• Directed by Michael Hurst
• Written by Michael Hurst and Mark A. Altman
• Starring
  • Christine Taylor
  • Shane Brolly
  • Chloe Moretz
  • Jerry O’Connell
  • Ellie Cornell
• Produced by Mark A. Altman and Mark Gottwald

This review contains both spoilers and SPOILERS. The major SPOILERS are, in time-honored fashion, obscured so that you can skip ‘em if you want to. However, there are so many minor spoilers mentioned that to hide them all would leave this review looking like it was redacted by the NSA, and nobody wants that. So consider yourself warned.

Room 6 is another horror flick made specifically for release throough Anchor Bay Entertainment. As with previous movies so released that I’ve reviewed (here and here), it’s a very professional production; it’s amazing what $2 million in the hands of competent professionals can do. Also as with the two movies cited, it’s not exactly an original story; after all, if you have a stunningly original plot, you throw together the financing for theatrical release, not D2DVD. (Or, if it’s like sooooo stunning that the masses just won’t get it, you move to France and get the government to finance it.) The goal in these movies isn’t originality so much as novelty. It’s all elements you’ve seen before, but hopefully you at least won’t see them coming. In this regard, Room 6 is a little less successful than the other two; not only are some of the “shocking” twists telegraphed a little too early for fans familiar with the genre, but by the end the revelatory twists unravel what they’re supposed to explain.

Nostril hairs — of doom!!

It’s easy to see (even without the confirmation in the making-of documentary) that the idea was sold on the strength of the first scene: pretty blonde Amy (Christine Taylor) wakes up in an operating room, unable to move or speak but completely aware of the medical personnel prepping her. Desperately she tries to alert the doctors that she is both conscious and sensate, finally managing to twitch a finger enough to knock a scalpel from a tray. But her relief is short-lived: the evil-looking Nurse Holiday (Mary Pat Gleason) leans over her and informs her that they know she’s awake — they want it that way.

Of course, it’s all a dream. Amy awakens safe in bed with her longtime boyfriend Nick (Shane Brolly). She’s a schoolteacher, he’s a professional something-or-other, and they’re what people refer to these days as a “committed couple” — so much so that Nick spends half the morning trying to propose to her in a way that will register on her radar. (Hint, ladies: If he’s been talking about how great the last four years have been and then gets down on his knees, start paying attention. Don’t wait for him to actually pull out the ring before that little bell sounds in your head.)

But Amy’s got issues. Commitment issues, wrapped up in family issues, wrapped up in hospital issues. Amy hates hospitals, due to a deep dark secret that she’ll naturally have to face in the final reel. And no, I don’t consider that either an uppercase or a lowercase spoiler. When you’ve got a movie about a demonic hospital, Screenwriting 101 says that your protagonist should be someone who hates hospitals. (The commitment thing is a bonus.)

Okay: Foreshadowing nightmare, troubled protagonist with a hidden secret… What’s missing? That’s right, a spooky child who says cryptic yet prophetic things. I mean, it’s got to be either a child or a Native American, and since Amy’s a schoolteacher, kids are in ready supply. (If she were an agent of the Bureau of Indian Affairs who hated hospitals, though, you can bet it would be an all-knowing medicine man.) In this case, the child is Melissa (Chloe Grace Moretz), the introverted child of an economically-disadvantaged family, who draws pictures of warped monsters during art class and whispers things about terrible dreams and what we’ve done to deserve them.

“If only you hadn’t proposed to me, our lives wouldn’t have immediately turned to crap!”

With all that established, let’s get on with the movie! Because this would all be a Gen-X drama if it weren’t for the traffic accident that Nick and Amy get into just after he picks her up. She’s alright, but Nick has a broken leg; similarly, Lucas (Jerry O’Connell), driving the other vehicle, is just fine, but his sister in the passenger seat is roughed up. Amy watches in panic as an ambulance drives up and extracts Nick, trundles him in the back, and drives off without mentioning what hospital they’re taking him to. (It would be kind of me to say that the sudden transitions from cloud to sun to rain in this scene add to the surreal quality, but let’s be honest: Sometimes the weather doesn’t cooperate with location shooting.) It takes all Amy’s nerve to hop in a cab and go to the nearest hospital, but they’ve got no record of any ambulance admittance. Soon she meets up with Lucas, who’s sister was also spirited away in an ambulance, and they start calling all the local hospitals to no avail.

Meanwhile, Nick is being treated by the same doctors and same Nurse Holiday that we saw in Amy’s dream. (But because Nick didn’t see the dream, he only knows that his leg hurts like hell, and that the nurse is terribly homely.) He soon starts to realize that his sense of unease is something more than the medications talking: There are only two other patients in his recovery ward, neither of whom seem willing or able to say how long they’re been there, or even what they were admitted for. There are no windows, or any other sign of the outside world. Amy never shows up to see how he is. Aside from Nurse Holiday, the nurses are all hot. (Not necessarily a bad thing, but still hella unusual.) And they seem awful devoted to taking blood tests.

