MOVIE REVIEW - "Six Degrees of Hell" by Martin Berman-Gorvine

In my series of posts for The Bold Mom, I have begun laying out something of a theory of horror fiction. It’s not very complex or subtle; my point is simply that gripping storytelling and characters the reader cares about are what boosts great horror fiction above the abattoir level. So-called genre fiction, such as horror or my other great passion, science fiction, often gets a bad name because these essential ingredients are left out in the excitement of portraying a world of shocking violence and terror, or the world of the future, as the case may be.

This truth applies to horror films as well. We’ve all sat through pointless slasher movies where characters (who are often young, attractive white women) are introduced only to have their throats messily cut. There is much to dissect on a cultural level about the implied misogyny of such features, but nothing to recommend them.

It’s a different story when we get to know the characters and are given reason to care about their fate. Such is the case for three movies featuring Nicole Cinaglia, an up-and-coming young actress and producer whose performances make these films notable.

The least coherent of the three is Joe Raffa’s “Six Degrees of Hell” (2012), which stars Corey Feldman. This is basically a haunted house tale, in which a building that was once used as an insane asylum is turned into a horror theme park for Halloween every year. Naturally the building’s terrible past afflicts its present, and the make-believe horrors start turning into real ones. But these routine horror movie tropes aren’t explained very well, and there are a number of difficult-to-follow subplots as well as some inaudible dialogue. As a young woman with second sight, Cinaglia helps hold together this mess of a film.

The quirkiest of the three films is Tony Trov and Johnny Zito’s “Alpha Girls” (2013), starring the appealingly offbeat Falon Joslyn. What could have turned into the ten thousandth teenage slasher flick is saved by the bond between Joslyn’s character Morgan, a new pledge at a hellish sorority in an unnamed Philadelphia college, and her fellow new pledges and dogsbodies Cassidy (Beverly Rivera), April (Julie Chen), and Juliette (Cinaglia). The plot resolves into your basic temptation-and-retribution drama, but it derives its emotional force from this four-way relationship and the belated qualms Cinaglia’s and some of the other characters develop.

Playing on the safest ground for a horror movie (though not for its characters!) is B. Harrison Smith’s “Camp Dread” (2014), which drags us all back to the blood-drenched ground of summer camp, with the thin and frankly incredible premise that washed-up horror movie director Julian (Eric Roberts) has been permitted to run a rehab boot camp for a group of twentysomething offenders. Here again, Cinaglia’s character Adrienne stands out, for the depth of the horror she has been through simply as part of her backstory, which Cinaglia plays with convincing fury.

A common theme uniting all three of these movies is the strong regional flavor from their Pennsylvania settings, something that is often missing from the featureless wastelands where so many horror movies (and novels) seem to take place. The strong sense of place in Stephen King’s novels, which are mostly set in his native Maine, is an underremarked source of his appeal. The moral is that setting, together with character and storytelling, are as indispensable in horror as in other genres of fiction. And when it comes to movies, actors like Cinaglia make the work spring to life.

[bctt tweet=”MOVIE REVIEW – ‘Six Degrees of Hell’, ‘Alpha Girls’ and ‘Camp Dread’ – ‘The Actor and the Horror Film: It’s All About Character (and Nicole Cinaglia Has Plenty!)’ by Martin Berman-Gorvine @MeshuggeWriter” username=”theboldmom”]

Author

Martin Berman Gorvine

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Author of the four-book “Days of Ascension” horror novel series--All Souls Day (2016), Day of Vengeance (2017), Day of Atonement (2018), and Judgment Day (2020)--all published by Silver Leaf Books.
He is also the author of six science fiction novels, many with an alternate history theme: the Sidewise Award-winning The Severed Wing (as Martin Gidron) (Livingston Press, 2002); 36 (Livingston Press, 2012); Seven Against Mars (Wildside Press, 2013); Save the Dragons! (Wildside Press, 2013), which was a finalist for the Prometheus Award; Heroes of Earth (Wildside Press, 2015); and Monsters of Venus (Wildside Press, 2017). 