HELLRAISER: HELLSEEKER

Trevor wakes up in the hospital after several days in a coma: his last memory is a car accident in which he falls with his girlfriend already from a bridge and his vain attempt to save the girl from the waters. But the police inform Trevor that there is no trace of his girlfriend! From that moment on, Trevor's life turns into a nightmare wide awake: the people around him start dying in strange and violent circumstances, he can no longer distinguish reality from fantasy, and the police's suspicions begin to focus on him. Digging into his memory, Trevor manages to trace his delusions back to the purchase of a strange cube, taken before the accident in a second-hand shop. With four years of delay, it is also distributed in Italy, only for the home video market, the sixth chapter of the long saga started by Clive Barker in 1987 (today we are already at the eighth film). That of "Hellraiser" is a saga that seemed to have fallen into repetitive nonsense, marked only by some good gore finds, and by an extreme taste for makeup and sets, already from the second film, to reappear in a more than decent way with a fifth film ("Hellraiser: Inferno") mature and anguishing that had definitely changed the narrative register compared to the canons of the saga. Rick Bota, the director of this "Hellraiser: Hellseeker", tries to adhere as much as possible to the formula staged by Derrickson in number five, giving rise to a mix between the psychological thriller and the bloody horror in the style of Barker. However, this sixth adventure soon runs out of breath because it steps too hard on the psychological film pedal, irreparably descending into boredom and repetition, marked here and there only by some good gore scenes (very realistic the brain operation); everything then seems to function in view of an "effect" ending in which an attempt is made to leave the viewer stunned, but, due to a not very original solution, the effect only succeeds in part. A major flaw of this film is to leave the presence of the Cenobites and their leader Pinhead totally in the shadows, relegating them to the appearance in very few scenes and sewing the story of the Lemarchand cube in a somewhat forced way, as if the subject of the film had not initially been thought to belong to the "Hellraiser" saga. However, it may please fans of the saga to find Ashley Laurence in the role of Kristy, a character already appeared in the first two episodes. In short, "Hellraiser: Hellseeker" is a film composed of continuous ups and downs that leave the viewer undecided whether to promote or fail the film: the supporters of the Cenobites and the infernal Barker saga will probably be disappointed to discover that in this film there is really little of Cenobites and hell; the followers of horror cinema in general, on the other hand, will be disappointed to witness a weak story with often boring development. In short, we don't know who to recommend it to!