Young Texans (Jamie Alexander and Joey Mendicino) hit the road and head for Hollywood when they happen upon a grotty-looking rest room that even Britney Spears would put some shoes on to enter. Alexander goes in to answer the call of nature and emerges to find her beau has vanished. The SOB seems to have run off on her! (Not that Alexander seems to care, she’s such a bad actress she never reacts to anything!) And hey…isn’t that the same pickup that was terrorising them earlier in the day? Anyhoo, Joey…er…Joseph Lawrence plays a dutiful but doubtful cop Alexander happens upon.
With enough trips to gas station toilets to warrant a title change to “Rest Room”, this 2006 horror pic (with a movie poster that blatantly rips off “Wolf Creek”) from writer-director John Shiban is another film where the idea is much better than the treatment given to said idea. Call it “Wolf Creek” meets “Joy Ride/Road Kill”, only worse than either of those. It’s brutally violent at times (the bit with the finger sure is nasty, and there’s a bit where the wrong person is killed that is just so goddamn not fair as to be brilliantly twisted) and has nice cinematography (though the camera lens does seem to linger an awful long time on female body parts), but that’s about it.
The acting and characters are amateur hour stuff (yeah, even Joey ‘Woah! Call me Joseph!’ Lawrence, though his is still the best performance in the film). The killer is an interesting blend of the unseen force in “Duel” and the unkempt sicko in “Haute Tension”, but said killer is also a major idiot. Not as big an idiot as the heroine, though, badly played by Alexander, you’ll be begging to see this twit suffer (she may in fact be the dumbest horror movie heroine in history. Anyone want to argue the point?). There’s also a strange subplot involving a bizarro hillbilly family that makes no sense whatsoever and is never adequately integrated into the rest of the film.
OVERALL SUMMARY
A nasty streak and a nice look cannot save a horror pic from becoming a chore, I’m afraid.
