Main cast: Kari Wuhrer (Amy Klein), Paul Rhys (Winter), Simon Kunz (Charles), Marc Warren (Joey), Georgina Rylance (Marla), and Doug Bradley (Pinhead)
Director: Rick Bota
Oh god, Hellraiser: Deader. Yet another Hellraiser movie dragged kicking and screaming out of some discarded script commissioned by Bob Weinstein, with Pinhead and his Cenobite crew sprinkled in like stale croutons on a salad no one ordered. It’s got the Hellraiser logo slapped on it, but don’t be fooled. This is about as Hellraiser-y as a Halloween costume bought on November 1st.
The plot—or what passes for it—follows Amy Klein, a reporter sent to Bucharest to investigate a cult called the Deaders, who apparently moonlight as amateur necromancers. As she digs deeper, she unearths the cult leader’s connection to the Lament Configuration and promptly spirals into a mess of supernatural horror, unresolved childhood trauma, and drug-induced hallucinations. Speaking of hallucinations, brace yourself for a flood of flashbacks and trippy scenes that serve no purpose other than to pad the runtime. You’ll be checking your watch more often than you’ll be checking for Cenobites.
This could’ve been a decent supernatural thriller with a sprinkle of cosmic horror if it hadn’t been shoehorned into the Hellraiser franchise like an ill-fitting corset. Pinhead? Where is he? Did they pay Doug Bradley in pizza to show up for one afternoon and read his lines between slices? His presence is so fleeting you’d think he had a scheduling conflict with literally anything else.
Kari Wuhrer, bless her, tries to elevate the material as the troubled, drug-addicted reporter with enough childhood baggage to make Sigmund Freud salivate. But alas, the film isn’t scary. Not even a little bit.
The real horror here is that this movie isn’t Hellraiser, not even in spirit. The Cenobites, once the elegant ambassadors of pain and pleasure, are reduced to generic “Boo!” monsters who pop up occasionally just to remind you this is technically a Hellraiser movie.
Now let’s talk about the Weinstein brothers, those paragons of cinematic desecration. They’ve taken Clive Barker’s nightmarish brainchild and run it into the ground faster than you can say “Lament Configuration”. Their idea of a Hellraiser movie is to grab any half-baked supernatural script lying around, throw some Cenobites at it, and call it a day.
Oh, and the production values are about as polished as a high school play. The limited set pieces and dim lighting make this film feel more like a fever dream you’d rather wake up from. Dead is right—this movie is deader than roadkill on a summer day.
You want to like this movie. It flirts with some interesting ideas—the cult, the protagonist’s inner demons—but nothing ever comes together. The whole experience is one long, dull slog, leaving you to marvel not at the horror, but at your own ability to stay conscious through it all. It’s almost as if the Weinsteins set out to create their own version of hell—not with hooks and chains, but with mind-numbing boredom and the slow, painful death of a once-great franchise.
