Crew
Director – Shawn C. Phillips, Screenplay – Ethan Phillips & Shawn C. Phillips, Producers – Spencer Breslin, Nicole Butler, Joel Callison, Philip R. Garrett, Jeremy Hirsch, Lucas Hirsch, Joseph Kelly, Adrian Low, Klark McIntyre, Jojo Payne, Shawn C. Phillips, Mason Reese, Ninqi Stratton, Douglas Vermeeren & Jeff Webb, Photography – Cameron Jutte, Music – Guthrie Lowe, Special Effects – Monique Paredes & Eric Yoder. Production Company – Five Forks Films.
Cast
Joseph Poliquin (Kurt), Elizabeth Chamberlain (Ruby), Nicole Butler (Kat), Michael B. Moynahan (Howard), Mason Reese (Earth Devil), James Duval (Buck), Riley Wade Chase (Chase), Robert Lasardo (Hell Devil), Brett Wagner (Kane), Robert Carradine (Virgil), Todd Bridges (Dutch), Eileen Deitz (Eileen), Eric Roberts (Derek), Oliver Robins (Greg), Jenna Jameson (Nun Nell), Lisa Wilcox (Barbara), Spencer Breslin (Buddy)
Plot
The Devil’s son Howard has come to visit Earth. Kurt steals Howard’s skateboard only for it to transport him to Hell. He shows the skateboard to others who use it to visit their own private Hells and return. With Howard ending up at a homeless shelter, The Devil decides the only way to find him is to personally visit Earth.
Skate to Hell is directed by Shawn C. Phillips. Phillips has over 240 credits as an actor since the late 2000s. Skate to Hell is listed as his nineteenth film as director, although this is misleading in that fourteen of these credits are for directing segments of low-budget horror anthologies. He made his full-length directorial debut proper with Amityville Karen (2022) and followed this with Amityville Shark House (2023), Woods Witch (2023), Amityville Bigfoot (2024) and Desert Fiends (2024). Phillips can be briefly seen on screen here as a producer on the film set going on about needing more beaver shots.
Skate to Hell is a vaguely amusing idea that falls into Bad Movie stakes within the first minutes of opening. Everything about the film shouts out as being amateurish. This is frequently the case when it comes to the acting – although there are seasoned professionals in the cast, others often have a hesitancy as though they were ad libbing or looking for their next line. There is no real plot to anything that happens – just a random progression of scenes. No attempt is made at any kind of realism – the plot, for instance, mandates that a police detective spend days pursuing the trail of a skateboard that only may have some relevance to his case.
There are random gore and meltdown effects thrown in – perfect case in point being in the first few minutes as Devil’s son Michael B. Moynahan demonstrates his arm farts to two street people and causes a toxic meltdown of either. The personal hells for each person could have had some amusement – but this turns into rather lame set-pieces where Elizabeth Chamberlain’s hell is a minimum wage job with sexual harassment from a manager (cue another random gore effect where she cuts off his dick); or Nicole Butler is trapped in a hair salon runs by demons – before the idea peters out and is forgotten.
Even worse is the totally inept looking The Hills Have Eyes (1977)-alike film-within-a-film being shot in the desert, which looks like a film trying to be bad and failing at even that. (It would appear that these were outtakes or shot on the same sets as Shawn C. Phillips’ Desert Fiends, which has fairly much the same plots and shares many of the same actors). The end of the film also comes with ten minutes of social media-type vox pop interviews.
Skate to Hell does at least come with an amazing cast line-up. This includes regular B movie actor Robert LaSardo as The Devil and Robert Carradine, who plays one of the characters in Hell; porn star Jenna Jameson as a nun; former child star Spencer Breslin who also co-produces the film; Mason Reese, a former child actor in a series of tv commercials of the 1970s, as the Devil’s earthly body; a now middle-aged Oliver Robins, who was a child actor in Poltergeist (1982) and Poltergeist II: Other Side (1986), as a tv repairman who is killed by The Devil; Lisa Wilcox, the heroine in A Nightmare On Elm Street IV: The Dream Master (1988), who appears in leather wielding a whip during the film shoot; and Eileen Deitz who was the face for the demon in The Exorcist (1973) as a woman at the homeless shelter. One surprise is the quiet well-known name of Eric Roberts, an actor who has done a lot of trashy but also a good number of respectable roles in his time, who turns up at the homeless shelter as a drunk.
Trailer here
Full film available here