5/5 Satisfied
  by Ashley (Dullsville, Tennessee)
Bought this DVD for a present to a friend. Packaging was in good order, dvd was like new, shipping was fast and with no problems at all.

4/5 Reheated Hell, With Extra Evil
  by Mark Eremite (Seoul, South Korea)
Ahhhh. Hellraiser's back! Kinda. The title of this installment is HELLRAISER / HELLSEEKER. Yes. One hellraiser divided by one hellseeker. It turns out, that equals one pretty good movie, but without that much hell getting raised.

The hellseeker here is Trevor, who just so happens to be married to Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence, reprising her role from the first two Hellraisers). They're a little too much in love, because they smooch while highway driving and, oops!, drive straight off a bridge and into a river. Trevor manages get out of the car, but Kirsty isn't so fortunate. She yanks on her seatbelt and bangs her palms on the window, but those things apparantly don't, you know, unlatch seatbelts or doors. Trevor swims back to save her, but since the only thing he does is also bang on the window with his palms, the door never opens, and Kirsty drowns. It's unsettling. And also not a spoiler.

After that, Trevor's life gets weird. You know. HELLRAISER-weird. Kirsty's body is never found. Detectives begin hounding him suspiciously. People at work are acting weird. And dang it if he isn't having some pretty upsetting hallucinations. Dean Winters' Trevor stumbles through it all at a numb remove, too slow-witted to understand anything, but also too poorly acted to be anything more than a figurehead for the audience's own confusion.

Because the movie isn't impatient to make any sense. Scene two (roughly five minutes in) and the roller coaster is already barrelling down the first nauseating drop. At this point, I glumly realized I had the movie figured out. But then, just as quickly, I realized I didn't. Then I did. Then I didn't. And we danced. The movie definitely keeps you on your toes.

Also definite is that the plot of HELLSEEKER is almost too similar to that of the fifth film. In both, flawed protagonists are forced to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of their lives, but the pieces are as dangerous as actual jigsaws. In INFERNO, the picture on that puzzle wasn't hard to get, even long before all the pieces were in place. HELLSEEKER, on the other hand, paints a far more satisfying picture, even if it does so at an indulgent, devil-may-care pace.

No movie since the fourth has really taken full advantage of the possiblities inherent in the Hellraiser mythos (and I'm not counting the third film, a campy misstep that was for Hellraiser what Joel Schumacher was for Batman), and HELLSEEKER is no different. Our resident demon (Cenobite?), Pinhead, is still not much more than a color commentator. When he finally shows up in this film, he is introduced by a glowing crack in the wall that is shaped like an upside-down question mark. Get it? He's the Anti-Question, the answer, the deux ex machina (how ironic!). In other words, he's not really living (or killing) up to his potential. It's convenient. Even a little shameless. But it's also fun, fast, and dark enough to creep out the coroner.

1/5 Another Weak Sequel To A Once Promising Franchise
  by Derrick Dunn (Woodbridge,VA)
Hellraiser: Heatseeker is a film that I wanted to enjoy. I thought the first direct to video Hellraiser sequel was decent but this one is just patheic consdering it has Ashley Laurence in it. I would only say you see this film if you need a movie to fall asleep on.

4/5 HELLRAISER PART 6
  by MARCOLA (Somewhere in Time...)
This movie was good, just not as good as Part 1&2.
This series was at it's best back when Clive Barker
was making the movies.
It seems that every movie you see less & less of Pinhead.
I would say it has a good storyline, but not as good as Clive Barker's
original creation in Part 1 & 2!!
I rate this DVD a 7 from 1to10!!

2/5 What might have been?
  by M. G Watson (Los Angeles)
Sometimes I think the whole HELLRAISER series is actually a series of metaphors about us, its fans. In the films, some fool goes out and obtains the box, brings it home with high hopes as to what it will do for him, and is brutally disappointed. Substitute "movie" for "box" and you have our collective history. We know in advance what fate awaits us when we rent a HELLRAISER film, but we do it anyway. People like us keep Pinhead - that is, the studio suits who grind these flicks out twice a year - in latex and chains.

Ne'er has a concept for a horror series been cooler, or offered a richer and more complex backstory, than did HR. And seldom has that concept been more badly and consistently bungled in execution, leading not merely to films which were weird, flawed and not what they should have been, but in some cases unwatchably bad and stupid. HELLSEEKER is somewhere between the two of these categories. It aspires to great heights, combining plot elements from films like MOMENTO and ANGEL HEART, but as it's carried out it's just a mess - confusing, disjointed, boring, and unpleasant to watch.

HELLSEEKER is the story of Trevor Gooden (Dean Winters, the best thing about HBO's prison opera, OZ), a seemingly ordinary suit-`n-tie office drone who nearly died in a car accident which may, or may not, have killed his wife Kirsty (Ashley Lawrence, reprising that role for the fourth time). Gooden, whose head was badly injured when his car went bye-bye into a river, can't remember what happened to her, and the cops can't find her body. Gooden is anxious to discover his wife's fate - especially since said cops don't believe his story - but he's plagued by chronic pain and an almost continuous series of hallucinations which make him seem guilty of something more than careless driving. When the people around him begin to turn up horribly murdered, Gooden begins to hallucinate about a puzzle box and a certain highly stylizied demon with nails in his mug and a penchant for torture. But who did what to whom, and why...and what really happened to Kirsty?

Like I said, the story aspires to be much more than the standard spatter-`n-splatter horrorthon. And on a few levels, it succeeds. For starters, Ashley Lawrence is not only one of those women who gets hotter as she gets older, but her acting skills have improved dramatically over the years, and while her screen time is limited she has more to do than scream and run away from demons. Stylistically, the movie is appropriately noirish - everything looks washed out, shadowy and run-down, precisely the way a HR film should look. And certain events in the movie's climax are pleasantly reminiscent of "Incident at Owl Creek Bridge" and "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty" in their mind-frakking, falling-into-place quality. But these things can't overcome the film's basic problems, a short list of which would include sluggish pacing, confusing, epilepsy-inducing editing, a completely confusing storyline, listless direction, a forgettable script, and needless departures from the HR series mythology (how, for example, can Pinhead lay claim to souls who did not ever use the Box and were murdered in an ordinary way?). The biggest mistake the editor made was the decision to keep the hallucinations going full-clip throughout the flick, rather than having them build slowly over its course: the end result is a disjointed, eye-glazing orgy of what Hollywood types call "frame-[expletive]ing", whose relatively satisfying and well-executed climax won't help the people who pressed "stop" on the remote after forty-five frustrating minutes.

I realize it's chump-ism to expect that HELLRAISER movies will be "good" in the classic sense of the word. The budgets are too low, and the talent levels of the people involved are too inconsistent to produce anything spectacular. But when a concept is this good, when you have a director with some aesthetic sense who clearly is trying hard, and when you can get solid, respectable actors like Winters to play your leads, the end result should be much better. The real "puzzle" here is why I keep coming back for more. I guess, like Pinhead, "I prefer pain."