Franchises: Hellraiser. Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002)

Like I mentioned in my review of Hellraiser: Bloodline, this marked my first step into the franchise's very sordid direct-to-video era, along with the eighth film, Hellworld. I didn't go into it completely blind, though, as I knew from Ashley Laurence's interview on the original film's 20th Anniversary DVD that she returned to the franchise here, as Doug Bradley himself contacted her. However, I also remembered her saying she had mixed feelings about where the character of Kirsty went, and I learned the reason why when I saw it (The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy either downplayed her ultimate role in the story or it didn't stick in my mind). Speaking of which, I also learned from that book that Hellseeker was very similar to Inferno, to the point where it felt like the filmmakers were trying to make up for what everyone disliked about that movie (thus, I knew what to expect when I got around to seeing Inferno). And finally, like before, I knew that Pinhead and the Cenobites had very little screentime.The first time I watched it, I remember thinking that Hellseeker wasn't that bad, although I still had a lot more fun with Hellworld, which I watched a day later. It hasn't held up on repeated watches, though, and I have to say that, as mixed as I was on Inferno, that movie is much more visually interesting and genuinely unsettling, whereas this one is quite generic and even milquetoast by comparison. What's more, even though the story and ultimate revelation are very similar to Inferno, only with a protagonist who's not as overtly unlikable, it comes off like a much more random series of bizarre events and visions, with not as concrete of a through-line holding it all together. Pinhead's motivation for his role in the story feels more in line with the character than in the previous movie, but there are still holes you can poke into it. And, most disappointing of all, they brought back Kirsty only to barely do anything with her, as well as take her character in a direction that a lot of fans might not care for.

While out driving, stockbroker Trevor Gooden and his wife, Kirsty Cotton, end up crashing their car over the edge of a bridge and fall into a river below. Trevor manages to unlock his seat-belt and escape, but is unable to save Kirsty, and watches her die while trapped inside the car. Trevor then suddenly wakes up in a hospital, suffering from painful headaches and partial amnesia. After a bizarre dream about his brain being operated on while he's still conscious, he's shocked to learn that over a month has passed since the accident and Kirsty's body was never found. Going back home to the apartment they shared, as well as his job, he begins having flashes of memory, as well as bizarre visions and experiences that include his boss, Gwen, and neighbor, Tawny, coming on to him, his being stalked by a dark stranger, coughing an eel, and being attacked by Pinhead while receiving acupuncture. He also learns that foul play is now suspected in Kirsty's disappearance, and while sympathetic Detective Lange believes that Trevor is innocent, his more aggressive partner, Givens, believes he murdered Kirsty to get his hands on an inheritance from her late father and uncle's holdings. Between all of that and his ever worsening headaches, Trevor's life begins to spin out of control. And the more he remembers, the more whatever is happening seems to stem from when he bought a certain musical puzzle box from a shady man and gave it to Kirsty as an anniversary present.

Like Inferno before it, as well as the two that followed, it's often been said that Hellseeker began life as a non-Hellraiser script that was ultimately turned into one. However, by all accounts, the title and basic story, if nothing else, were taken from an unused concept for the fifth film. Written by Michael Lent, the story was indeed called The Hellseeker and dealt with an amnesiac survivor of a traumatic incident who's haunted by horrific visions. However, when the intended director for that version of the movie went off to do something else, and several executives at Miramax and Dimension who were backing it quit, Lent's script was put aside and, of course, Scott Derrickson and Paul Harris Boardman's concept was the one that was made. After fulfilling his contractual obligations, Lent moved on, only to later hear about Hellseeker's production up in Canada. He's said that, while there are most definitely similarities, the final movie, written by Carl V. Dupre and Tim Day, was very different from what he'd envisioned.

According to Paul Kane in The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy, Dimension tried to persuade Derrickson to return for this film, but he opted to move on to other projects. However, the man they did choose to direct Hellseeker, Rick Bota, would stick around for the next two films. Bota had mostly worked as a cinematographer, shooting a number of episodes of Tales from the Crypt, as well as the Demon Knight movie, and films such as Barb Wire, the House on Haunted Hill remake, and Valentine; he also worked as a second unit director on Guillermo del Toro's Mimic and Kiss the Girls. Before Hellseeker, he'd only directed an episode of a forgotten TV show called L.A. Doctors, and, in Gary Tunnicliffe's opinion, while a nice guy, wasn't the right director for Hellraiser (thus, it baffled Tunnicliffe that Bota ended up doing three of them). In any case, he got along well with Doug Bradley, allowing him to come up with a lot of dialogue for Pinhead, although most of it got deleted. Also, Bota claims that, when the movie was finished, he had Clive Barker himself take a look at the initial cut and see if he had any suggestions. And unlike with Inferno, Barker is said to have not only liked Hellseeker but also advised Bota to put in some more graphic imagery here and there.

