Hellraiser 6: Hellseeker
I must admit, I had high hopes going into this sixth installment of the franchise, as it was advertised as featuring the return of Ashley Laurence as Kirsty Cotton, the brave, beautiful heroine of parts 1 and 2. Unfortunately, the character barely receives only about ten minutes of screen time, and is actually removed from the story in the opening scene in a quite dramatic way. This means that the actual lead role in the film is that of her husband, Trevor, played by Dean Winters: As bland as a slice of wonderbread and possessing a lack of charisma to boot, I found myself drawn more and more out of the story as director Rick Bota insists on giving us HIS story, and even worse is the fact that the film basically repeats the premise (and twist) of Part 5 in giving us a story once again patterned after Jacob’s Ladder, as his world starts to become undone by nightmarish, demonic hallucinations, even if the viewer is hard-pressed to care (at least Craig Sheffer in Part 5 had a bit of presence). Worse, the story unfolds in a similar way to Memento, as Winters suffers from amnesia concerning the events leading up to the film, with spotty clues throughout rendering much of the story incomprehensible. Yes, Doug Bradley’s Pinhead does appear, but ever since the departure of writer Pete Atkins in Part 4, the Pope Of Hell’s dialogue has gone from being deliciously sinister to rather dull and mundane, with uninspiring lines of drivel about the nature of evil. While there are some good ideas at play here, such as Pinhead appearing at one point just in a puddle of water or a female doctor whose overly sympathetic nature is eerily explained in the final scene, much of what we see is just hellish imagery for the sake of it, and the film also features an alarming shortage of gore which means it’s perfectly suited to air uncut on the Sci-Fi Channel. Finally, one has to come back around to the character of Kirsty, once up there with Laurie Strode and Nancy Thompson as one of the greatest horror heroines, who has now been utterly ruined due to decisions on the filmmaker’s part as to her role in the story, not only reducing her screentime but making what she does have to do here extremely questionable. Overall, a film I looked greatly forward to, if only they hadn’t sold out their lead heroine…
4/10