‘Wherever there is hate, violence, depravity… a door will always be found...’
By 2002, the Hellraiser franchise had slipped into irrelevance. The fourth entry had made less than $10 million at the box office and the fifth entry hadn’t made it to cinemas at all. Hellseeker, the sixth film in the franchise and the second straight-to-video release, marked the introduction of director and cinematographer Rick Bota, who would later go on to direct a further two sequels. Predictably, it isn’t great…
Trevor Gooden (Dean Winters) survives a car crash that kills his wife, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence – returning to the franchise for the first time since Hellraiser II) and then falls into a Jacob’s Ladder-style descent into madness. Doug Bradley returns as Pinhead.
Now, Dean Winters is hardly a major star, but at the time of this film’s release, he was still starring in one of the most prestigious and influential TV dramas of the era in Oz, so what he made of some of the performances in this film is an interesting one to ponder. That being said, he doesn’t really cover himself in glory either, often coming across as faintly embarrassed to be involved at all. Elsewhere, Laurence fails to capture the essence of her previous performances of franchise favourite Kirsty Cotton, instead coming across as a completely different character (although this is mostly down to the writing rather than any kind of fault on her part) and even Bradley, often so darkly effective in the Hellraiser franchise, seems a little tired of it all.
Hellseeker is badly plotted to the point of incoherence; it’s derivative of much more effective films within this genre and, to be frank (oh, how I longed for a character as compelling as Frank in this thing), it looks like shit. I’ve seen much worse horror sequels than this over the years; large parts of it are at least watchable, but there is a will-this-do attitude that pervades this film that will go on to define the franchise going forward. This is where the rot really begins to set in.