Like Detective Thorne in the previous movie, Hellseeker centers around a man whose life becomes a surreal, waking nightmare following a specific incident; in this case, it's Trevor Gooden (Dean Winters), a stockbroker who, it turns out, met and married Kirsty Cotton at some point in the years since Hellbound. As the two of them are driving down a country road, flirting and playing with each other, while also intending to work out some sort of issue, they lean in for a kiss, causing Trevor to take his eyes off the road and nearly hit a car. Swerving, he drives their car over a bridge and into a river below. The car sinks beneath the water and Trevor, frantically trying to save Kirsty as well as himself, rushes to the surface in a panic, only to then realize she's not with him. Swimming back down, he tries to help, but is unable to get the door open, and watches as she drowns. The next thing he knows, he's in the hospital, getting treatment for headaches he's been suffering since the accident, which he learns was over a month ago. He also learns that Kirsty has never been found and, despite what he claimed, both car doors were open. On top of that, he has a dream of doctors performing a painful operation on his brain while he's conscious, the first of many bizarre hallucinations and visions he has over the course of the movie. When he goes back to his and Kirsty's apartment, and to his job, he experiences his vampish boss, Gwen, suddenly coming on to him in the break room; a mysterious stranger watching him from down the street and in the building across from his; imagines coughing up a screeching, wriggling eel; finds his neighbor, Tawny, being rather flirty, and Gwen visiting him at his apartment, expecting him to have a camera recording them having rough sex. He also sees Gwen being murdered by Cenobites on the camera, and the next day, she's disappeared. Trevor eventually visits an acupuncture specialist to help with his worsening headaches, and the specialist, Sage, tells him that his subconscious is trying to tell him something. There, he also gets a visit from Pinhead, who stabs him through the neck with a long needle, only for Trevor to then awaken and find nobody other than Sage in the room. Worst of all, Kirsty's disappearance has been ruled a homicide and, because he stood to inherit Larry and Frank's financial holdings from Kirsty in the event of her death, he becomes the prime suspect in Detective Givens' eyes.

Besides the disturbing visions, Trevor also has flashes of memory which suggest that his and Kirsty's relationship wasn't as harmonious or secure as he thinks it was. He remembers their drive not being nearly as playful and friendly as it was in the opening, him willingly making out with Gwen, and when he looks at home movies of his and Kirsty's anniversary, they go from loving and endearing to contentious, with her now complaining about how Trevor had a need to

record everything. His most significant flashes of memory revolve around him going to a bizarre, rundown place, buying a musical puzzle box, and giving it to Kirsty as an anniversary present, one she was not at all happy to receive. Detective Lange later tells him that the box was found not far from the site of the accident, with splotches of blood matching some found in the car. Things get more horrific for Trevor when he has nightmares of both Tawny and Sage coming on to him, only for

things to turn sinister, with a Cenobite taking Tawny's place and Sage trying to stab him. He also witnesses his coworker, Bret, committing suicide after claiming the two of them had conspired to murder Kirsty for her inheritance. And Dr. Allison, the one person who's been truly sympathetic to him, acting as a therapist since the accident, turns out to not even be real. Things unravel completely when Trevor goes back to Sage, only to find her dead, and the police then force their way through the door and arrest him for her murder. At the

station, while Lange is questioning him, the detective gets a call that a body has just been found in the river, and Trevor also learns that all the people whose deaths he imagined or who featured in his visions have indeed been found murdered: tortured and then shot. Lange takes Trevor down to the morgue to view the body, where he's faced with Pinhead again and the final revelation is made.

Like Thorne in the previous movie, Trevor has been in his own private hell the whole time. And while he seemed like a confused and innocent guy being put through this, also like Thorne, he was actually a really bad person. Hedonistic and greedy, he cheated on Kirsty with many women, including Gwen, Tawny, and Sage, and conspired with Bret to kill her for her inheritance, then bought the Lament Configuration and had her open it to get rid of her himself. Unbeknownst to him, Kirsty

made a deal with Pinhead, offering to bring him five souls in exchange for her own. After murdering Gwen, Tawny, Sage, and Bret herself, she pulled a gun on Trevor while they were driving and shot him through the head, leading to the crash and the headaches he's been suffering while in this purgatory. She not only made it look like a suicide but also pinned all the murders on him, and this odyssey of piecing together what happened and facing the terrible person he was has been his punishment. Once his judgement has been passed,

Trevor, expecting to see Kirsty in the morgue, sees himself lying on a table there instead, revealing once and for all that he's the fifth soul, while the final scene shows that some of the other characters he dealt with are actual people at the crime scene.

This is really unfair to Dean Winters, I know, but I have a hard time taking a movie seriously when my lead is the All-State Mayhem guy. I know this movie was made long before those commercials started, and that he's also had a pretty long and varied career, especially in television on shows like Oz and Rescue Me, but they're what I know him best from. Putting that aside, his acting here is okay, but he tends to have that same bland, somewhat befuddled, expression on his face and doesn't emote much beyond that. He is pretty good in the flashes that reveal he was a really bad guy, though, as well as in the opening, when he's trying to save Kirsty (yelling the way he does underwater can't be easy), but I think they could've easily gotten someone better.

