| Hellraiser: Hellseeker | |
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Directed by |
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Produced by |
Mike Leahy |
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Written by |
Carl Dupre |
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Distributed by |
Dimension Home Video |
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Release date |
October 15, 2002 |
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Running time |
89 minutes |
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Preceded by |
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Succeeded by |
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Hellraiser: Hellseeker is a 2002 horror film directed by Rick Bota from a screenplay by Carl Dupre and Tim Day, the film stars Dean Winters. Ashley Laurence, and Doug Bradley. It is the sixth film in the Hellraiser franchise, set sometime before the 2127 events of Hellraiser: Bloodline and after the others, as well as Inferno.
Plot[]
Kirsty Cotton and her husband, Trevor Gooden, are driving in a car, when suddenly Trevor nearly hits another car and crashes over the edge of a bridge into the river. Trevor escapes but Kirsty remains trapped inside.
Trevor wakes up in the hospital, suffering from headaches and amnesia. Kirsty is said to be missing, and her door in the car was open despite the fact that Trevor claimed it was locked. Trevor has nightmares about a surgeon performing painful surgery on him. He watches a tape and sees that he gave the Lament Configuration to Kirsty as an anniversary present.
Trevor is in love with his boss, Gwen. But at one point, he has a nightmare where a camera that is recording the room shows (though this is not happening in the room) two Cenobites killing Gwen. Trevor is also in love with two other women named Tawny and Sage, and he has a nightmare where he finds Tawny lying dead in a chair. Pinhead appears and gives him a note saying "All your problems are solved", and the body is gone when next he enters, before he wakes up. When next he sees Tawny, she doesn't remember being with him at all, and is with another man.
Trevor soon realizes that Dr. Allison, whom he is talking to, is really a hallucination, when the janitor doesn't see her.
It soon becomes apparent that Trevor was not a good man, and was conspiring with his friend Bret to kill Kirsty for her inheritance of Larry and Frank's money. Gwen is said to be dead, and Trevor is suspected for the murders. Only Detective Lange believes he is innocent. Later, Trevor has a nightmare about Bret getting angry at him because their plan was to kill Kirsty and make it look like a suicide, but instead he drove the car into the river to drown her. Bret shoots himself before Trevor wakes up. Later, he has another nightmare about Sage trying to kill him, and when awake he finds her dead, stabbed in the head.
Detective Lange enters the room and tells Trevor that it is not his lucky day, because a body was found in the river and Lange takes him to the morgue to see, in the process revealing that he and Detective Givens are the same person, created by Pinhead. Trevor enters the morgue and sees a dead body with a sheet over it. He is about to remove the sheet when Pinhead traps him with hooked chains and shows what really happened. When Trevor made Kirsty solve the Lament Configuration so Pinhead would kill her, finding Trevor bland compared to one who escaped him before, Kirsty offered him five souls in exchange for her own. She killed Gwen, Tawny, Sage, and Bret all by shooting them in the head, and Pinhead took their souls. Pinhead says that only four would not satisfy the deal, and reveals that in the car Kirsty shot Trevor in the head, which was what caused him to crash, and Kirsty was the one who survived. Trevor removes the sheet and finds his own body lying there, and realizes he was the fifth soul, and was in hell the entire time.
On Earth, after the car crash, Kirsty says Trevor shot himself, and he is believed to have killed the others when the bullets will be matched to the gun. Everyone from Trevor's hell exists in reality, including Allison and Lange, and the surgeon from his nightmares is really a coroner. The film ends with Kirsty walking away with the Lament Configuration.
