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