Behind the Couch

2006 Dir. Rick Bota Two years after the death of their friend, who died while playing an online game based on the Hellraiser mythology, a group of teenagers find their own lives endangered. Accepting an invitation to an underground rave party at an isolated mansion, they’re told by their sinister host that the Cenobites and the puzzle box of Hellraiser infamy are actually real. Before long, the gamers are picked off one by one as nightmarish fantasies become entwined with disturbing reality... The eighth instalment of the on-going Hellraiser series, Hellworld , like Deader before it, didn’t actually start out as a Hellraiser film. Based on a story by Joel Soisson (writer of Mimic 2, Hollow Man 2 , and various Prophecy sequels) called The Dark Can’t Breathe , Hellworld unfolds as a strange and rather bland fusion of slasher flick and creaky haunted house yarn. The narrative essentially consists of teens partying at a spooky mansion, splitting up to explore said mansion, ve...

2005 Dir. Rick Bota When a tough investigative journalist begins researching a bizarre underground cult, dabbling in necromancy and the resurrection of the dead, she becomes embroiled in a nightmarish world in which her very soul is at stake… The seventh film in the franchise, Deader wasn’t actually written as a Hellraiser film. An existing spec script by Th13teen Ghosts co-scribe Neal Marshall Stevens had elements of the Hellraiser mythology added to it by Tim Daly (co-writer of the dreary Hellseeker ). And it sort of shows. Much like Inferno and Hellseeker , it feels cobbled together in a lazy attempt to keep the franchise afloat; the overtly ' Hellraiser ' moments a clunky afterthought. That said, it’s certainly a marked improvement on the prior instalment, and at the heart of proceedings twitches a genuinely interesting concept - an underground goth cult experimenting with suicide, necromancy and resurrection. These are themes that were dealt with in Barker’s o...

2002 Dir. Rick Bota When Kirsty Cotton and her husband are involved in a horrifying car crash, she is declared missing and presumed dead. Her husband Trevor, a shady businessman, attempts to piece together the details of the crash in an attempt to find her. Suffering from severe head injuries, amnesia and horrifying dreams in which he is tortured by the demonic Pinhead, Trevor soon realises that all is not as it seems, as he spirals into a personal hell of his own making… The sixth instalment of the Hellraiser series, and the second to go straight to DVD, Hellseeker was apparently an attempt to emulate Barker’s original film. Director Bota, and writers Carl V. Dupré and Tim Day, had actually wanted to involve Clive Barker in the production, but were allegedly advised against this by Dimension, who wanted to continue moving the series in a new, Barker-free direction. Bota and co set about fashioning a film that would remain faithful to the tone of Barker’s original, and ...