The sixth installment in the series and the return of original final girl from the first movies, Ashley Laurence as Kirsty Cotton. Seeing that this movie would be tied in some way to the original movies gave me at least a small amount of hope that maybe they would attempt to return to some semblance of what made the first couple movies interesting. Given that I have been, if not impressed, at least somewhat surprised by how serviceable the straight to video outings for the series have been thus far; I was interested to see if the tie-in would help or hurt things. Also, I’ll just say there will be Spoilers below because I don’t care about maybe ruining these movies.

Many years after the events of the first Hellraiser, Kirsty and her husband Trevor Gooden end up going off the side of the road and into a river. Trevor manages to escape but Kirsty is trapped in the car and he can’t get her out. He then wakes up in the hospital a month later with seemingly no memory of what happened over the past month and no idea where his wife is. He is suffering from constant headaches and begins to have hallucinations where he can no longer distinguish reality from his nightmares. As memories slowly start to return, Trevor is forced to confront the awful things that he did during their marriage as he desperately tries to find his wife before the police take him in for murder or something far more sinister catches him first.

This movie is strange in that it really feels like a mix between the previous movie and the first one. We do at least return to the more deviant, sexual shit of the first one with our dirtbag protagonist having been a cheater that liked to videotape himself having rough sex with the people he was having affairs with. However, we also get the nonsense from Inferno where the Cenobites are doing psychological torture shit instead of, you know, actual hooks and chains torture. That said, the way this movie goes about it with the ending reveal makes it all much more satisfying and more in line with the franchise’s original feel than the previous movie. I wish they actually had Ashley Laurence on board when they started shooting instead of shoehorning her in along the edges because she was fun to have back.

Dean Winters as Trevor does a good job as being a fully believable scumbag that ends up feeling remorseful over his actions. Most of the other actors are fine outside of a few eyeroll moments. As is the problem with a lot the films in this franchise, the movie tends to suffer from a issue of laborious pacing. The whole surreal, Lynchian storytelling thing they did in Inferno is done a touch better here but still ends up coming off as kind of muddying the waters for the sake of itself rather than any real meaning most of the time. It’s wild to have a franchise be six movies deep at this point and still feel like it hasn’t actually found it’s voice. Or, rather, that it had a voice and keeps trying to establish different ones with every new installment.

This marks the last time Clive Barker would have any involvement with the direct to video movies and we shall see how that changes the quality.

Score: 2.5 out of 5