6 Degrees of Hell 2012 - REVIEW

There are a lot of things in horror films that I can pick out as an irritating factor. But none are more severe than getting hyped about a main character only to see him/her for maybe 10 out 90+ minutes. That's like ordering pepperoni on your pizza and getting canadian bacon instead... it's just not the same.

Six people and their lives are stitched together by a supernatural force that has laid claim to one of them. A Halloween haunted establishment is ground zero for a paranormal perfect storm inadvertently touched off by a seemingly random series of events.

The acting in this film is not bad. What's bad is when a character who spends very little time on screen outshines everyone else. That character would be Deputy Hendricks played by Brian Anthony Wilson. He is way under utilized in this film as most of his time is spent sitting across the table from Corey Feldman recounting the story of these six unfortunate people. Very much a waste of his talents in this reviewer's opinion. I would however like to mention Joe Raffa who took on the ambitious tasks of acting and directing. If he intentionally made his character an arrogant prick then he did a spot on job because he was definitely not my favorite of the bunch. The rest of the main cast, Nicole Cinaglia, Kyle Patrick Brennan, David J. Bonner and Brian Gallagher worked well with what they were given.

My biggest problem with this film lies in the first 60 minutes or so. The viewer is bombarded with one incomplete story line after another. There is so much going on in that first hour that I had to start the film over again just to get a clear vision of what direction it was taking. We're introduced to one under developed character after another and the transitions between them is so flawed that it's really a struggle to keep up with who's who and what story line goes where. At one point I even got two of the characters confused because everything was so muddled that I couldn't keep up. The story is being told by Wilson's character so in essence the entire film is a flashback. Then you have flashbacks in the flashback that give you peeks into each individual character. It's just soooooo much! Information and set up is key to getting good characters but in this case they just tried to do too much in too short of a time without ever really getting a good foothold. 

All that said, the last 30 minutes are a rip roaring good time with a high body count and decent effects. But for me it was too late by then. I've said it before and I'll say it again, without a solid, well built story, everything else just falls apart. Would I watch this again? The answer is an emphatic no. Would I recommend this to anyone else? Well, it's all a matter of taste I guess. I literally just had a conversation with someone today who doesn't think a good story is necessary for a film as long as everything else... execution, score, style, etc is good... so it's possible this person would enjoy it. I'm not saying it's all bad, if you can make it through the first hour and not look back you may find it's an enjoyable film.