Well, here we are, just past the halfway point in this review series as well as past the point of seeing any more good entries in the franchise (well, mostly - I'll explain when we get around to it). As usual, this review will contain spoilers, this is just my opinion, I don't own the rights to Hellraiser and any use of images or video is covered by Fair Use, all that standard boilerplate stuff. (You all know the drill at this point.) Without further ado, let's get on to it.
So, Hellseeker... where do I even begin? I mean, the fact that the movie is one of the only ones to reach a 0% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes kinda already gives you an idea of what to expect. I won't beat around the bush here. This movie sucks, and as someone with a really high tolerance for bad horror movies, that's saying something. Is it worth a score of 0/100? Maybe, but at least I was able to get through the whole thing in one viewing rather than being forced to turn it off for a bit and spend a while wondering just why I'm wasting my time with this franchise. Looking at you, Friday the 13th Part VI. Like, seriously, maybe I could accept a main character who has psychic powers despite the world of the series never having indicated that something like that was possible, and maybe I could have just rolled with the fact that a rotting corpse could get reanimated by a simple lightning strike, but both in the same movie? Give me a break. I don't usually delete movies off my computer after watching them but that one wasn't worth even a quarter of however many gigabytes of space the file took up.
Anyway, back to Hellseeker. We start off with a pretty cool opening sequence where the actors' names are displayed in front to a rotating view of the Lament Configuration (probably one of the highlights of the movie if I'm being honest) before transitioning to some unlikeable asshole having a poorly acted conversation with his wife, who happens to be none other than a much older Kirsty Cotton. (Damn, Ashley Lawrence must have been really desperate for money at that point.) In typical horror movie fashion, the couple is unable to keep it in their pants and begin making out while Trevor is driving. As you might expect, this leads to Trevor driving off a bridge. He manages to easily escape the vehicle, but for some reason, Kirsty has forgotten how to open a car door and (surprise!) drowns within the sunken car. Immediately after, Trevor wakes up in a bed, revealing that this scene was a dream. Get used to this, it's going to happen a lot.
Upon awakening, he is informed by a police detective that the accident did in fact happen. However, strangely, Kirsty's body was never found. For some reason, the police are treating this disappearance as a murder investigation, and it is clear from the conversation that Trevor is the main suspect. You might ask, how does "the body was missing from the car" transition to "the unconscious guy that we fished out of the lake after the accident somehow killed her and hid the body"? The answer is to try not to think about it too much, because the writers clearly didn't.
The next hour of the movie proceeds as follows: Trevor encounters some woman, who immediately comes on to him. They have an uncomfortably long sex scene. Trevor has some sort of bizarre and violent hallucination before waking up somewhere completely different. Repeat.
This cycle is mercifully ended as Trevor is arrested and brought to the police station. The detectives who had been pursuing him are revealed to both be part of a strange, two headed monster (a pretty cool special effect, I'll give them that). He flees into the basement, where he encounters, you guessed it, Pinhead, played yet again by Doug Bradley. Pinhead explains that in fact, Trevor did attempt to murder Kirsty by trying to force her to open the Lament Configuration. This would be a good time to bring up that this isn't how the box works, but it's not like the writers of this movie watched Hellbound anyway, so there's no point harping on about it.
Pinhead continues, in his usual smooth, sexy voice (I'm the only one who thinking it, right? Right?), to explain that Trevor is the one who is dead and in hell, not Kirsty. This may sound familiar to you, which is probably because it's the exact same twist as the previous movie in the series. The deja vu doesn't end there, because it turns out that yet again, Kirsty escaped the cenobites by offer other souls in her place. Unlike with Frank Cotton, however, there doesn't seem to be any logical reason that Pinhead would prefer some random guy and his mistresses over the woman who had already escaped his grasp multiple times before. Unfortunately for Trevor, logical reasoning left the building a long time ago, and we cut to Kirsty watching Trevor's corpse being pulled out of the lake from the beginning of the movie, taking the Lament Configuration with her in a shameless attempt at sequel baiting.
Well, that was an ordeal and a half. You know, finding out how bad the review score was on Rotten Tomatoes was a pretty big relief for me. Like, I remember when I first watched this one a few years ago, I kept seeing online comments talking about how this was one of their favorites, or a high point in the series. Even Clive Barker had something positive to say about this one, which after watching the movie convinces me that he must have only seen a preliminary, much less shitty cut of the film than the one that finally got released to VHS. Even today, I still run into the occasional idiot online who somehow things that this was a good sequel, or even just better than the previous one, but at least now I have a bit more ammunition for when I tell him that he's full of shit.
You know, I just don't understand people like that. Is there something wrong with the segment of their brain that gives them good taste? What drives them to again and again to stubbornly insist that the fact that they were able to derive enjoyment from a garbage movie like this somehow means that it was objectively good? It holds for life in general, to be honest. Assholes out there seem to think that because they think being alive is better than being dead, it's an objective fact. God forbid someone who bought a ticket for this metaphorical film decide to leave the theater early instead of waiting to see how the movie ends. Listen, pal, you don't know what my life is like, you don't have to live in my body or deal with my memories. Don't act like you know what it's like to be me just because some chemical imbalance made you feel depressed at some point in the past. How hard is it to accept that maybe I have good reasons to be unhappy, damn it. Good for you that the pills helped you feel better, but changing some chemicals in my brain isn't going to do anything to the life circumstances that made me feel like this in the first place. Screw you, buddy. I've had too many people get my hopes up to fall for it again, and you're not going to change that.
Whatever. The point is, the movie sucks, and I watched it so that you don't have to. You're welcome.
Final Ratings:
Plot: F
Acting: F
Atmosphere: C
Special Effects: C
Overall: D-
Favorite Quote: "Welcome to the worst nightmare of all: reality."
Originally Posted on October 11, 2018.