Unrest (2006)

Unrest is a movie about medical students doing the kind of stuff they do, which is awesome. I'm glad we finally have a movie that doesn't marginalize them, and fully shows their true identities as detectives who figure out why ghosts are haunting the place. That's just what I wanted.

Director: Jason Todd Ipson

Starring: Corri English, Scot Davis

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This was one of the Eight Films to Die For series that mostly polluted Blockbuster shelves a lot back in the 2000s. I don't know why they were 'to die for.' Honestly, a lot of them were pretty middling in quality and I doubt anyone would throw themselves on a sword for these movies or run back into a burning house to grab them. The only way someone might DIE for a movie like Unrest is if you dropped it in the street in front of your house while going to throw it in the garbage, and then the garbage truck hit and killed you.

Also, I'm pretty sure these movies were the reason Blockbuster shut down. That's a bit of a conspiracy theory, but trust me on this.

The film starts out with a couple of doofus coroners checking out the tits on this body that just came in. In these kinds of movies, there's never a point where they DON'T make dumb jokes about how hot a woman corpse is – it's like some kind of fucking rite of passage to be a bad horror movie coroner.

"Alright, Jim. Are you ready to spew this uninspired dialogue?"

Then we get our main character, a blonde med student who apparently lives in the janitor closet in the hospital. We find out later this is because her grant money hasn't come in, but honestly I think it's because she's a millennial and this seems like luxury to her compared to the actual apartments she's lived in. Woohoo, housing market!

"This is the nicest place I've ever slept in!"

The first day of class, we find out med school is really just a wacky, fun place where students do things like push down on a corpse to squirt corpse juice into the mouths of their fellow students! I'm sure that won't cause any random disease outbreaks or horrific Resident Evil or Walking Dead style disease. Seriously, how did nobody get expelled from school for shit like this?

Amidst that is the one guy in their group constantly flirting with her and trying to get her to fuck him. I guess this is to be expected – I mean, that IS what women go to these schools for, right? I like how they tell her not to get too personal when she starts wondering about what happened to cause the strange wounds on the corpse's body. Because the GUYS weren't being weird at all when they said she was into kinky bondage sex, but an honest wondering about what happened to her is “too personal.” Sure.

One of the other guys has a fiance who comes by and wants to see one of the bodies. I guess this is why she was with him – she was just biding her time for when he was actually in a place where he'd let her touch a body with her bare hands. Because yeah, that's what she does, just touches this dead body with her bare hands. Is every character in this thing just willingly going to spread the virus that kills all of humanity and turns the world into some dystopia hellhole? 'Cause touching magic enchanted corpses is kind of how you do that.

Then, like clockwork, she runs out in the hallway feeling ill, and when her fiance finds her, she's dead and there's blood all over the floor somehow.

Oh no, she died from... some unexplained thing we'll never go back to, but it has to do with that corpse I guess!

On Monday, everyone just comes back to class like normal... somehow the fact that a woman died for vague reasons after touching a corpse never caused any alarm, because no one knows about it until the professor comes up to their group in class and privately tells them about it. Like what, is people dying in this hospital from inappropriate contact with corpses so prevalent that it barely even registers anymore? I think this scene raises more questions than answers, but then again, people have always accused me of thinking too hard!

The main girl, apparently cursed to be in possession of actual brain cells, thinks there's something weird about the corpse that people die after touching. She tells her professor about it, and he just dismisses her as crazy – just one of those kuh-razy women, with their weirdo theories and estrogen and what not. I'm sure he's right and it's all fine, and the rest of the movie is here for no reason except to show her happily becoming a doctor.

"I'm just the stereotypical stick in the mud character here to step on your dreams."

I guess she takes a break from wondering about that to go out with that other guy and have sex with him. Which is, you know, fine, but why are we watching a movie about it? Is this movie under the impression that these characters are rich and interesting enough that we want to see what they do in the bedroom? Because I dunno about you, but I am thinking no.

There are some more scenes of the girl trying to figure out what happened to this corpse – because I guess med students are just doing the jobs of detectives now. That's what budget cuts do to you, I suppose. I wonder what the scene was like where the real cops found this body and apparently did no investigating on it at all...

DETECTIVE 1: We found a body out in the field! It's naked and all cut up with scars and cuts!

