Really, people, if you have to tout your movie as a Corey Feldman vehicle, and he’s only in the damn thing for 10 minutes tops, you’re not giving me much hope for a fun ride. Or a good one. Or at least a tolerable one. Okay maybe this movie was sort of tolerable.
6 Degrees of Hell begins with a group of four friends as they go through a haunted hotel attraction. Kelly, Chris, Kellan, and June are only mildly amused/frightened by it but they’re having fun anyway. Afterwards they have a little private party where it comes out that June is psychic. Kelly wants a reading and immediately freaks out when June give an accurate description of Kelly’s birth. Then June starts mumbling something about doom and it’s coming and whatnot and Kelly assumes it’s all about her so boyfriend Chris has to talk her down from the ledge. When he goes to get Kelly a drink, leaving her all alone (uh oh), some white figure appears behind her and she promptly dies.
Switch over to present day and here is where we see Corey Feldman play Kyle Brenner, a paranormal investigator speaking to good cop, Hendricks, as he describes a horrific and unexplainable (unless you’re a believer) police case involving demons and possessions and that damned haunted hotel attraction. Which, as it turns out, was built over an old asylum where bad things happened. *eye roll*
So as Brenner smokes his electronic cigarette we are treated to the rest of the story. It involves three of the original four friends (because, you know, Kelly died) where Chris and June are married, and have the most lackluster sex ever, and Kellan is helping Jack, owner of the haunted hotel, redesign the attraction with actual cursed and haunted artifacts. Um, what?
Then throw in a paranormal investigative group, headed up by Erik Sanborn. He’s called to a home where the son is possessed by a demon who specifically asked for Erik to come see him. Turns out Erik’s sister was killed by this very demon years ago. Small world, eh?
Eventually Erik and June are in the hotel and share a psychic moment involving a vase that Erik’s sister owned right before her death. Several info dumps later we find out that vase was in the original asylum, it absorbed a lot of bad energy connected to the demon, and said demon needs to reach out and absorb the energy from six people in order to pass from the void (where it’s trapped) and open the door to Hell where it can call forth its friends and party like it 1999. June is the key because she is a very powerful psychic and she will eventually open the door between Hell and our world. And that would just suck.
There’s a lot of bad in this movie. For one, the picture quality is the worst I’ve ever seen. It looks like it was recorded on a VHS tape then copied to another one, and then that copy was transferred to DVD. I don’t know who’s fault that was, or if it was done on purpose, but don’t do that ever again. It’s awful.
Some of the dialogue is ridiculous and heavy handed. The good cop performs this enormously boring soliloquy about his gramma and the eyes are the window to the soul and how Kelly’s eyes were preserved pure blue by terror and blah blah blah. The bad cop is so fucking cliche as to go beyond amusing to just stupid. And I’m not even joking when I say the guy possessed by the demon said he needed six souls to ‘excape’ Hell. I shit you not. Let’s not even get into the over and under acting by almost everyone. And was the actor in the one of the final scenes lecturing me as he broke the 4th wall? Um, fuck you, buddy.
There was a lot of plot going on in this flick. A little too much. It was hard to keep track off what was what until about halfway through when things started to click. But even then it seemed the writers were trying too hard to be clever and develop too many intricate highways of intersecting stories and characters. It’s probably why there were 2 big info dump scenes - just too much going on to put into action.
Now let’s get to the good stuff (which isn’t really much). Not all the acting was terrible. I liked Kyle Brennan as Erik. He was a sympathetic character and he played it well. Joe Raffa (also editor, producer, and director) played an awesome douchebag. Got a little over the top but that was probably on purpose.
The scene where Erik and June share a psychic experience in witnessing the murder of Erik’s sister was completely disturbing. Even as I type this I keep replaying that scene over and over. I didn’t see it coming. It started out sweet and tender then the next thing you know there’s blood everywhere. I was sitting in my chair trying to shove my fists into my mouth to keep from screaming.
Over all there were a couple places in the flick where I stopped taking notes (because my memory is full of more holes than these Michigan winter roads) as I became engrossed in the action. But those hardly make up for the rest of this stink bomb.
1.5 Hatchets (out of 5)
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