41. "Hellraiser: Hellseeker" (2002, Bota)
By Eivind Langdal
27th January 2010

There is a scene in Hellraiser: Hellseeker where the main character, a guy named Trevor, rides in a bus when a rather large man starts playing heavy metal music on a ghetto blaster. Finding the volume to be unnecessarily high, Trevor kindly asks the man to turn it down. All he gets back is a cold (and almost deadly) stare. Had this been any other film, Trevor would have stood up, quietly walked over to the large man, and then showed him that he was the guy to be feared, either by using advanced martial arts to take him down, or by giving him a monologue that is supposed to achieve in a verbal manner what the martial arts would do physically. In fact, this kind of scene is so commonly used in action films to establish exactly how dangerous a character is that it’s a wonder it doesn’t have its own moniker.

But Trevor doesn’t do anything to the man. Instead, he quietly leans back and tries to ignore the loud music. I found that oddly refreshing. Instead of establishing Trevor as a character you don’t want to mess around with, it is rather the film that messes around with him. He is the antithesis of the characters that Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger played in the 80s and 90s. With this little moment, the film underlines the chief difference between protagonists in action and horror films. In the action genre, the main character is always superior to his enemies in everything but number. In the horror genre, the main character is rarely superior to anyone. In the action genre, the main character almost always wins. In the horror genre, it might go both ways. When your movie is named Hellraiser, the chance of survival is about fifty-fifty.

This is the sixth entry in the series, which began in 1987 with a superb film created by Clive Barker and continued with a couple of hit-and-miss sequels, including the underwhelming second installment, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, the ridiculous third one, Hellraiser: Hell on Earth (which saw one of the villains being equipped with the ability to throw CDs), the complex Hellraiser: Bloodline (which was both a prequel and a sequel) and the fifth entry, Hellraiser: Inferno (which shifted the series’ focus from physical to psychological terror). Throughout the series, the only real red thread is the mysterious box called the Lament Configuration, and the iconic villain of the series, Pinhead (always played by the reliable Doug Bradley).

It is understandable why Pinhead is the only character to appear in all films. It would be foolish to try to replace him with anyone else. But what I never understood was why the main character of the first film, the young Kirsty Cotton (played by Ashley Laurence), vanished after the third film (where she was only spotted briefly in a video recording). So you can imagine how pleasantly surprised I was when I learned she was going to be in this film. In fact, she is in it from the first scene, which sees her and the aforementioned Trevor (her husband), drive on the countryside, clearly having a good time (I was also pleasantly surprised to see that Trevor was played by Dean Winters, a very talented actor best known for his portrayal of prisoner Ryan O’Reily in the HBO series Oz).

However, the pleasant emotions vanished quickly (both for me and the characters), as Trevor and Kirsty avoids a car crash (filmed in a manner so effective it saw my back become quite well acquainted with the pillow that it was resting on) only to plunge head first into a river. Trevor manages to get out of the car and get to the surface, but when he swims down again, the door to the car has been locked, and Kirsty has been trapped inside. Then, he wakes up in a hospital, where, apparently, quite some time has passed. He is visited by a police detective who seems rather suspicious of Trevor’s explanation of the accident. It doesn’t take long before Trevor realizes that he is suspected of having killed Kirsty. The problem is, though: her body can’t be found, and Trevor can’t remember much.

Trevor is haunted by odd visions, and he starts to trust his sanity less and less when everything around him makes less sense by the minute. One particular scene (which I liked a lot), sees him getting down in a game of hot lovemaking in his apartment with his boss from work, only for him to reject her and leaving her so disappointed that she leaves (but not before assuring him that the raise he had hoped for is something he is not going to get). The entire séance is shot by a movie camera, but when Trevor views the footage (which is shown live on a TV screen), it still shows him and his boss having sex. He moves his hand in front of the camera, and it too shows up on the screen. But when he looks at the chair where they are supposed to still be having sex, he sees nothing. When he looks back at the screen, it sees his boss getting strangled by Cenobites, and there is nothing he can do about it.

Eventually, Trevor starts remembering more about his past, but at the same time, his life starts going more and more down the drain, and soon enough, Pinhead himself appears in his visions (in a scene that, for the first time in the series, subtly acknowledges that he looks like every acupuncturist’s dream). Ultimately, Trevor has to stand face to face with him in a climax that is like a bad combination of the first film and the interesting Hellraiser: Inferno. The scene itself (which I won’t spoil the details of) is heavy on the exposition, but few of the revelations feel really significant, as just about all of them has had their arrival signposted (the film has spent the entire running time making it pretty clear that it is hurdling down the road to a twist).

Ultimately, Hellraiser: Hellseeker is a disappointing effort, even though it tries to make some connections with the first film, specifically with the appearance of Kirsty (who doesn’t appear much) and with the fact that, once again, it is not the Cenobites that are the villains, but the humans. But it is never really as chilling and scary as it thinks it is, and at one point, it becomes pretty clear how low the budget is in a scene that will remind you how distracting CGI can be when it isn’t done right. In the end, all I could do was to desperately try to find some good parts of the film. The only real one worth mentioning is the one I opened the review talking about, and it doesn’t make up a large portion of the film.