DETECTIVE 2: Really? Well, that is just super fucking boring.

DETECTIVE 1: Yeah, you're right. Just dump it in the coroner van and forget it. Now let's go down to the bar and pick up chicks and not investigate this at all!

DETECTIVE 2: Woohoo, it's fucking awesome being a detective!

The rest of the movie is mostly taken up by the same old cliché crap you expect from these movies – main girl talks to this older woman at the school who believes her about the corpse being supernatural, and plenty of more scenes of researching why everything is happening, combined with random sex and flirting scenes of main girl and whatever-his-name-is. It's like they just put together an Ad Libs version of a horror movie. I guess none of it is TOO bad, but is that really an accomplishment? Just not being AS bad as other bullshit movies?

I do like this one part where they figure out that the corpse is actually from an Aztec temple or something down in Brazil. They ask the one Spanish guy they know to help them translate their Portugese research documents, and he says Brazilians don't speak Spanish, so he can't help. They tell him his Spanish is still better than their not knowing of any other language – what a bunch of racists. But it turns out they're right and he's able to tell them exactly what they need to know. Because stupidity is all encompassing.

Then we find out that the woman used to be an archaeologist until she went to this ancient burial site in South America, at which point she became a prostitute and started killing her johns after giving them blowjobs. Wow. Had to find some way to fit a prostitute in there, huh? I love that it doesn't even really matter – she could've been anything and still had the main plot of killing people in this hospital. But they went nope, prostitute is the job most women have, so we gotta go with that!

"Bad lighting, no character, no plot. 1/10. This movie sucks."

The Spanish guy dies next, and the ghost is at least courteous enough to give him a warning:

I hope the ghost paid for that textbook she defaced...

Oh, and the next day, NOW everyone notices the dead body on campus... I guess this one was just more noticeable and stood out more.

Throughout all of this, the British doctor guy teaching the class staunchly refuses to do anything or consider that something supernatural might be going on. There have been like five deaths in this movie and he still is just like “how dare you think there's some connection between this and that corpse we brought in JUST before they started?” I guess life is easier when you're just a fucking moron. They finally make him get rid of it, and he says he does...

BUT... it turns out he didn't, and instead just tossed it in the tank full of body parts in the lab, like nobody would ever fucking notice. Then people keep dying and it's like, whoops. But at least our heroes are here to try and get the body out – by taking their shirts off.

Why are they doing that? Like, you're already dipping into nasty corpse water anyway. Who cares if your scrubs get dirty? Are those the only ones you were allowed to have, so you have to make sure they don't get dirty? That's what budget cuts do to you, I guess. Or it could just be because of boobs. I dunno.

They finally burn the body and take its ashes all the way to fucking Brazil to bury – how they got there, I don't know. I mean the girl was sleeping in the hospital because she didn't have any money. Did they sleep in the luggage bay of the plane for really cheap?

But they scatter the ashes, only to realize a second later that the spirit is actually, maybe, still back in the lab! DUN DUN DUN... oh, wait, they have no basis to think that and it's actually just sort of random. I love that they're not even 100 percent sure - they just kinda THINK the spirit could still be there. What a half-assed cliffhanger. It's like the agnosticism of movies - you're not really sure and it's all very wishy-washy and noncommittal.

That was Unrest, the frankly kinda dull movie about corpse superpowers and people dying in a hospital! What did we think of it? Eh. That's really about it – just, “eh.” It wasn't the worst thing ever, but there wasn't much of interest. I mean, a few mildly silly things happened, and there were some odd plot decisions, but it was hardly like the new The Room or Troll 2 or anything, so it couldn't even succeed on that front. It was just sort of a middle of the road, bland adventure. So unless you really want to see, uh, people dying in a hospital but from ghosts instead of medical causes... you probably won't love this movie.

Images copyright of their original owners, we own none of them.

The 500th Post: Zyzzyx Rd. (2006)

Well, it's been a long road to get here, but I've finally reached the 500th blog post on Cinema Freaks. Hooray!

Just imagine the sounds of people cheering.

Now you're all probably wondering what exactly I'm doing to commemorate this occasion...well, it's easy: something that will please legions of fans and draw in more audience traffic than ever before. Something well known by everyone that will surely seem like the logical choice for such a momentous occasion.