It would be easy at this stage to think that we’re watching a medical thriller about organ harvesting or somesuch. But that doesn’t take into account Amy’s weird visions. She starts catching glimpses of malformed, demonic creatures who sometimes disappear or merely seem to be normal people in the next second. Then they start speaking to her, hissing things like, “Leave him! He’s with us now!” The police are no help; apparently there’ve been enough of these mysterious ambulance disappearance reports lately that they’ve started considering them a massive practical joke on the police. All Amy has is Lucas to help her search (but who doesn’t see the demons), a cab driver who knows her name without her being told, and the whispered name of St. Rosemary’s, a hospital that burned down over a half-century ago, after nasty rumors of ritualistic doctors started circulating.

AAAHHH!! It’s a demonic homeless guy, with Jerry O’Connell’s head growing out of his shoulder!!

I hope you’ve been keeping track of the obligatory elements so far. A sinister hospital, waking dreams that only the protagonist can see, and worst of all, an evil force which seems bent on revealing itself to the protagonist and gaining her attention by telling her to leave it alone. As I think we all know from being forcefed a diet of Scooby-Doo adventures in our youth, there’s nothing that attracts interest and investigation like trying to scare people off. Yet here, as in so many horror movies, the pernicious forces of darkness seem to concentrate their efforts on dropping clues for the protagonist and stringing her along until she has enough knowledge to confront the evil, whereas simply ignoring her would have left her ignorant of what she’s up against.

With that said, it’s time to leap into the major spoilers:

<spoiler>The final twist to Room 6 is that it’s a movie in the vein of Carnival of Souls or Jacob’s Ladder: Everything after the crash is a vision or spiritual odyssey, in which cosmic forces are testing Amy to see if she’s got the strength to come to terms with what happened with her father in the hospital so long ago. Once that becomes clear, then it’s suddenly less annoying that the Forces O’ Evil keep getting in her face, as they are part of the elaborate scenario devised specifically to test Amy.

On the other hand, that final twist creates its own set of problems. The lesser one is that Amy is not only being tested on whether she’s got the moral fortitude to confront her Deep Dark Shame, but also whether she’s got the correct mindset to entertain stories of a mysterious demonic hospital with an address in the netherworld which abducts accident victims. I’d certainly object to having my final reward determined by how closely I adhere to the behavior of the standard horror movie protagonist.

Hel-LOOOO, nurse!

But that objection pales in comparison to the huge story relevance problem now created. When Amy finally “wakes up” to find herself dying in the vehicle with Nick, he hasn’t experienced any of the multi-day drama in which Amy was trying to find him in the hospital that doesn’t exist; she’s the only one that has experienced it. But from the time of the crash until this waking-up scene, half of what we’ve been watching has been Nick on the inside, trying to figure out what’s up with his panicked fellow patients and with the nurses taking blood samples for their lesbian orgies. These events weren’t anything which Amy was ever involved in, but as the real-world Nick knows nothing of amy’s teleological testing, that means that these are events which none of the characters actually experience in any sense. It’s filler, with no bearing on the resolution of the plot. There IS no Nick in the hospital, and showing scenes from the point of view of a character who doesn’t exist makes no sense.

What’s worse, this problem could have been solved very easily, if when Amy wakes up, Nick had also blinked awake, and made some comment which meant that he, too, had been involved in her visions. That alone would have justified (or at least allowed for) all of the scenes of him hobbling down green-tiled corridors and spying on supply closets full of lesbian nurses.</spoiler>

There. Let it never be said that Cold Fusion Video Reviews skimps on the spoiler content.

“Whoa! WHOA! Watch the hands there, sport!”

In concentrating almost entirely on story concerns, I’ve neglected any commentary on the technical qualities of the movie. Really, I have very little to say; these original Anchor Bay D2DVD features are uniformly competent, with a $2 million budget which rarely shows any straining against budgetary limitations. Granted, there’s no way that that ugly green-tiled hospital is from the early half of the 20th century; it looks like a hell designed in the middle of the ’60s or ’70s. But by the same token, the technical competence of the production lives or dies by the strength of the story, and in this case, the simple mix-mastering of familiar horror movie elements fails to yield a narrative which enlarges upon or departs from the precedents on which it draws.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 5
• breasts: 8
• explosions: 0
• dream sequences: 3 (including one double-wake dream), plus a variety of waking hallucinations)
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 2
  • John Billingsley (“Harrison McKendrick,” one of Nick’s hospital-mates) played Dr. Phlox on Enterprise
  • Susan Dalian (“Carolyn”) played “Ensign Kaplan” in three episodes of Voyager