Kari Wuhrer

(In French, On Cable TV, January 2021) There are now ten films in the Hellraiser canon and Hellraiser: Deader is the seventh of them. As luck had it, French-Canadian horror channel Frissons TV had itself a merry little Hellraiser marathon from the first to the seventh instalment, and now that I’ve caught up with my DVR recordings, I have no intention of seeking out the later ones. To be entirely fair, Deader is not a completely terrible film. It has a few scattered ideas, some visual sense within the limits of its low budget and Kari Wuhrer in the lead as a journalist investigating a mysterious sect videotaped reviving someone from the dead. Originally written as an original script only to be retooled into a direct-to-video Hellraiser sequel, Deader shares far too many characteristics with the other members of the fifth-to-seventh instalments of the series. It has a halfway-promising premise half-heartedly retrofitted into the Hellraiser mythos (making the Cenobites irrelevant, and whatever “rules” the first instalments offered completely discarded), with some down-and-dirty low-budget visual style and lead characters that could have led to something better if anyone had been paying attention. Deader is branded as a “Stan Winston production,” but aside from a mildly effective scene in which the protagonist has to contend with a knife piercing her through the chest (somehow a survivable injury!), there’s not much here to do justice to the special effects legend. Like its previous two brethren, Deader does not scrape the bottom of the barrel in terms of horror movies, but it’s still not that good and could have been better if not branded with the Hellraiser title—although, frankly, the entire series (now that I’m stopping at seven instalments) has specialized in wasting its opportunities. In retrospect, even the first film makes promises that it, let alone its sequels, never came close to fulfilling: there is something in its BDSM union of sex and violence that could have been profoundly unnerving but seems almost consciously toned down, either by the filmmakers’ incompetence, insufficient means, lack of audacity or a simple poor misconception of the potential they were handed. We’re left with half-formed ideas, bad special effects, no continuity of vision and what’s perhaps the biggest belly flop of the 1980s horror franchises. I was pleasantly surprised to see that the series still didn’t completely autodestruct by the fifth instalment, but I was going with very low expectations from the get-go.