Streaming Screamers #1.7: Hellraiser 7: Deader

Hellraiser 7: Deader


This one is from 2005, when filming low budget horror movies in eastern Europe was all the rage. (See: Seed of Chucky, Man With the Screaming Brain, The Cave, etc.) This time the star of our show is a British undercover journalist sent to check out a resurrection cult (The Deaders) in Romania. She finds the box in the hand of a corpse along with a video tape full with instructions. Then maybe she falls asleep and dreams she opens the box, or maybe she opens the box. Either way, she wakes up to start a brand new day and a trip down the rabbit hole.

First up: follow the tape's instructions. That part is neat because she has to go see this guy Joey that lives in a party train. Yes, you read that right, PARTY TRAIN. The last car of a train in the Romanian subway (as long as a full train on the inside) full of drunks, junkies, gypsies, artists, and lots of people having all different kinds of lovin'. Joey reluctantly gives our journalist the Deaders' home address.

The Deaders live in a place that's mostly made of catacombs except for the windowed office of the cult leader Winter. He makes a vague allusion to being part of the Merchant family. I don't know where that puts him in the bloodline between artist Merchant and spaceman Merchant, but I bet they weren't thinking too much about that. Actually, I'm pretty sure they weren't, because IMBD.com confirmed my suspicion that this wasn't even written as a Hellraiser movie, and they threw the cenobites and box and stuff in later.

The rest of the thing is a bunch of hallucinations about the journalist's violent and incestuous childhood, a sucking chest wound, a Romanian insane asylum, and some sort of war between Pinhead and Winter Merchant.

Over all, this one wasn't so bad. Clearly not a Hellraiser storyline, but there's a good amount of decadence, depravity, and gore. I also learned how one can pull a knife out of one's back.  I give it 2 brains out of 5 -- watch it once for the gore and creepy Romania scenery.

Streaming Screamers #1.56: Hellraiser 5 & 6

Warning: As usual, these reviews are SPOILERific.

First up,  Hellraiser 5: Inferno

Really, the trailer is all you need to see.

This is a cop story. A not very exciting cop story, until the cop starts losing his mind. Then it's not exactly exciting but at least surreal. People he's close to start turning up dead and he sees cenobites. At one point he goes to a body piercing place to shake a guy down for information, because it might be Hellraiser-y to show extreme lifestyles, but at this point the 90's were over, and we've all seen enough body piercing and modern primitive stuff.

The cenobite that gets the most play is just arms and a head that's had its lips removed. Apparently every cenobite that's had its lips removed must chatter. It's either some kind of rule, or your lips keep you warm in hell.

Anyway, it turns into a Groundhog Day loop scenario, and then they reveal that he opened the box before all of this started. It's the equivalent of "It was all a dream." Super lame.

 Moving on...

Hellraiser 6: Hellseeker

This one is basically 5:Inferno, except that the guy is a businessman played by Dean Winters (better known as Mayhem in the Allstate commercials), and he's married to Kirsty. Yup, it's the actual Kirsty. Did she sign a bad contract? Did she really need the money? Did they simply talk her into it? I wonder. She still looks good though.

Our main character, who I will call Mayhem, because that's how I'd rather think of Dean Winters, wants his wife out of the way because he's banging every other chick he can get his hands on and there might be an inheritance. Mayhem acquires the box and gives it to Kirsty as an anniversary present, she gets pissed off and opens it, and bing-bang-boom he spends the whole movie in a hell dream. That last bit is revealed at the end, so this is a huge spoiler, but trust me, I'm doing you a favor here.

I will say that the place where Mayhem acquires the box is like Hell's Kitchen, old school Chinatown, the docks, and a creepy sub-basement all rolled into one. Whatever city he's in (I think it's one in Canada) has the worst and awesomist bad neighborhood ever.

Together, I give these movies one brain out of five. They're awful.  Watch them if you're a completist, or just skip them entirely.