| 90s action mainstay Lou Diamond Phillips stars as a federal agent tasked with delivering a rogue witness from the wilds of the Arizona desert to a courtroom in Los Angeles. They're short on time, so they take a shortcut via Route 666, an offshoot of Route 66. This stretch of road is not on any map. Oh, the days before GPS and smartphones and the endless wonderment they inserted into the world. But they also have us this movie, so I guess it's a wash? The witness ("Rabbit") is played by character actor de jour, Steven Williams, and he reads every single line like he's late for an appointment... |
LDP's partner is played by Lori Petty who I know is beloved in some circles. I'll just say that she's very Lori Petty in this! Rabbit is being hunted down by the mob in addition to the Feds and this leads to a shootout which looks like crap, just an atrocious mix of slow-motion and shaky cam. They kill all but one of these villains and hit the road with three other, straight-laced agents who don't trust LDP at all.
The plot revolves around the idea that LDP's father, a career but mostly non-violent criminal, was murdered alongside three other prison inmates while working on a chain gang on this very road. The other three were all deranged serial killers (of course) and now all four haunt Route 666 as demon ghost zombie things with the caveat that they can't materialize anywhere off said road (we later learn this is because the sicko warden who killed them ran them over with a steamroller while they we're still alive). Despite realizing this fact — that they only need to take one step off the concrete to be safe — one by one, our characters are killed by these jumpsuit monsters. A glitchy video effect is deployed during these kills that's somewhere between terrible and WTF we're they thinking...
Long story short: the crazy warden who ran them over all those years ago is now the local sheriff and he shows up to capture/kill everyone so that the secret won't get out or something. But LDP's dad recognizes his son and he kills the three other mutant zombie guys. They get revenge on the sheriff and this frees his soul and then the movie ends. Just impossibly bad and equally boring. The most undercooked idea extrapolated into a 90-minute movie for some reason. Also notable for featuring perhaps the most worthless Dick Miller appearance of his illustrious career.
So let's fast-forward about two decades and watch some Asylum direct-to-video flicks that also have "666" in the title! Yippee!!
CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 666A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 666C ⫸
⫷ EPISODE 666A - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 666C ⫸
Route 666 is a 2001 action horror film directed by William Wesley and starring Lou Diamond Phillips, Lori Petty, Steven Williams, L.Q. Jones, Dale Midkiff, Alex McArthur, and Mercedes Colon. In the film, government agents are besieged by the ghosts of a massacred chain gang while driving down a desert highway. It was released on October 22, 2001.
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