America’s favorite sadomasochistic pin cushion is back in the saddle, hooks and all, in “Hellraiser VI: Hellseeker,” another unworthy follow-up to the modestly scary and well-crafted, Clive Barker-directed “Hellraiser” from 1987. Therefore with “Hellrasier 6,” lots of confusion and silly slasher joke writing is raised, but not much hell, in any sixth sense of the word.
Trevor Cotton (Dean Winters) is left shaken after he loses his wife Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) in a car accident. Trying to return to normal life is hard for Trevor, especially when he begins hallucinating and pounding out nightmarish visions of the Cenobites, led by supreme nasty Pinhead, whose face resembles that of a soccer ball crossed with the contents of an acupuncturist’s junk drawer.
As it so happens, Pinhead has plans for Trevor’s fate and so does the magical puzzle box, which has been the connecting tissue in the previous five “Hellraiser” films. Director Rick Bota, whose best work has previously been photographing many episodes of HBO’s “Tales From the Crypt,” keeps viewers at a severed arm’s length, and although his effort isn’t mired in excessive gore, the requisite festoons of rotting flesh and maggots are still on display.
Writers Carl Dupre and Tim Day’s script likes to walk the fine line between fantasy and reality, but rarely does it cross the mediocrity line from TV movie to feature film. Even the sets stay, the majority of the film, grounded on Earth, unlike previous prequels, which ventured into nether worlds. Here, all the cutbacks prove to make “H6” neither interesting nor involving. This is simply “Hellraiser” warmed over.
