Room 6 [Import]

Like most of you who have seen this 2006 horror film I checked it out because the trailer for it was popping up on a lot of other DVDs that I was watching. The implication was that there is a room in this particular hospital where the doctors and nurses do evil, wicked, bad and nasty things to patients. How that is the just the ground floor for this tottering Jenga of a horror film. Our heroine is Amy (Christine Taylor), who not only has nightmares about hospitals, she is having nightmares about the hospital in this movies. When she is not asleep and having nightmares Amy is a schoolteacher with one young student who makes weird comments and a tendency to look at people and suddenly see them as demons. Then Amy and her boyfriend Nick (Shane Brolly) are in an accident. A crowd stands and stares but offers no help and then an ambulance shows up to take Nick to the hospital. The problem is that when Amy tries to find Nick, he is in none of the hospitals in town. No, poor Nick is in the hospital that Amy has been seeing in her nightmares.

"Room 6" is one of those horror movies where they seem to be throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, and then that hits you smack in the head too. You have Nick in the hospital from hell, which could be enough to sustain a horror movie plot, but Amy is seeing things and doubting her sanity. Not only that, but she has a deep dark secret in her past, and there is a back story about St. Rosemary's Hospital, which burnt down many years ago. There is a little girl (Chloe Grace Moretz) with a touch of the supernatural, naked nurses finding fun things to do with blood, and Jerry O'Connell in the role of the only person who believes anything that Amy is saying but who is clearly too good to be true. There was so much going on in this movie as the script by Mark A. Altman and director Michael Hurst (the team that brought us "House of the Dead" and "House of the Dead 2: Dead Aim") kept pouring it on, that it was not until the second appearance of the taxi driver (Billy Gardell) that I finally started to get a handle on what was really happening.

You might enjoy "Room 6" more the second time through once you know how to "read" it properly. You might not agree with the point of the story once you know what it is, but it does offer an explanation as to how all of the seemingly disparate elements in this film fit together, especially for people weaned on "The Twilight Zone." On balance, I liked the scenes with Nick in the hospital more than those of Amy trying to find Nick, largely because every time she saw another demon it seemed more like a distraction that another piece of the puzzle. The film does have a nice look, thanks to cinematographer Raymond Stella, who was the camera operator on "Halloween" and 59 episodes of "Buffy The Vampire Slayer." For horror buffs there is a cameo by Kane Hodder (a.k.a. Jason), and the boiler room location used is the same one Wes Craven used for Freddy Krueger in "A Nightmare on Elm Street." For DVD extras there is the trailer for "Room 6" and some other Anchor Bay releases, a 41-minute featurette "Hospital From Hell," a decent enough commentary track from Hurst and Altman, and if you pop the disc in your DVD-rom drive you can read the film's screenplay.