While Kirsty Cotton has never been one of my absolute favorite horror heroes, bringing her back for the first time really since Hellbound (you can't really call her videotaped sessions in Hellraiser III an actual role) was definitely an intriguing idea, full of potential. Unfortunately, despite going through the trouble of both writing her into the plot and bringing Ashley Laurence back, they don't do much of anything with her; in fact, up until the ending, they make you think she's either dead or, at the very least, missing in action, as we clearly see her drown after she and Trevor drive into the river. After that, she appears in flashes of Trevor's memory, which gradually reveal that the playful and sweet, if slightly troubled, interaction we saw between them at the beginning wasn't quite truthful. The memory that truly proves this is a home movie taken on their anniversary, with Kirsty sitting in bed, playfully asking Trevor to stop filming and join her, when he gives her a present. Though thrilled at first, the mood changes when she unwraps it to find the Lament Configuration, and he asks her to open it. We see this videotape and the scene associated with it pop up throughout the film, and Kirsty and Trevor's interactions become much more contentious, with her initially agitated about him filming their anniversary, saying he's obsessed with filming everything they do. She also goes from shocked to downright furious and hurt when she realizes what Trevor's gift is, screaming at him about it. At the end of the movie, we learn this was part of Trevor's plan to kill her so he could get her inheritance, reneging on his and Bret's initial plan to do it together. Ultimately, Kirsty opened the box, telling Trevor that she hoped it was everything he wanted, and found herself faced with Pinhead for the first time in many years. But, like she did before, she made him a bargain, one she promised she would deliver personally: five souls in exchange for her own. 

I will cut the screenwriters some slack, as there is a reason why Kirsty is not utilized here in the manner you would expect or want. Though they had intended to bring her back from the get-go, the filmmakers had trouble contacting Ashley Laurence, as she'd taken a sabbatical from acting in the late 90's to focus on her family and had only just recently started back. So, they rewrote the script to make her into a completely different character, although they kept the first name of

Kirsty, but when Doug Bradley was able to contact Laurence and persuade her to return, they only had a few days before filming began to write Kirsty Cotton back into the story. It's a shame, too, because it would've been nice to focus the movie entirely on Kirsty and see what her life had been like in the years since she left the Channard Institute. We get hints of it, with Trevor saying at one point that she never liked to talk about her past, as well as the plot-point that she was poised

to inherit Larry and Frank's money, but not nearly as much as you'd want. It's be nice to know just how Kirsty dealt with the horrors of her past, if she had lingering fear that the Cenobites would come for her again, what became of Tiffany, how and where she met Trevor, and so on. Even more disappointing is knowing there was a lot of dialogue in her meeting with Pinhead that was excised from the final movie, dialogue that not only suggested his exact interest in her, as we'll get into, but also alluded more to the past movies, with

him mentioning how her family has always made it easy for him to get to her. She brings up Frank and how she kept her promise and delivered him back to the Cenobites, and Pinhead, in turn, brings up how he faced the Channard Cenobite and allowed himself to be regressed back to Elliot Spencer so she could escape. He goes on to say, "They will all be waiting for you at the gates of your hell: the uncle, still lusting over what he cannot have; the sweetly sinful stepmother; and, of course, the father, who aches to hold his little girl again. Don't

you want to run to Daddy?" Rick Bota said he decided to take all of that out because he didn't want to alienate newcomers, which is a baffling decision, as I doubt few people other than diehard Hellraiser fans would even be interested in the sixth film, or that newcomers wouldn't start from the beginning.

And then, during the climax, they do something with Kirsty that flies in the face of who she was before: they make her into a murderer. After she makes her deal with Pinhead, she keeps her word about personally delivering them and kills three of the women Trevor had affairs with, Bret, and finally, Trevor himself, causing the crash that led him to this purgatory. While I can't blame her for killing Trevor and Bret, given how they'd once conspired to kill her, killing Gwen, Tawny, and

Sage is going over the line, even if they were complete whores, especially in Gwen's case. (I have it on good authority that Kirsty becomes a villain in the Hellraiser comic books that were made later, so others thought it was a good idea, but it still feels very sudden and out of character here.) Once she's fulfilled her promise and delivered the souls, as well as pinned the other murders on Trevor and accused him of committing suicide, Kirsty is just about to walk away from the scene, completely free, when Detective Lange asks

her about the Lament Configuration, which they found in the car. Not wanting to attract suspicion, she says it was her anniversary present, and when Lange offers to let her take it home, she does so, reluctantly. While she could simply say she doesn't want anything to remind her of this whole ordeal, it still ends the movie on an ominous and hopeless note for her, especially since this is very likely the last time we ever will see Kirsty.

