Hellraiser: Hellseeker
Ooh! I was so ready after the optimism triggered by Inferno to find myself beginning this review, “D’oh! And the hope dies …” but here, in a weird reversal of the, “oh crap, Alan Smithee,” moment during Bloodline’s opening credits – looky, looky, Kirsty’s back! But alas, that feeling kind of vanishes when, after about a minute’s screentime, she vanishes again for most of the movie.
It’s a good 30 minutes before Pinhead shows up proper too, and the rest of the movie is too much like Inferno for its own good. It feels like it was written stream-of-consciousness style with no rewrites – one thing after another, “and then he woke up again and that thing that happened hadn’t happened yet,” like those stupid online continuous interactive stories (ok, I’m a guilty contributor to some of those, but I don’t ask anyone to pay me for my brainfarts) – and I don’t know, maybe Inferno feels that way too if I went back to it now – but at least there it hadn’t been done yet in the series.
In any case, any benefit of the doubt I was willing to give the movie goes out the window when Kirsty finally returns for the last ten minutes of the movie. It almost looks like there might be a final neat closure to her story – but then the film makers ask us to believe she would doom 5 other people to hell before herself. Now, I don’t know how I’d react faced with eternal pain the likes of which I’ve never known; but I don’t want to believe that Kirsty would make the deal she makes, and I can’t imagine any other fans of the first couple of movies being any different. Sure you can justify it like, yes, what she’s been through would kind of explain her being out of her mind, and of course, “hell hath no fury …” ... but, like I said … I really didn’t feel Kirsty was that woman. It’s an insult to one of the few stronger horror heroines (horruines?) to end her story this way, and it basically kills the movie for me. It seems to me that if they got Ashley Laurence back Heather Langenkamp in New Nightmare stylee, and still had the stunningly loyal Doug Bradley onboard as Pinhead, they really should’ve held out for a better screenplay than this.