#hellraiser vii

I'm going to be honest, I actually kind of wanted to like this one. The beginning set-up seemed interesting: a reporter receives a lead about a cult of resurrectionists from a video depicting a ritual suicide. And to a degree, I'll admit, this one pulls off the reporter angle considerably better than Hell on Earth (why do I keep trash-talking that one when Inferno exists? Who knows, not me).

The investigation takes her to Romania, inhabited entirely by English speakers, of course, where the intrigue kicks up. Our reporter searches the apartment of one of her leads where she discovers a video tape and a curious box. This tape gives us another lead to investigate further, and a warning to not open the Box. The Caligula Effect kicks in and I get to make a joke I've repressed since Bloodline.

What does the Lemarchand Box have in common with this Cube?

Both can be solved in two moves.

Lame joke. Don't care. I'm annoyed that no effort is spent showing the Box being opened. Obviously Hellraiser and the sequel put a bit of effort in depicting the thing being solved. And yes, I get it, the props used aren't exactly designed as functioning puzzles and therefore don't really work as functioning puzzles and therefore can't be acted with as though they are functioning puzzles. However, I could spray paint a Square One- or any other shape-shifting cube puzzle for that matter- gold and produce a slightly more interesting prop.

It bothers me, okay??

Anyway, we are lead to a cool BDSM train which gives us the information we need to discover the whereabouts of our Resurrectionist Cult.

Then the movie begins to annoy me.

The investigative reporter plot was cool. Now we spend the rest of the movie with our lead going insane because she's been murdered and brought back, but because she opened the Box, her soul can't be claimed by the villain because it belongs to the nail-headed Hell Priest because of the aforementioned Box Opening.

So we instead jump around constantly as she is driven crazy by her past or something. Turns out she murdered her father when she was younger because he did the thing that caused Kathy Bates to push her husband down a well in Dolores Claiborne.

There's a nifty bit in an Asylum involving a young girl drawing a really cool creepy drawing which I was too lazy to screen grab for this post. Otherwise, we randomly wake up, back safely in the custody of the murder cult.

The Box is opened again and we have apparently a reveal that our villain Winters is a descendent of Philip Lemarchand. This adds nothing to the stakes, except explains why our villain is so weird about the Lemarchand Box.

Because this movie again plays really, really loose with what constitutes the Cenobites' domain of Hell, our reporter committing Death by Knifey-Stabby does not earn her a one-way to Hell. The movie actually treats her suicide as the winning move, a defeat of the Cenobites because her soul is still hers, or something. I guess it's a slightly less painful death, at any rate, than the one she would have suffered via Enhookening.

I'm actually a bit pissed off with this one, because there was actually a good Hellraiser movie in here somewhere. The beginning is solid, the deaths are cool. Doug Bradley gets to be weird and hammy (I am The Way!).

Maybe it's the editing, the decision to film all the flashback scenes in black and white. Actually, I should have foreseen annoyance at the very beginning: anyone have a decent explanation for the obsessive number of cuts during the Deader video segment?

You know what? I liked it more than the previous two. That's a low bar, it was better than either Inferno or Hellseeker.

So, Hellworld's next:

My ★★★ review of Hellraiser: Deader on Letterboxd

Hellraiser: Deader – Review

The Hellraiser franchise has firmly found its new home on DVD and the quality continues to suffer, although not as beautifully as Pinhead would like. Hellraiser: Deader started life as an unrelated spec script by Neil Marshall Stevens, also titled Deader, which was rewritten by Tim Day to shoehorn in any relation to the series. Day, to his credit wanted to write a direct sequel to Hellseekerwhich…