The characters of Detectives Lange (William S. Taylor) and Givens (Michael Rogers) initially seem like the typical good cop/bad cop duo. Lange, the first one we meet, is very sympathetic to Trevor's plight, often trying to give him the benefit of the doubt when his story about the accident doesn't match up with what they found at the crime scene. Givens, on the other hand, is sure that Trevor murdered Kirsty for her inheritance, and often gets in his face and threatens him, trying to make him

tell the truth. When Trevor, during their first meeting, insists he didn't know anything about the inheritance, Givens says that when he has a feeling about something, he's usually right, adding, "I got a bad feeling about you, Trev. Real bad." This dichotomy between the two cops remains even as more incriminating evidence towards Trevor arises, with him, at one point, overhearing them argue about whether or not he's guilty. Even after he's arrested at the scene of Sage's murder, holding a bloody ice pick, Lange remains on his side. It's only when he gets a phone call telling that a body was recently recovered from the river that his opinion about Trevor begins to turn. He takes him down to the morgue to identify the body, and even appears to let him go at one point, only to lock him behind a barred door in the hallway leading to the morgue. Lange tells him, "I believe that you and me have a lot in common. I believe each of us are the sum of two entirely different people... Good and bad, Trevor. Honest, dishonest. Righteous, evil. That's how we're all made: It's a little of both. It's just a question of how... much... of each." And he then reveals something quite startling: he and Givens are, literally, two sides of the same person, as the latter's head rips its way out of the back of Lange's, noting, "And we're made up of just the right parts of both." While the effect used to pull this off is very mixed, it is an interesting reveal, and when you think back, it makes sense, as you never saw the two of them in the same room. Also, when Trevor overheard them arguing, Lange came out of his office but Givens was nowhere to be seen inside. And like the other significant characters in this purgatory, Lange is an actual person in reality, namely the detective who talks with Kirsty at the scene of the car crash.

The same also goes for Allison (Rachel Hayward), a kindly female doctor who's the first one Trevor sees when he wakes up in the hospital following the accident. She is the one completely pure spirit in the whole movie, promising to see him through this ordeal and find out the cause of his bad headaches. She even speaks to him as a psychiatrist, encouraging him when he's down and saying his slowly returning memory is a good thing, even if he's realizing he wasn't the good

person he thinks he was. Near the end, she tells him that he's going to have to confront the bad things he might've done, adding that she can't be there with him when he does... and then, as a nearby janitor points out, he's talking to himself. In reality, Allison is a coroner's assistant who, at the scene of the accident, talks to Trevor's corpse, her reasoning being, "What if there's no afterlife? Wouldn't you want someone to talk to you like a normal human being one last time?" The coroner himself (Ken Camroux-Taylor), who also appeared in Trevor's hell as the doctor who saw to him along with Allison, and recommended they start to ween him off painkillers, says that actually creeps him out.

Of the three other women in Trevor's life, his boss, Gwen Stevens (Sarah-Jane Redmond), is the most sexually aggressive towards him. She roughly comes on to him at work, when he's trying to make a choice at the vending machine, putting him in an arm-lock, pressing him up against the machine, and is not only unsympathetic about his wife having apparently died but, after licking his chin, says, "It's perfect," and acts like she's about to give him a blowjob. Trevor then gets a flash of the two of them having much more passionate, and consensual, sex elsewhere, and he briefly gets into it in reality before pushing her away. Unfazed, Gwen says they'll pick it up later, adding, "Now get some fuckin' work done." She motions towards a security camera in the corner and notes, "We're watching you." She shows up at his apartment that night, intending to have her way with him and get him to videotape it, something he typically does. However, Trevor isn't having it and, after letting Gwen grind against him for a few minutes, makes her leave, much to her irritation. As she goes, she says, "You can say goodbye to that promotion." But after she's left, Trevor not only sees the camera continuing to record them doing it, but also Gwen being murdered by Cenobites, after which she goes missing in reality.

His neighbor, Tawny (Jody Thompson), is not as aggressive but no less horny... or so it seems. In her first appearance, she shows up at his door to show off a tattoo she just got on her belly, and while he sends her away, she invites him to come over any time if he feels like "talking." The next night, she, again, shows up, this time under the pretense of wanting to borrow something, namely him. She immediately comes on to him and, like with Gwen, he tries to push her away, but she doesn't take no

for an answer and insists. The two of them start making out on a table, only for one of the Cenobites to interrupt and attack Trevor, who then wakes up to find Tawny dead, tied to a chair. But then, after a quick run to the bathroom to wash blood off his hands, and an encounter with Pinhead, he comes back out to find her gone. Moreover, he goes over to an apartment, and not only finds her there, but she has no memory of being with him, and also has a boyfriend. She's eventually found murdered, with evidence pointing to Trevor, and her boyfriend is wanting to just get at him at the police station. Sage (Kaaren de Zilva), the acupuncture specialist Trevor visits, initially comes off as completely innocuous, only wanting to help him get rid of his headaches, and even tells him that his visions are his subconscious trying to tell him something. He goes to another session with her later, when his headaches get worse, and she tells him there's no physical reason for it, as well as that he's blocked his own soul from the healing process. Telling him to give in completely, she strips down and makes out with him, only to then grab an ice-pick and seemingly stab him with it. However, that turns out to have been another hallucination, at least at first, but near the end, he finds that Sage has been murdered as well, the ice-pick stabbed into the top of her head.

