Route 666 (2001)

Directed by William Wesley [Other horror films: Scarecrows (1988)]

I have to say that Route 666 surprised me. Though by no means would I call the film good in a traditional sense, it can be oddly fun, and I think a lot of that comes from the performances involved here.

To be sure, I have seen Route 666 once before, though like many of the films I’ve watched recently (Swarmed and Hard Ride to Hell, for instance), it’s been so long that I only remembered the vaguest outline of this. In fact, I thought it was a zombie movie going in – which might be an easy mistake to make – only to be surprised that it’s more ghostly in nature.

While pleasant in some ways, which I’ll touch on shortly, it does fall flat in some areas, mostly the story. One of the characters here has a relationship with one of the ghosts, and late in the film, we have a situation where this ghost has to decide whether or not to turn on his ghostly hombres. That comes with the occasional psychic flash a character suffers, and while there’s not many of them, I wasn’t overly impressed with those sequences.

Also, a lot of the action here is quite jerky. I don’t know if I can explain it better than that – the ghosts move in jerky motions, and the action is often in the same vein. It’s not headache-inducing or anything, but it was notable, and not in a positive way, but an annoying one. Lastly, as far as complaints go, I felt some of the antagonists that pop up toward the end could have done with a bit more reasoning behind their actions, and what they were attempting to accomplish struck me as a bit extreme.

Those elements aside, Route 666 isn’t a bad slice of entertainment. A lot of this comes from the central performances of Lou Diamond Phillips, Steven Williams, and Lori Petty. Phillips (who I know from his recurring role on Numb3rs, along with the TV movie Hangman and films such as Bats and Carny) was a lot of fun in this action-oriented film, and worked great with Lori Petty (a couple of episodes of House and Bates Motel, randomly, is where I knew her best from) and Williams (from The X-Files and The Fear Chamber). All three of them were great – I loved Petty’s sassy attitude, and Williams was just fun – and really added a lot to this film.

Out of the rest of the cast, I guess it’s fair to say both Dale Midkiff and L.Q. Jones were decent. Midkiff (of Pet Sematary and Nightmare Weekend fame) took a bit to really stand out, but once he did, I enjoyed his character, and while I didn’t love where Jones’ (The Brotherhood of Satan, The Strange and Deadly Occurrence) story went, it was fine. I did love seeing a brief appearance of Dick Miller (The Howling, Gremlins, and many other films) at the beginning, and Mercedes Colon, who popped up much later in Malignant, appeared, which was sort of random.

If anything makes the movie work, it’s the performances, because the story, while okay, doesn’t entirely cut it, and the gore is pretty non-existent, even when they had a chance for some violent jackhammer action. Someone did get their hand slammed in a door, which did look reasonably painful, and there was some occasionally fun gun-play (many of the characters are in government agencies, so much of the beginning is more action-oriented), but it’s not at all what I’d describe as gory.

Even so, I can’t say that I didn’t find a lot of the movie serviceable. I definitely didn’t love the conclusion, and elements that came up every now and again were less interesting, but overall, I had a better time with that than I thought I was going to. Of course, it being so long, I can’t remember what I thought about Route 666 when I first saw it, but I am pretty sure I enjoyed it a bit more this time around.

Honestly, Route 666 is still below average, but if you want a movie to have a good time with, you could do a lot worse than this one.

6.5/10