Expanded Look: Hellraiser: Deader (2005)

Hellraiser: Deader is the 7th entry into the family and was direct to video.  It stars Kari Wuhrer (from MTV's Remote Control) and Doug Bradley returns as Pinhead for his now standard 5-6 minutes of screen time.  Rick Bota directed this, the second of three Hellraisers he led (Hellseeker / Deader / Hellworld).
'R' rating is for violence, language, nudity, and sexuality.
Deader, like Hellseeker, took a non-Hellraiser related script that Dimension Films already owned, and the screenwriter just wove in the Hellraiser elements.  It was filmed in Romania.
**spoiler alert**
Amy Klein (Wuhrer) is in an investigative journalist who is sent to Bucharest, Romania, to look into a cult of people called Deaders who allegedly kill themselves but are then resurrected by their leader named Winter (Paul Rhys).  Amy got onto the story from watching a videotape sent to her paper from a girl named Marla who was a Deader.  Winter, we learn, is a descendant of LeMarchand, the creator of the original puzzle box.  It seems Winter wants to open the puzzle box, so he can "rule the hell dimension", but he cannot open the box himself.  So he seeks out vulnerable people, and from what I can gather, basically convinces each one to kill him/herself with the rest of the cult looking on and then resurrects them so that they will be subservient to him, hoping that one will be able open the puzzle box for him.  However, he obviously has been unsuccessful to this point getting someone to open the box.
Amy finds Marla's apartment, but discovers Marla, apparently dead and clutching the puzzle box.  Amy takes the puzzle box, returns to her hotel and opens it; Pinhead appears and warns her she is danger, but that is it.  She continues her investigation and comes across the Deaders, but it quickly seems that she is in the "possibly awake, possibly dreaming, or possibly in hell" fugue state.  Just as she is about to be assaulted by Winter, Amy "wakes up" in her hotel room, but then finds she has been stabbed severely in the back - knife still buried to the hilt, yet she is still alive. 
She seems to hallucinate through a few more sequences - visiting a group of nihilists living on a train, memories of her abusive childhood, seeing Marla, then ending up in the psych ward in Romania - until finally, she is "awake" and back with the Deaders, again, if she ever really left.  The puzzle box opens, Pinhead appears and informs Winter of his obvious ignorance, that he could never have any power in the Cenobite realm.  Winter and the Deaders are torn apart by the Cenobites, while Amy chooses to kill herself rather than be taken to hell.

Positives: The visuals for this film were excellent: it very much had the feel of a nihilistic-Euro horror film.  There is something about Romania that just lends itself to the horror genre.  The atmosphere was creepy at the keys moments, the tension rose and fell at a good pace, plus the gore/ splatter was not over or under used.  The score provided appropriate background in the scenes.
Kari Wuhrer was a very pleasant surprise as Amy.  Looking at her resume you see a bunch of B and C movie credits, with plenty of small TV roles, so it was nice to see her pull off a strong-willed journalist, but with a good mix of fear and emotion at the right moments.  Her character alone made this worth seeing.
 
Negatives: While I am normally a fan of the distorted perception and the breakdown of reality (where the audience cannot tell if someone is awake, dreaming, in another dimension, etc...) it did not work as well as it could have for Deader.  This element has been used many times in the Hellraiser movies, but for some reason it just felt a little disjointed to me because just as the tension was spiking Amy would then suddenly "wake up", again.
Pinhead and the Cenobites were grossly underused, especially considering the film chose to use the element that Winter is a LeMarchand, from the prior mythology.  If his desire was to get to or be in the hell realm, I think we could have/ should have been shown a little more.  That being said I am still glad the story did not get comically ignorant trying to spoon feed us a sorry attempt at expanding the Bloodline story arc.
I am slightly unclear at the conclusion implying that Amy, by killing herself, was escaping hell.  I guess my impression was either she should have been in hell already, or to escape she would have had to bargain her way out (a la Kirsty).  But, that is a minor detail.

Recommendation: Worth seeing, in my opinion, for the visuals and Wuhrer's performance.  Like Inferno and Hellseeker it plays out more like a psyhological thriller, but Deader ups the proverbial ante a bit with a little more splatter.  It stands alone - you will not need any exposure to any prior Hellraiser films to see this.  The Cenobites are basically an afterthought, so do not expect much participation from them.