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.
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