I'm of course talking about Zyzzyx Rd. See? Look at all the audience traffic JUST THE NAME ALONE has drawn!

Also, Cinema Freaks now takes place in high class theaters.

….

Well, shit. Ruined it again!

Director: John Penney

Starring: Leo Grillo, Katherine Heigel, Tom Sizemore

IMDb

You're probably wondering why I'm reviewing this movie at all, let alone making a big deal about it. Well, I'll tell you: it's because this is the all-time box office record for the least amount of money made on a movie in the history of film. This thing was only in theaters once a day from February 25 to March 6 of 2006, and in that time it made a grand spanking total of $30 at the box office, with $10 of that being from a “personal refund” to makeup artist Sheila Moore and a friend by one of the leading actors after the opening weekend.

On top of that, the name of the movie comes from a real road in the Mojave Desert. Only here they spelled it wrong – whether by accident or not, I have no idea, but the real road is Zzyzyx Rd., not Zyzzyx Rd. Either one though, wouldn't really roll off the tongue enough for moviegoers to pique interest that much. I mean it does kind of sound like the sound you'd make when being electrocuted to death. Not really a big selling point.

"ZYZZZZZYX!!!"

Honestly, though, this is really only part of the story. Some newspapers were lazy at the time and figured the movie was so bad it only made $20. In reality, director John Penney didn't really care about releasing the film theatrically and only did it to fulfill a requirement with the Screen Actors' Guild so he could then distribute it on DVD – where it did make a respectable sum, or at least one that wasn't $30.

I'm sure this is in no way an inaccurate portrayal of the makers of the film after DVD sales.

In fact, the only reason they even wanted to release it on DVD was to make money to make other movies, which Penney and lead actor Leo Grillo fantasized as being “Hannibal with animals.” (Grillo was a pretty big animal rights activist and Penney was right there alongside him on that being a good idea, but then again, they have only done one film in the eight years since, which apparently wasn't a horror one at all.)

So with all the hullabaloo about this movie's creation and box office gross, it did gain a modest level of fame among the kinds of people who were fascinated by films like Plan 9 or The Room. And that's good enough for me. Let's take a look at this thing. What, already? Yes, I realize I'm jumping in with both feet...

We start the film off with a middle aged businessman named Grant (Leo Grillo), who is eloping from his wife and young daughter with a young girl named Marissa – real class act there already, movie; great job enticing me to like the character. Apparently these two not only killed Marissa's violent ex-boyfriend in a struggle at a hotel after he caught them having sex, they're now driving out into the desert to bury him. Which to me is always the best time to suck on a Ring Pop:

Put that shit in a commercial already.

It's just got that after-murder refreshing taste, ya know?

Grant gets out into the desert and tries to bury the body, which goes about as well as you'd think for a middle-aged tax accountant who looks like that trying to bury a body. Lots of swearing, sweat and the obvious one: misplacing the body. Yes, really.

"WHICH WAY DO I TURN THE SHOVEL AGAIN?!?"

He gets back in the car and asks Marissa about whether the boyfriend was really dead, to which she replies that she didn't even see him, because she was in the bathroom the whole time. Grant, apparently, just sucks at telling dead bodies from live ones. Either way they're both morons.

So Grant goes out and runs around in the dark looking for the escaped would-be dead body, but only ends up taking a tumble down a hill and getting hit at least once, but not actually capturing him. He goes back to the car and has a really telling conversation in the car with Marissa. First, Marissa panics, thinking the ex-boyfriend might tell someone, or even more bafflingly that he might die out there and someone else will find him!

Uh, for one, if he DID tell someone, what would he say? “I tried to kill these people and they fought back”? And two, if he died out there in the desert, IT WOULD SOLVE ALL YOUR PROBLEMS. Have you even seen where you are? You're in the middle of the fucking Mojave desert! The only people who will find his body are going to be other people trying to hide bodies!

Then she changes gears completely and says he isn't going anywhere and they can find him in the morning. He isn't going anywhere? I think you have an incredibly warped sense of space and the ability of people to move, lady!

Then they start talking about being in love, which really makes sense as they met in Vegas and had a skanky affair in which Grant cheated on his wife. Grant says he wants to be with Marissa now, because clearly having sex in a motel and then killing the girl's ex-boyfriend is what true romance is founded upon.

