Road Kill (2010)

I had an awful lot of trouble getting through this movie. It wasn't that it didn't cut it as a horror film or that the acting was so wretched that I couldn't stand to be in the same room as my television set after a few minutes, for that isn't the case here. It is a nasty little ditty about a group of young people who clash horns with a demonic truck and the performances were plausible.

What bothered me was how much it was spoon-fed to me. There are few things that will get my goat more than repeatedly reminding me that something (in this case, the hood ornament) represents evil... especially when it really doesn't. It would have been just fine, however inaccurate, if one of the characters would have pointed out the ornament to his friends and delivered a short monologue about how the three-headed dog is the most evil thing in Hell and wonder aloud why anyone would decorate their truck with that image.

But no, instead we are treated to several random shots throughout the film of a "live" tri-headed dog with evil glowing red eyes snarling and barking for no apparent reason. In my opinion, they should have put the money they spent on an Cerberus puppet and hired a second screenwriter to fill in the holes in the plot. Believe me, our crumbling highways have nothing on the script when it came to damaging holes.

I'm still not sure if the truck was actually fueled on souls or if it just preferred blood to high-octane petro.

So it took me three tries to get through this film, which is never a good thing to have happen when I'm looking for new review material. Another one of our reviewers was with me on the third try and judging on how many times he rolled his eyes... I'm fairly certain his review wouldn't have been much better than mine.

One good point, if you are into this sort of thing, is that it is gorehound candy. As we've seen in films such as Wolf Creek, a lot of nasty things can happen to teenagers who vacation down under.

But overall, I found it both tedious and even boring. The basic idea for the story had some potential, but something derailed in the writing. (Or perhaps it was butchered during production, as scripts can be cut to ribbons during the early stages.)

On IMDB: Road Kill - Road Train




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