Main cast: Eric Balfour (Ryan Hinds), LaDon Drummond (Leslie Hinds), Joe Grisaffi (John Hinds), Larry Wade Carrell (Bruce), and Kristin Cochell (Anna Hinds)
Director: Giorgio Serafini

Spoilers are present in this review! Although, given how dumb this movie is, nobody will get hurt being spoiled, but hey, your call. Spoilers!

I don’t know why I subject myself to this… oh, that’s right. I have an irrational infatuation with Eric Balfour, which is really unfortunate because he always appears in some of the worst shows imaginable.

Also, 200 Degrees is at the time of writing available for free viewing at one of those licensed channels. At least, I think it’s licensed. The whole set up looks legitimate, however, so hey, if it weren’t, I’m just a victim as much as everyone else, so don’t trigger and oppress me with accusations please.

So, this movie. It’s a low budget film and, for once, the script is scaled appropriately to the budget, so there are not many scenes here ruined by limitations caused by a lack of dough.

Basically, Ryan Hinds comes to to find himself locked away in a steel room equipped with large heating lamps. He’s essentially being slowly cooked alive, while disembodied voices over his phone ask for money and taunt him. What is going on here? Oh, and his party-buddy and partner in crime (Ryan is a crooked stockbroker) is also being cooked alive in the other oven, but no one cares about him so whatever, really.

Now, I quickly get distracted by the fact that, despite being apparently cooked under high heat, Ryan’s white shirt shows no sweat stains at all. He rolls around on the floor, and the white shirt still appears clean, pristine even, throughout it all. Perhaps they have rented the shirt and are told to return it in clean condition, and they have run out of budget for laundry, who knows, but I can’t suspend my disbelief when the lead character is screaming about how hot everything is, and his clothes are clean and dry.

Oh don’t worry, people, someone does take their top off in this show: some lady that plays a prostitute. Yes, even when it makes sense for the guy to get shirtless at the very least, they make him keep his clothes on, but have no issues with gratuitous female topless moments. Assholes! Give me some topless dude, at least, in the name of democracy!

Also, it turns out that the people responsible for all this are his own family. Well, that shouldn’t be a surprise as there are no other characters unrelated to Ryan, except one and that one ends up dead eventually. What is worse is the motivations of Ryan’s brother John and Ryan’s wife Anna in doing all this nonsense and even killing someone in the process.

John is mad that Ryan didn’t offer him money to pay for his cancer-stricken son’s life, but as Ryan points out, John never said why he needed the money. John’s excuse is that he couldn’t find the words to tell Ryan that his son was dying of cancer. What? Not even when the kid’s life was on the line? Is it so hard to say that his kid had cancer and he desperately needed this much money for urgent treatments?

Well, he now wants Ryan to feel how he felt… and I guess John felt like he was being cooked in an oven when his son died? Whatever, this guy is a imbecile of indescribable degree.

Ryan’s wife just wants him to apologize for being a meanie all this while. Good lord, lady, just go for counselling! There is no need to go this far and even take part in the murder of some guy just to get the husband to say sorry, is there?

John’s wife has the only sane reason to be involved in all this: she wants the money they are extorting from Ryan, and she is happy to kill her husband and her sister-in-law to have the money all tp herself. I like her already.

Unfortunately, the actress playing her is like a first-timer that has been dragged onto the set ten minutes before filming started, and was reading her lines off an off-screen cardboard held up by some intern. To be fair to her, everyone else with the exception of Mr Balfour is terrible here.

Ah Mr Balfour. He is quite the underrated actor in that he plays some of the most adorable villains around, and here he is no different. Ryan is not a good guy at all, and in fact, he has a few cards up his sleeves here.

Unfortunately, the dumb story and the terrible acting from the rest of the cast do him little favors, and dang it, he keeps all his clothes on even when there’s a perfectly non-exploitative reason here for him to get naked on screen. Oh well, it’s okay. I’ve seen everything he has to show in some of his past movies anyway.

So, 200 Degrees. It’s horrible mostly because it has an intriguing, if now particularly original, premise, only to squander all potential with a really dumb and cringe-filled story and cast of which two of them are technical guys likely dragged in front of the camera because the budget for casting actual actors has run out. It’s… you know what, I can’t even think of anything halfway witty to end this review. Just don’t watch this thing.