So…we’re now at the point where we’re asking the question ‘What if Hellraiser, But ACTUALLY ‘Carnival of Souls’ by way of ‘Fight Club’…And about halfway into this film I lamented to my partner that only a week or so ago we were enjoying ‘Hellbound: Hellraiser 2’ and all the wonderful mysterious etherialness that came with it.

And now here we are, crashing through the world of DTV, where originality is beyond the attention of the morgue and the absolute BEST we can hope for is a couple of half decent performances and the feint FEINT hope that the tribute act this film is trying to make will at least stick the landing…and by the barest of threads, I think this film manages it.

‘Hellraiser: Hellseeker’ is the 6th entry in the Hellraiser series, and we’ve now pretty much settled into the ‘Freddys Nightmares’ approach to the cenobites…I.E, that 90% of the story is a standalone tale of a persons excesses leading them down a dark and dangerous path, ultimately leading to the final 10% of the story, which is a handful of shots of pinhead scattered across the runtime, leading to a final confrontation where the great spikey git appears through the mists of a creaking set in the style of a reveal from ‘Stars in their Eyes’, to essentially tell the victim EXCATLY why they’ve ended up in front of Pinhead, in such a way that reveals that there was in fact VERY little way anyone could have really guessed what was going on.

‘Hellseeker’ specifically has a fundamental flaw that i’ll get to shortly…But the plot is the first film Since ‘Hellbound’ to try and tie things back to our first ‘Final Girl’ of the series, Kirsty Cotton. As we open with Kirsty fooling around with her husband of 5 years ‘Trevor’ when…after getting a little TOO hot and heavy on the highway, their car careers off a bridge into the fridgid lake below, killing Kirsty and putting Trevor in the hospital with severe amneisa and memory loss.

Released from the hospital, the detectives want to know EXACTLY whats gone on, but Trevor has no idea…Kirsty’s body hasnt been recovered from the wreckage and the best Trevor can muster up is some vague flashbacks to their 5th anniversairy celebrations, and an encounter with a mysterious man offering him a mysterious box that could lead to both his AND Kirstys life vastly improving…

As Trevor tries to work his way back to normality, he quickly finds that his intepretation of reality may not be entirely accurate, he keeps bouncing around multiple different scenarios and moments. One minute he’s riding the night bus home, next he’s being grinded on by his boss in lengerie, next the girl from down the hall is trying to have sex with him…then his accupuntural therapist…and mixed in all amongst this, we have scenes of cenobites tormenting and torturing both Trevor and some of his close friends, feint memories of him and Kirsty together that dont always quite align. and a constant feeling like he’s forgotten something critical…Something that would make all of this make sense…something ominous…that may in fact be better left in the darkest recesses of his mind…something terrible thats about to turn Trevors world completely upside down and give him revelations he could have never conceived.

I’ll get my biggest gripe out of the way here, and its the script. It. drags. ASS. it is SO slow, painfully slow, glacially slow. its slow, and because they’re trying to play with the ‘Fight Club’ mechanism of showing the audience scenes which may be real, may only be happening in Trevors head, or may be the Cenobites screwing with Trevor. it means that everything we see happen MAY be real…or may be totally false…which, on paper may read like an intreaguing process…Until you realise that if you dont ground your unreliable narrator into at least SOME basic world lore…you end up with a film where I as the viewer dont feel like ANY of it matters…because it could ALL be a false narrative, just as much as it could all be true.

They dont clarify anything until about 10 minutes off the end of the film when they put all their cards on the table finally, and just…flat out tell the audience what was real, and what wasnt. And thats a problem for me, because…This isnt a film trying to get the audience to figure out whats going on. It isnt trying to tease the narrative, it isnt even really breadcrumbing. Its just showing us a load of random scenes and then at the end going ‘Ah! THESE scenes were REAL!!!’ before cutting to black. and thats awful storytelling, because why would I want to invest 89 minutes of my time into a film where realistically, the only stuff that ACTUALLY matters is the opening 10 minutes or so, and the final 10 minutes or so.

