Hellraiser: Deader (2005)

There's an unwritten rule in horror cinema that says: you know you're in trouble once they stop numbering the sequels to originally successful genre classics. This is the seventh installment in the Hellraiser franchise and yet they already stopped giving them numbers since "Hellraiser (4): Bloodline". And can you guess where exactly it started to go wrong with the series?? Oh well...the good thing about these Hellraiser movies is that, no matter how mediocre the stories are, there are always some remotely interesting elements in them to satisfy horror lovers. In this seventh entry those elements are the presence of Kari Wuhrer, some sinister settings and really a lot of gore. Wuhrer stars as a chain-smoking, hard ass journalist who's sent to Bukarest to investigate the bloody rites of an underground cult. The leader seems to have a talent to bring recently deceased persons back to life and he promises his followers a world of pleasure once they returned from death. What he really looks for, however, is the one person who's able to open the mysterious puzzle box in his possession. As you can guess, our female journalist is that chosen person and she'll have to fight both the leader of the cult and Pinhead; the ruler of hell. The actual plot of "Deader" definitely shows potential, but it's confusing and it tries to be overly intelligent. Pinhead's share in the story is limited, as it already was in the previous two sequels, and he seems dragged into it simply because it wouldn't sell otherwise. The sequences inside the Romanian subway-trains are nice to look at and there's a lot of gruesome butchering going on. Kari Wuhrer is a talented and beautiful actress but she starred in too many dire, straight-to-video horror productions already. Apart from this failure, she also appeared in two sequels of "The Prophecy", a turkey called "Final Examination" and in the belated sequel to "The Hitcher". Even the bigger productions she starred in recently ("King of the Ants", "Eight Legged Freaks") were disappointments. We have another Rick Bota sequel coming up, namely "Hellworld".