Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002) (V)

The beginning of the fifth Hellraiser sequel raises something of a moral dilemma, which is extremely rare for a horror movie. After the car crash, Trevor, our hero, escapes from the car after it sinks to the bottom of the river and he rushes to the surface to get air, then returns to attempt to save his wife. At that point, my immediate reaction was that he deserves any suffering that comes to him, since he left his wife on the bottom of the river to go and try to save himself. On the other hand, it probably wouldn't have done much good had he remained down there and lost consciousness right there with her. I guess that's why they tell you on the airlines to secure your own oxygen mask and THEN help your kid.

But while this early scene inspired in me an unusually complex combination of thoughts and emotions, it unfortunately is unable to escape from the destructive presence of reality on the possibility of it happening the way it did. I am willing to suspend disbelief on the premise that the guy was screaming at his wife underwater through the window, watching her drown right in front of his blurred eyes and therefore not necessarily able to think all that clearly, but on the other hand, riverbeds have an overwhelming tendency to be covered with big, round, hard, window-breaking rocks.

When the investigation begins, things start to get a little strange and we begin to realize that there is something weird about what happened in that crash. Evidently the car was found with the doors open, which puts some serious holes in the story about not being able to get the doors open to save his wife. It turns out that he has come back with a spotted memory, and that the crash that we saw at the beginning of the movie may not have been exactly how the event unfolded. Things seem to have happened that he doesn't remember.

I found it highly amusing that the detective that always gave him a hard time because he didn't believe his story was named Detective Gibbons, just because I recently took an Anthropology class in which I learned what a `gibbon' is. I would NOT have been able to keep my cool with this guy though, who was hugely overacting and throwing harsh accusations which were not necessarily unfounded but definitely a little too confident and, if accusations can be this, a little too accusatory.

The best thing about this installment in the Hellraiser series is that it works on a psychological level with the main character. Granted, this is nothing new in the horror genre, but it is done very well here. We never know when he is seeing reality, when he's dreaming, when he's having delusions, inaccurate flashbacks, and there is plenty of opportunity for lots of twists and turns, and thankfully these opportunities are not ignored. I hate it when movies do that (see Hollow Man). Because of this, we never expect things like the startlingly effecting scare in the vending machine, one of my favorite scares in the movie.

Pinhead has thankfully been given a much more prevalent role than he had in the rather disappointing Hellraiser Inferno, the least Hellraiser movie of all of them, and it's morbidly pleasing to see some of the familiar Cenobites return, like Chatterer. The movie closes with the old `leave him and take me' cliché, but as a whole it is a quality entry in the Hellraiser saga. It is well-written, well-thought out (almost unheard of for a horror movie these days), and entertaining, and most importantly, it is more than just another cash in on a successful series. There are a lot of horror series' that are well past their time to pass away, but as long as they keep putting this much thought and creativity into the Hellraiser films, I say there is infinite opportunity for sequels.