It creates a film thats pretty much ‘Burn after reading’ because once you’ve seen it once from start to finish and understand what they’re ACTUALLY trying to do, I can say confidently that you might get ONE more watch out of this thing, just to see if you can notice the things you missed the first time…and then its basically unwatchable for how much of the audiences time it wastes.

The films INCREDIBLY horny. But not in a ‘Hellraiser’ 1 or 2 way…a classy way…No. this is ‘Skinimax’ terratory, with fully clothed dry humping and blink and you’ll miss it boob shots…and thats about it. Their must be at least 4 or 5 sex scenes in this film. and again, it just reminded me of the sex scenes in the first couple of movies, where they were delicately peppered in to give the audience an idea of the intensity of the relationship between Frank and Julia…here, it feels cheap and seedy. Basically just here because otherwise the film quite literally WOULD be sedentary and incoherent.

The characters are all fairly one note for most of the runtime. Trevor probably gets the meatiest character development…But he essentially has 3 moods, bewildered, sad…and later in the film, when he finds out whats ACTUALLY going on…angry. and thats about it. the rest of the cast are horny inserts…or corporate inserts…and thats all their is. Even the dialogues just awkward and stilted. Reading like what a teenager would imagine ‘angsty’ and ‘edgey’ would ACTUALLY be like.

The act structurings a mess, again, the first and last 10 minutes of the movie. No notes, they’re pretty solid…but the remaining 69 minutes? incoherent ramblings that ride pretty much the same level across the runtime. In fact, this almost feels like a beat for beat reworking of ‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ to some extent…Only, instead of the lead character being an out and out ass. Instead we here have a character whos sad, confused and looking for meaning…while the implications lead to a darker past.

Direction wise, it again feels like ‘Hellraiser: Inferno’ we have David Fincher inspired moody lighting and tribute style framing and directional choices within the edit and performance choices. Nothing offensively bad, but nothing particularly groundbreaking. Again, it hurts me to see this series nosedive so hard, so quickly.

The cine again…is fine. I dont feel they quite manage to do the cenobites justice here, they cut around them quite frequently and the lighting doenst really compliment their presence…I assume they just…Didnt think the costumes were very good and decided to hide them by keeping them in low lighting and showing as little of them as possible.

Sequences are built fine enough for DTV, but theres a definite whiff of phoning it in across the board, it doesnt have heart, it doesnt have that creative flow…It feels like someone went to the movies over a long weekend, saw a load of cop dramas and psychothrillers and just…decided to borrow some of the best bits for this movie…with mixed to poor results.

Performance wise, We’re pretty much with Dean Winters as Trevor for the full runtime…and he’s fine. Not outstanding, not remarkable…he does a fine enough job as the lead in a cop infused horror thriller DTV, he gets through his lines fine enough, his physical presence is fine enough. He’s watchable.

To be completely honest, I was happier to see Ashley Laurence back as Kirsty, and although she only appears in the movie via flashbacks. She did end up having a meatier role than I expected, and again, she’s pretty decent. Honestly, the best parts of the movie are scenes with her and scenes with her and Winters. Its such a shame this is only really a cameo for the most part…

Doug Bradley is in this movie in a duel role for approximately 10-15 minutes of screentime. He’s clearly bored by this point, they arnt really giving him any good material to work with, he doesnt really do much…I know he’s capable of great things, but…to excuse my language. He’s dealing with a case of ‘Shit in, Shit out’, and this kind of marks the beginning of him really firmly trying to leave the franchise, but then being dragged back in for one reason or another.

The musics ‘MiDi-fied’ orchestral gumpf, with a little bit of rock and drone thrown in for good measure. its nowhere near as good as the first two films score…But its SO much better than ‘Hellraiser III’ or ‘Inferno’…

All in all, Hellraiser: Hellseeker is a frustrating watch, because it opens strong and the ending is probably the strongest the series has been since ‘Hellbound’, but you have to wade through over 60 minutes of absolute drivel and garbage to get there. This could have been an incredibly good short film, something for the fans to get a bite of. But instead, its an overly bloated, underfunded and badly managed waste of time for the most part. Not the worst that the series has spit up yet…I COULD actually see myself rewatching this one. But we are NOT in Kansas anymore Toto…

source https://letterboxd.com/tytdreviews/film/hellraiser-hellseeker/