Cast[]
- Dean Winters as Trevor Gooden
- William S. Taylor as Detective Mike Lange
- Michael Rogers as Detective Givens
- Doug Bradley as Pinhead / Merchant (as Doug Bradley/Charles Stead)
- Trevor White as Bret
- Rachel Hayward as Dr. Allison Dormeer
- Sarah-Jane Redmond as Gwen Stevens
- Ashley Laurence as Kirsty Cotton-Gooden
- Jody Thompson as Tawny
- Kaaren de Zilva as Sage
- Dale Wilson as Chief Surgeon / Surgeon Cenobite
- Ken Camroux as Dr. Ambrose
- Brenda McDonald as Angular Nurse
Production[]
Writer Michael Lent gained attention for a spec script he had written and was invited by the Weinstein brothers to pitch on the fifth installment of the Hellraiser franchise. Lent's story "The Hellseeker" began with a fire at a remote radio station turned hacker laboratory. There is at least one survivor, a severely burned John Doe, later named Miller Rix. A game designer named Blink is also missing. Rix does not remember who he is, as he slowly recovers from his injuries. A fragment of a Cenobite claw embedded in his body, causes him to be haunted by horrific images as his memories are gradually restored. Rix hunts for his own identity, pursued by the police and the Cenobites, he has a chance to be new person or be caught by his past and the literal demons who seek to claim him. Blink returns and tells Miller about the Hellraiser game they had hacked into and his plan to release it globally. The script went through many drafts and Doug Aarniokoski was brought on as director, but he left to direct Highlander: Endgame. Several executives connected to the project at Miramax/Dimension had been fired, and the project was pushed back from fifth to potentially the sixth Hellraiser film. Lent completed his obligations, and offered to work something out if further drafts were needed but the project went silent. The next thing Lent heard about it was that a film titled "Hellseeker" was filming in Canada. Although the two projects had some similarities the film that was eventually produced was very different from what Lent had written, "everything that happens after the first eight or ten minutes was not anything that I would have ever envisioned".
After the relative success of Hellraiser: Inferno in 2000, Dimension Films hired Carl V. Dupre and Tim Day to write a sequel, and Rick Bota direct. At Bota's suggestion, the script was rewritten to include the first film's protagonist Kirsty Cotton, who had been absent from the series since a cameo appearance in the third film. Although it initially appeared Ashley Laurence would not be able to reprise the role, Doug Bradley informed her of the film and she agreed to return. After filming completed Bota decided against the wishes of the studio to screen a workprint of the film for Clive Barker, who provided notes and suggestions for the film's third act. The film's original climax, written by Bradley, was ultimately edited out of the film.
Release[]
The film was released on VHS and DVD on October 15, 2002. The film debuted on the Blu-ray format for the first time on July 17, 2012 by Echo Bridge Entertainment.
Reception[]
Based on 8 reviews, the film received a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 3.6 out of 10.
Richard Scheib of Moria called the movie "quite an oddity". He stated that "Hellseeker would have worked much more effectively if it were not a Hellraiser film, one suspects" and rated it two and a half stars out of five.
Scot Weinberg of eFilmCritic stated in the film's review: "Though a marked improvement over its two immediate forefathers, Hellseeker suffers from the same maladies as the cheapies that came before: muddled storytelling, turgid pacing, unconvincing acting performances, and an overall sense of filmmakers simply not trying all that hard". He described the film's finale as being "culled directly from cult-fave Jacob's Ladder" and rated the movie one star out of five. FilmThreat said it "rarely does it cross the mediocrity line from TV movie to feature film" and "all the cutbacks prove to make "H6" neither interesting nor involving".
According to writer Tim Day, Clive Barker enjoyed an early version of the film, calling it his favorite in the series since Hellraiser 3.
Trivia[]
- This is the only film where Pinhead never directly kills anyone. (It is believed the Pillar of Souls was his means of hiding in Hellraiser II, and he killed the worker).
- This is also the only Hellraiser film to feature Ocean voice actors (as many horror movies do). Dale Wilson is the chief surgeon/coroner, and Alec Willows is the janitor.
External links[]
- Hellraiser: Hellseeker at Wikipedia
- Hellraiser: Hellseeker at IMDb