Trevor's coworker, Bret (Trevor White), initially comes off as just an obnoxious dick who busts his balls over having taken off unexpectedly one day, i.e. the day he went to the hospital for his headaches, and for falling asleep at his desk. But when he realizes that Trevor is going through something, he sends him to Sage. Later, Trevor spots Bret at the police station, talking with a detective, but when he confronts him about it at work, he's evasive, at first. Later, in the break room, Bret tells Trevor that he's quitting the company, and also alludes to the money that Kirsty was going to inherit, as well as "the plan." However, like before, he insists that he didn't tell the police anything. That night, after Trevor investigates the place where he remembers buying the Lament Configuration, he runs into Bret on the street, and he suddenly pulls a gun on him. It turns out that night was when they were supposed to kill Kirsty, make it look like a suicide, and split the money, but Bret accuses him of killing her in the car so he could get all the money for himself. Not buying that he has amnesia, Bret tells Trevor it's only a matter of time before Detective Lange connects him to Kirsty's death as well, adding, "I don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison. I'd rather spend it in hell... with you." He then shoots himself right in front of Trevor.

Like in Inferno, Pinhead's first appearance doesn't happen until almost forty minutes in, when Trevor is getting his acupuncture therapy, but it's much more memorable. He actually emerges from an acupuncture chart (a gag that Rick Bota thought about cutting, as he thought it was too silly, but Doug Bradley loved it), removes one of the pins from his head, elongates it, and sticks it through the back of Trevor's neck and out the front, asking, "Which do you find more exhilarating, Trevor: the pain or the pleasure? Personally, I prefer pain." Also, while his screentime is still limited, unlike in Inferno, he doesn't disappear completely until the climax after his first appearance. He appears in Trevor's bathroom mirror when he's washing his hands after finding Tawny murdered, and again in the third act, as a reflection in a puddle of water, mockingly asking if he's still in the dark about what's going on, adding that he'll know it all soon, but he'll wish he hadn't. Trevor accuses him of being the killer and Pinhead cryptically answers, "The killer is amongst us, yes," before his image disappears and is replaced with Trevor's own reflection. Finally, like in the previous movie, Pinhead's most significant scene is at the end, when he confronts and chains up Trevor, revealing what's been going on. He tells him about how, when he bought the Lament Configuration and gave it to Kirsty to open, it was something Pinhead himself arranged, as she was the one he was after. But before he could take Kirsty, she offered to trade him five souls for her own, even promising to bring them to him personally. Intrigued by this, Pinhead was also impressed with how Kirsty went about killing three of Trevor's "companions" and Bret, before killing Trevor himself to fulfill their bargain. And this is where I feel Hellseeker succeeds more as a Hellraiser movie than Inferno. Even though Pinhead still spends the entire movie putting the protagonist through a series of horrific visions as punishment for what he did in his actual life, and does make him face the truth of it, it's not out of some sense of morality on his part but simply because Kirsty gave him a more enticing offer.

Besides the nice references to some of the past movies, the deleted parts of Kirsty and Pinhead's confrontation add an interesting subtext to his desire for her. In the finished film, it comes off as though he's been hunting her since their first meeting because she was the only one who truly escaped him, but in the deleted bits of dialogue, there's more to it. Kirsty insists that Trevor was the one who wanted Pinhead there, but Pinhead himself says, "Still playing the innocent, Kirsty?

You disappoint me. After all these years, surely you've realized it's you that wants me here." As Paul Kane notes, Kirsty doesn't argue against that. Pinhead goes on to say, "It was your loving husband who did the hard work," and then reminds her of how he sacrificed himself to Channard, asking, "Did you think that gift was nobly and freely given? Did you? I will not rest until I get what I want, and what I want is you." As Kane says, aside from Larry, Pinhead is suggesting that he's the only man in her life who hasn't betrayed

her in some way (even in the original movie, when he and the Cenobites tried to take her with them despite now having Frank, Pinhead never promised that they wouldn't do so; he only gave her a maybe). Had this stayed in the movie, it would've suggested that his wanting her goes far beyond mere revenge for her having escape him. And even though he, again, is willing to let her escape after she promises him the five souls, it's possible that he allows it only because it means the game will continue. As he says in that deleted section, "The box will never let you go."

