Room 6 (DVD)

Room Six is generally not the kind of horror movie I like — it's not very original, it's repetitive, there are zombies, and it has lesbian love scenes thrown in for no apparent reason. That's usually a recipe for disaster in my grimoire.

But the movie is directed with obvious affection and gusto by Michael Hurst, and it's well-acted by two people I genuinely like to watch on film: Jerry O'Connell and Christine Taylor. The "scary-face" horror bugaboos (reminiscent of everything from Jacob's Ladder to The Exorcism of Emily Rose), while repetitive, are fun every damn time. The dialogue is sometimes clunky, but it's certainly no worse than most movies of this ilk.

The movie, a rare one actually filmed in Los Angeles on location (and in a real hospital), follows the story of Amy (Christine Taylor), a hard-working young woman whose boyfriend, Nick (Shane Brolly), has proposed marriage. She's overwhelmed and can't answer right away — but sometimes life throws curveballs and as it turns out, she is literally prevented from giving him an answer after the two of them are in a car wreck and separated by fate. Amy, along with the driver of the other vehicle (Jerry O'Connell), go on a search through reality and unreal dimension — and some pretty creepy hospitals — to find her boyfriend, and his sister.

Upon impact Amy enters a netherworld where she is haunted by visions of evil faces superimposed on normal ones (we've seen this in lots of movies, but in my mind nobody's done a better job of using this device than Dean R. Kootz in his novel Twilight Eyes).

Meanwhile, we see the flipside to her horror as Nick is laid up in a strange, scary hospital with a badly broken leg. The nurses range from porn-star pretty (Stacy Fuson, Katie Lohmann, Jill Montgomery) to horrendously wicked (Mary Pat Gleason), his fellow patients (John Billingsley) are dropping like flies, and we haven't even gotten to the hospital food yet.

Small roles played by Kane Hodder (famous as a horror stuntman, and as Jason Voorhees), Chloe Moretz (the little girl from the Amityville Horror remake), and Ellie Cornell (all the House of the Dead films) are more than welcome.

In the end, the keys to the hospital and to Amy's past are entwined — but solving the mystery could cost her her life.

Despite a low budget and some very noticeable continuity errors, Room 6 is a surprisingly fast-paced spooky ghost movie with good makeup effects, buckets of blood, and solid performances in keeping with the characters.

The DVD includes spirited commentary from Hurst and screenwriter Mark Altman, plus an extensive making-of featurette which should fascinate genre fans — the location, L.A.'s Linda Vista Hospital, is the site of many other horror movies and there are quite a few arguments as to the fact that it is indeed haunted. (Here is mine.)

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Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson