Horror Extreme Movie Catalog

This movie was good, just not as good as Part 1&2.
This series was at it's best back when Clive Barker
was making the movies.
It seems that every movie you see less & less of Pinhead.
I would say it has a good storyline, but not as good as Clive Barker's
original creation in Part 1 & 2!!
I rate this DVD a 7 from 1to10!!

Sometimes I think the whole HELLRAISER series is actually a series of metaphors about us, its fans. In the films, some fool goes out and obtains the box, brings it home with high hopes as to what it will do for him, and is brutally disappointed. Substitute "movie" for "box" and you have our collective history. We know in advance what fate awaits us when we rent a HELLRAISER film, but we do it anyway. People like us keep Pinhead - that is, the studio suits who grind these flicks out twice a year - in latex and chains.

Ne'er has a concept for a horror series been cooler, or offered a richer and more complex backstory, than did HR. And seldom has that concept been more badly and consistently bungled in execution, leading not merely to films which were weird, flawed and not what they should have been, but in some cases unwatchably bad and stupid. HELLSEEKER is somewhere between the two of these categories. It aspires to great heights, combining plot elements from films like MOMENTO and ANGEL HEART, but as it's carried out it's just a mess - confusing, disjointed, boring, and unpleasant to watch.

HELLSEEKER is the story of Trevor Gooden (Dean Winters, the best thing about HBO's prison opera, OZ), a seemingly ordinary suit-`n-tie office drone who nearly died in a car accident which may, or may not, have killed his wife Kirsty (Ashley Lawrence, reprising that role for the fourth time). Gooden, whose head was badly injured when his car went bye-bye into a river, can't remember what happened to her, and the cops can't find her body. Gooden is anxious to discover his wife's fate - especially since said cops don't believe his story - but he's plagued by chronic pain and an almost continuous series of hallucinations which make him seem guilty of something more than careless driving. When the people around him begin to turn up horribly murdered, Gooden begins to hallucinate about a puzzle box and a certain highly stylizied demon with nails in his mug and a penchant for torture. But who did what to whom, and why...and what really happened to Kirsty?

Like I said, the story aspires to be much more than the standard spatter-`n-splatter horrorthon. And on a few levels, it succeeds. For starters, Ashley Lawrence is not only one of those women who gets hotter as she gets older, but her acting skills have improved dramatically over the years, and while her screen time is limited she has more to do than scream and run away from demons. Stylistically, the movie is appropriately noirish - everything looks washed out, shadowy and run-down, precisely the way a HR film should look. And certain events in the movie's climax are pleasantly reminiscent of "Incident at Owl Creek Bridge" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" in their mind-frakking, falling-into-place quality. But these things can't overcome the film's basic problems, a short list of which would include sluggish pacing, confusing, epilepsy-inducing editing, a completely confusing storyline, listless direction, a forgettable script, and needless departures from the HR series mythology (how, for example, can Pinhead lay claim to souls who did not ever use the Box and were murdered in an ordinary way?). The biggest mistake the editor made was the decision to keep the hallucinations going full-clip throughout the flick, rather than having them build slowly over its course: the end result is a disjointed, eye-glazing orgy of what Hollywood types call "frame-[expletive]ing", whose relatively satisfying and well-executed climax won't help the people who pressed "stop" on the remote after forty-five frustrating minutes.

I realize it's chump-ism to expect that HELLRAISER movies will be "good" in the classic sense of the word. The budgets are too low, and the talent levels of the people involved are too inconsistent to produce anything spectacular. But when a concept is this good, when you have a director with some aesthetic sense who clearly is trying hard, and when you can get solid, respectable actors like Winters to play your leads, the end result should be much better. The real "puzzle" here is why I keep coming back for more. I guess, like Pinhead, "I prefer pain."