What I don't like, however, is the suggestion that Pinhead was manipulating things in the real world so he could get to Kirsty. In the flashbacks, we see that Trevor visited this bizarre, rundown place, filled with equally strange characters, and was given the Lament Configuration by this merchant who told him, "I can see into your soul," and that he knew he was looking for a permanent way out of his marriage. Before presenting him with the box, he told him, "Wherever there is hate, violence,

depravity... a door will always be found," then warned him that there was no going back once it was opened, and asked if he was willing to pay the price. And when Trevor offered a lot of money, the merchant told him the price was much greater and that he would eventually learn what it was, before sending him off. Given how this man talks, as well as that you can tell he's played by Doug Bradley, and Pinhead tells Trevor that he was nothing but bait to lure out Kirsty, it really feels like they're trying to say he was Pinhead. Like the

machinations of Joseph Thorne's personal hell in the previous film, this, as well as the suggestion that one of the figures there was a Cenobite's human form, goes against the established mythology, which has made it clear that, under normal circumstances, they can't act in the real world unless the box is opened. Then, of course, there's the question of how Trevor was led to the box in the first place and how much he knew about what would happen when it was opened. He seemed to have a good idea, given how he made Kirsty open it, but that just raises more questions that don't make sense and aren't answered.

Though I miss the blue lighting they always had on Pinhead in the previous movie, as I thought it worked well with the makeup, they still photograph him well here, keeping him in either low lighting or presenting him in an otherworldly bluish-green filter for the scenes between him and Kirsty. However, the way they try to make Bradley up as the merchant so he would hopefully be unrecognizable, with long, stringy black hair and a goatee, is rather hard to take seriously, and they get right up on him in close-up during the later flashbacks. Plus, makeup or not, Bradley's voice, even when it's not modulated as Pinhead, is unmistakable.

In his book, Kane says that Hellseeker actually had a slightly bigger budget than Inferno: $3 million, as opposed to Inferno's $2 million. If that's true, then you'd never guess, as it's much cheaper-looking, with none of the visual flair. It's the first movie in the series to be shot up in Canada, specifically Vancouver, and it has that tell-tale generic look that many low budget movies and TV shows shot up there tended to have at that time. It's very bland-looking in general, with a white-blue look to a good number of the scenes, both inside and out.

Some scenes do look memorable, like those set on the bus Trevor often takes, the inside of which is bathed in a kind of sickly green and bluish white combination (anyone who's ever had a migraine can probably relate to how that makes his headaches even worse than they already are), and they also use filters and major color timing to make the flashbacks stand out. They often come off as washed out and overexposed, sometimes in an otherworldly, almost angelic manner, like in Trevor's warm memories of Kirsty, but other times,

they have an unpleasant sort of aesthetic to them, like when the aforementioned memories become not so harmonious, and when we see Trevor buying the box, which has an ugly green color palette and is really murky-looking. Speaking of that place, when Trevor goes back to it late in the film, the interior is shot in a memorably spooky manner that makes it look kind of haunted. And some of the shots in the morgue at the end are memorable, especially when the familiar shafts of light come

through and Pinhead makes his appearance. The one sign that the budget was a bit bigger is the stunt at the beginning, when the car goes over the bridge and into the river (a one-take deal that didn't go well, but they were able to compensate by dropping the car from the crane hoisting it out of the water at the end of the movie), and the underwater action of Trevor desperately trying to save Kirsty, which was done in a studio tank.

Because of the low budget, some of the sets were recycled from Children of the Corn: Revelation, which had just finished shooting, and whose production designer, Troy Hansen, came over as well. Trevor's apartment was one of them, as was the police station, while Trevor's workplace was an actual office, and the blandness of which kind of helped with the feeling they were trying to get across with it. Interestingly, the morgue at the end was actually recycled from Valentine, which, if you remember, director Rick Bota was the

cinematographer for, and while those first few places were very generic, it's kind of cool, with the long, dark tunnels and corridors leading to it (which were shot at an abandoned mental institution, which was also where they shot the hospital scenes), and the way the place itself is filled with so many gruesome, nasty sights, courtesy of Gary Tunnicliffe and his crew, that you can almost smell it. The same goes for that bizarre place where Trevor finds the Lament Configuration, which is like some dank, rundown

factory, filled with all sorts of bizarre sights and objects, including some very weird characters, like an old, Asian woman seemingly using a sewing machine on flesh, and large woman wearing bondage gear. And they do manage to make the streets of Vancouver look kind of creepy and cold late at night, while the countryside that we see during the opening and ending has a beauty to it, despite the dreary, overcast sky. However, where they dropped the ball in terms of production design

is the one scene in the Cenobites' dimension. While I like that they brought back the slats of light coming through the morgue's walls before Pinhead appears, the Cenobites' familiar realm has been reduced to little more than a threadbare, completely black room, with a bunch of chains and some lights hanging down (no flesh pillars whatsoever). They try to make it feel unearthly with one of those filters and by partly obscuring the other Cenobites with the chains, but it has nothing on what Clive Barker was able to pull off with much less money in the original film.