What? You don't agree? Then you, my friend, have never killed your girlfriend's ex-boyfriend in a shitty motel in Vegas and then driven out into the desert to kill him. Totally eye-opening experience, guys.

To add insult to injury, he then finds out that Marissa isn't even eighteen years old yet! I don't think it really matters though, as if you're a 50+ year old man married with kids, and you're spending your time with a girl who wears her hair in pigtails and sucks on Ring Pops when you're going to bury a body, you probably need to check yourself into marriage counseling – because, congrats, you have a bona fide mid-life crisis that's grown into a malevolent tumor.

I just love that he's still okay with kissing her after she tells him she isn't 18 yet, even though he still acted like he was pissed off about that a second before. It's like, I have priorities and morals, but eh, they aren't that important. What a fucking cockbag.

She doesn't kiss and tell...or rather, she does, but only in the Mojave desert in the middle of the night with frumpy, sad old men.

Oh yeah, and then she attempts to give him a blowjob, but because of the Ring Pop having a cinnamon-y flavor, she burns his dick as soon as she touches it. What a magical scene. I sure am glad that one was put in there!

A metaphor for the hard times in life when you just need to leave your wife and young daughter who you constantly claim to love for a 17-year-old girl who gives painful blowjobs.

Then we get some more scenes of them looking around in the desert and it's basically just a big old ad for the Mojave: come here and fall in love with the endless hallucinations and Hitcher flashbacks.

It really does reflect the movie - empty, dry and without much to do but keep going in a desperate trudge to find the end.

Speaking of flashbacks, we get some incredibly important and vital ones that show off an invaluable plot asset: Marissa has boobs. Truly we wouldn't have been able to figure that one out otherwise.

Her ability to have physical body parts that over half of the human race has is just astounding to me! She truly is great in this movie because of that.

Grant runs into the ex-boyfriend, Joey, played by Tom Sizemore. He's hiding out in some abandoned mine located conveniently right next to the road, which he says is because Marissa is actually some kind of succubus or demon that feeds on what you desire inside. However, I think it's really because he was hiding from the cops because he was wanted on drug charges.

Whoops! Did I spoil the illusion there? I'm just so sorry.

Joey tells Grant to go find Marissa and lure her down to the mine, and because he's got no sense of will or brainpower, he just goes along with it. After all, if you can't trust some weirdo you met in a dirty old mine in the middle of the Mojave desert, who can you trust?

"I, the Lord of this Abandoned Mine in the Mojave Desert, am truly a credible source for information!"

Grant gets Marissa down there, and she acts rather suspicious and skittish about the idea. He gets her in the cave and has to stab her in the leg when Joey doesn't hold up to his end of the bargain about trapping Marissa. Then Grant runs away and finds Joey being a fucking coward out in the desert, saying he just got scared or some shit like that – what a wimp!

Then they go back and Grant tries to lure Marissa out of the cave by saying he's sorry and it was a misunderstanding. For stabbing her, mind you. You know, one of those conversations every couple that's truly meant for one another has at one point or another. “Hey, honey, I'm sorry I stabbed you in the leg! Let's have make up sex! I'll make you brownies!”

Then we get a chase scene where it seems like Marissa is actually the one who's normal and Grant is the crazy one – wait, you mean the guy who was convinced his new girlfriend was a demon ISN'T the picture of sanity? Well, fuck; check ME into a mental asylum then. Marissa is chased by Grant to some house in the country, where Grant kills the guy who owns the house. Then, they go out to this road where Marissa trips over nothing and falls on her stomach:

"Damn air, always tripping me up. Maybe I'd better just use a wheelchair to get everywhere from now on."

She pleads with Grant not to kill her, and apparently understands in seconds that Grant is actually seeing a hallucination of her dead ex-boyfriend Joey who's telling him to kill her. I guess Joey was just that kind of guy. Ya know, the kind of guy where you just look at him and go “yeah, that's the kind of guy who will later appear from beyond the grave telling mentally weak people to murder me in cold blood.” I hate those kinds of people.

He doesn't do it though, and instead decides to take the easy way out and kill himself. I'm sure people were glued to the screens about that one.

"What have I done...hmm, what should I have for dinner tomorrow? Did I finish my laundry?"

