Rating: D+
Dir: Robert Gajic
Star: Justin Gordon, Shannon Dalonzo, Simon Phillips, Briahn Auguillard
It feels like this might be the kind of movie where you should know as little as possible going in. On the other hand, I didn’t know anything, and… eh, whatever. The biggest source of amusement to be found, might be spotting the other, better pictures which got thrown into the blender to make this. If I’d to pick three, I’d say (in alphabetical order) Dead End, The Hitcher and Jacob’s Ladder. We start with engaged couple Sarah (Dalonzo) and Michael (Gordon), driving through the desert on Route 66, on the way to visit her sick father, when they first hit ice – not exactly expected in their location – then find themselves being followed by a mysterious figure (Auguillard) in a black muscle car.
To escape, they pull over into a roadside diner attached to a motel, although things there seem off from the get-go, with both the other customers and staff behaving a little strangely. Or a lot strangely. Eventually hitting the road, they find themselves again being followed and, weirder still, once more pulling into the diner. Things from here grow more bizarre, with the motel manager (co-writer Phillips) trying to wrangle both the couple, and the increasingly rebellious staff, as the pursuer lurks on the road outside. Sarah and Michael have to figure out what’s going on, and how to get out of their situation. If there is any escape to be had, a point which seems more and more doubtful, the further we get into things.
The main problem is, I blurted out the movie’s big plot twist after roughly five minutes in the diner: the moment the waitress hands Michael two quarters, to be precise. I was not being particularly serious at the time, and was thus a little aghast as the script progressed inexorably towards my joking comment. Sarah and Michael seem almost wilfully oblivious to a reality that is steadily more blatant, the deeper we get into things. As a result, you may spend a great deal of the running-time, waiting for the characters to catch up with you. Sarah’s nausea is another point whose significance will be guessed by savvy viewers, well before the script announces it.
This will provide a chance to notice the movie’s other flaws. An example would be how the overhead shots of cars, are clearly not going the hundred mph shown on the speedometer. Or how Michael is far too old to have been high school sweethearts with Sarah, as is claimed. There are also odd loose ends that go nowhere, such as Michael being a song composer, albeit a one-hit wonder. Some scenes do achieve the intended unsettling impact, and the majority of the performances are slightly better than the script deserves. However, my advice is to bail on this, whenever you think you know where it’s going. Whether you were correct or not, the odds are you will probably find something better to do with your time.