In his Midnight's Edge interview, Tunnicliffe said that one of the reasons why he felt Bota wasn't the right director for Hellraiser was because he didn't go extreme enough in the bizarre and disturbing imagery. I can definitely see what he's talking about because, when compared to the truly unsettling stuff in Inferno, what we have here isn't that strong. There are notable exceptions, like Trevor's hallucination early on about his brain being operated on (my "oh, shit" moment here, as the visuals and sound effects really make my head

hurt), the visual of the fat woman in leather bondage gear sitting in the dark (I don't care what Tunnicliffe says, that shot does rather creep me out), and the nasty cutaways in the morgue at the end of the movie. I also think the scene where, after Gwen leaves his apartment after he rejects her, he sees the camera recording the two of them making out, then her being murdered by Cenobites, despite it pointing at an empty chair the whole time, to be interesting. But for the most part, the

visions are kind of ho-hum and even cliched, like a vicious pitbull trying to get at Trevor, a gray, rotted-looking arm suddenly appearing in the vending machine at his office, him hallucinating about coughing up an eel in his apartment, seeing a dying man on a gurney in a hospital hallway, and Sage suddenly going from coming on to him to trying to kill him. Sometimes they're hampered by really poor visual effects, like much of the eel scene and when Lange and Givens are revealed to

be two halves of the same person. And like Tunnicliffe said in that interview, it's also sometimes a case of what Bota considers weird, freaky, and taboo not amounting to much for diehard horror fans. The moments where Trevor sees a dark figure watching him from nearby, people being murdered, only for them to disappear before being found elsewhere by someone else, someone being brutalized by a cop at the police station, as well as a detective make an origami

replica of the box, and such are kind of out there, but nothing compared to what we've seen in some of the previous movies. The same goes for the moments where Gwen, Tawny, and Sage come on to him, which don't hold a candle to the deviant sexuality we've already seen, and would later see, in this series, as they're typical depictions of bondage and domination. Granted, the moment during his making out with Tawny when a Cenobite suddenly takes her place, then plants a device onto his mouth and slowly turns a handle, tightening it, is borderline, but it's still nothing compared to Thorne's first encounter with the Wire Twins.

The movie's structure around these visions and hallucinations feels much more disjointed and the moments themselves more random than in Inferno. There, you had a concrete through-line of Detective Thorne's ongoing investigation into the Engineer, and it did feel like the story was progressing as it went on; with Hellseeker, it often goes back and forth from Trevor having all these visions to being contacted by the police to ask him something pertaining to the search for Kirsty, and it feels like little changes each time, aside from the

occasional moment when it's believed that the case is a homicide and Trevor is viewed as a suspect. As for randomness, I don't know what that brain surgery moment at the beginning had to do with anything. Given the surgeon's dialogue about the thinness of the cortex between the brain's pleasure and pain regions, and how he's going to be triggering memories throughout the "procedure," it seems like an explanation for Trevor's headaches and ebbing amnesia, only for them to receive different explanations at the end. And these

surgeons are never seen again, save for, maybe, the elderly nurse, who seems to appear near the end when Trevor goes back to the hospital, and the surgeon possibly being one of the Cenobites' human form. There's also no reason for Sage to suddenly attempt to kill Trevor either. And while there were some moments in Inferno where Thorne would seemingly dream a horrific event, only for it to either have actually happened or take place after he wakes up, there are so many times here where Trevor springs awake from one of these "nightmares," often in some place completely different than we thought he was, that it makes it more confusing to follow than it should be.

You may have noticed that, unlike in previous reviews, I haven't referred to the other Cenobites by name and that's because, while they do have monikers, they leave little impression and do hardly anything of note. In fact, they only appear in Trevor's vision of Gwen being murdered, during his make-out with Tawny, and during Kirsty's confrontation with Pinhead near the end. Moreover, even though they had names, I had to look up which was which, as I had no clue. The one called Stitch (Sarah Hayward) actually has a moment all

to herself, as she's the one who suddenly takes Tawny's place when Trevor is making out with her, straps that metal mask to his face, and then twists the large screw in the center of it. The other two, known as Bound (Nancy Lilley) and the Chief Surgeon (Dale Wilson), are only seen suffocating Gwen with a plastic bag over her head and with Pinhead at the end, although I think we actually see them in human form earlier, with Bound being the heavyset woman Trevor saw at the place where he bought the Lament Configuration, and the Surgeon,

again, being the man operating on his brain early in the movie. Also, there's a form of Chatterer (Michael Regan) here, known officially as "Chatterer III," who may have also been the stranger Trevor saw watching him (I say that because Regan played that character as well). If nothing else, the Cenobites' designs, as always, are memorable, with Stitch having all the flesh on her flesh stretched and stapled together, while her eyes and mouth are sewn shut; Bound having two 

leather straps pressing against her eyes and mouth, and a crown of nails atop her head, stretching open her scalp; and the Surgeon having this apparatus on his head that keeps his eyes shut and his mouth open in a permanent grin, which I do find kind of freaky. However, as characters, these are among the most forgettable yet.

Although he said this was the one Hellraiser whose production he barely remembered, Tunnicliffe and his studio, once again, provided some really nice makeup effects, with the most effective being the operation on Trevor's brain at the beginning. Like I said, that's the scene that really gets to me, with the sound of the drill opening up a section of the top of his skull, the shot of it being lifted off, and the very realistic-looking brain beneath, which the surgeon fiddles with and sticks a pin deep into; again, that alone almost gives me a headache. There's also the

practical effects for the eel that Trevor imagines coughing up and which is pulled out of his mouth by the coroner at the end, the long pin that gets pushed through the back of his neck and out the throat, the gruesome aftermaths of the murders, the painful-looking cut he receives on his hand at one point in the break room, the very grisly cutaways in the morgue (which, according to Rick Bota, were among the images Clive Barker suggested he add in after the fact), and Pinhead's chains hooking into Trevor's face. Unfortunately, like with Inferno,

there are some not so good digital effects here, and they're much more egregious. I already mentioned how awful that digital eel is but just as bad is the visual of Pinhead emerging from the acupuncture chart and Givens' head emerging from the back of Lange's, the latter of which seems like a combination of CGI, makeup, and the actual actors; a nice attempt, but the digital work kills any effectiveness it might've had. At the end of the

flashback to Trevor meeting the merchant, some awful CGI crows fly past him (according to Paul Kane, some of that effect was recycled from The Prophecy), and a shot of the Lament Configuration opening the door to the Cenobites' realm is done with cheap-looking digital effects that somehow look worse than when it was done with archaic animation back in the original movie.  I think they even created some of the shafts of light coming through the morgue's walls digitally, which comes

off as rather lazy. That's not to say all of the visual effects are bad, though. Bret shooting himself up through his chin and out his forehead looks pretty good (probably because it goes by quick), as does Trevor looking in his triple-pane bathroom mirror and seeing Pinhead's reflection instead of his own. Plus, in the flashback to when Trevor first saw the Lament Configuration, it starts out as a round shape, then rolls across the table and becomes the box in a nicely seamless transition. Otherwise, the low budget is very apparent.

Not gonna lie, I kind of like the music score by Stephen Edwards, though that's most due to the awesome main title theme he came up with, which is played on an electric guitar, and sounds a bit like a really jazzed up version of the original Hellraiser theme. This piece, which would be reused in this initial form during the ending credits as well, becomes Pinhead's leitmotif and has some notable variations throughout the film, like a guitar/piano mixture for when he appears in the acupuncture parlor, building up to when he sticks Trevor through the neck with some stabbing chords; a distant, single chord iteration when Trevor sees him in his bathroom mirror; and a memorably ominous one when he appears to Trevor near the end of the movie and prepares to let him in on what's going on. And the final shot of Kirsty walking away, holding the box, is also played to this theme, nicely noting how she's unlikely to ever escape its hold. Speaking of Kirsty, Edwards came up with a fairly soft, ethereal motif for her, which you often hear whenever Trevor thinks about her. However, much of the rest of the score isn't that memorable, coming off about as generic as the movie itself, and I also recognized a couple of stock music cues that I've heard in various TV shows and commercials over the years.

In their rundown of the franchise on their YouTube channel, In Praise of Shadows describes Hellraiser: Hellseeker as, "An aggressively bad movie, almost unwatchable." That's a tad harsh, but it isn't a great one, that's for sure. Its biggest issue is that it goes for a similar approach like Inferno, but it's not even close to being as effective, as it has little to none of the visual panache, unsettling imagery, or taboo ideas and concepts. On top of that, there's not as concrete of a central plot holding

it all together, the lead character, though not as unlikable as Detective Thorne, is also not that memorable, Ashley Laurence has little to do in her return to the series after nearly fifteen years, none of the other characters or the new Cenobites leave much of an impression, there are, again, ideas that go against the established mythology, and the whole thing comes off as terribly cheap, especially some of the visual effects. That said, Pinhead's role in the story feels much more in character this time and he also has more noteworthy appearances, the film does have its moments of acceptable weirdness and imagery, there are plenty of grisly, wince-inducing gore and makeup effects, and the music score isn't half bad, especially its main theme. Since you're not going to get much Cenobite action either way, whether or not you prefer Hellseeker or Inferno depends on whether you want cool visuals, unsettling imagery, and unsafe subject matter but with a despicable protagonist, or a not so despicable protagonist coupled with a watered down version of what the previous movie did well. In short, pick your poison.