This whole thing wasn't terrible or anything. In fact the setting was nice, it had some good ideas here and there and it was even kind of suspenseful, in a trippy, psychedelic sort of way. It was the kind of thing you can definitely use to simulate the feeling of psychedelia when you're too poor to go buy mushrooms from that weirdo down the street at the abandoned old K-Mart. The acting, while not great, did manage to convey the story reasonably well.

The only problem was that it just wasn't really fully realized. Was Grant really so weak-minded that his delusions took the form of the dead body of a guy he just met once, and under stressful circumstances? Why was Joey his hallucination telling him to kill Marissa? Maybe it could have been his wife, whose voice we hear a few times nagging him in his brain – that would've made more sense and probably added some depth to this character who otherwise is just an unlikable asshole. I mean, yeah, that would have made no sense for her to be in the desert with them, but maybe his delusional mind tells him she followed them there. And these things don't have to make perfect sense anyway.

Also, why was he even crazy to begin with? Nothing really suggested he was, apart from the script forcing you to think so. It just kinda came out of nowhere like a truck on a foggy morning. Or one on a clear day where a crazy man can jump in front of it and kill himself, but either way is fine. And some of the dialogue in this thing was just so bad. I mean it really was just so stupid, silly and unrealistic, and took you out of the movie with the force of a guy falling from a ten-story window with an anvil strapped to his ballsack.

Overall though, it wasn't bad. It did at least prove one thing – guys who go for 17-year-old girls wearing their hair in pigtails and who suck on Ring Pops after murdering someone DO tend to be quite crazy. Though, for unrelated reasons that aren't fully explained and are quite separate from that initial pedophilic attraction.

If that wasn't enough for you, you also get some super cool extras when you buy the DVD, like behind-the-scenes things that are kinda cool. I dunno; I love the idea of seeing what goes into the creative process with any movie, as it really points out how so much work goes into making even a bad movie.

I mean, maybe if I watched more of these special commentaries and behind-the-scenes featurettes for the movies I reviewed, I'd have a whole new outlook on life. Maybe I'd suddenly see the good in these films and have a much rosier, sunnier picture of the world and really turn my life around because I wouldn't blow a gasket every time I saw one of these horrible movies! Maybe I'd finally turn into a rainbow, break through the shrouded gloom-cloud of life and magically see all the faults in my life and fix them with the snap of a finger.

Or maybe I'd just get shitty featurettes that looked more like you saw the movie in theaters and recorded it with a fucking cell phone camera. Where you can't hear any dialogue so the whole thing is pointless.

You can, however, hear the wind against their microphones. Whispering siren songs enticing you to watch bad movies...

Hear that? That's the sound of my last hope for happiness being murdered in an alleyway.

Oh, and we also get a "theatrical trailer" that makes this thing look like some kind of action-packed thrillfest, like it's some Denzel Washington thriller or something.



I'm sure that would have been magical if the movie were actually like that in the least.

Images and videos copyright of their original owners; I own none of them.

Rest Stop (2006)

One of the best things about horror movies is how they can be so imaginative, taking common ordinary places and ideas and turning them dark and morbid. Jaws did it for the beach, Psycho did it for taking a shower and some other movies did it for weird obscure things you wouldn’t expect. Well in 2006, some genius had the bright idea to make one about a rest stop on the highway. Did they succeed?

Well, it sure struck a fear in me of Winnebagos full of circus freak Addams Family rejects, and of getting my finger bitten off. Given that my standards are so low after many years of running this blog, I count that as a Grade A success.

Director: John Shiban

Starring: Jamie Alexander, Joseph George Mendicino

IMDb

Review co-written with Michelle.

The cover art tells me a lot about this movie – it’s about a pair of legs fighting a truck at a rest stop. Sounds exciting to me!

I’ve reviewed movies from directors I’ve called despicable scum, incompetent or just plain strange. But this is one of the only ones where I have to come to the conclusion that the director was literally insane. Because clearly there’s no other explanation for what happens in this jumble of incoherent “plot” elements trying to pose as a movie – really it’s more like whatever this thing was skinned and flayed the concept of movies and is now masquerading as some grotesque Leatherface-esque parody of one. And that sounds good to me!

We start off this movie with a lady taking a shit, which is probably how the idea for the movie came about. “Hey, I’m making this awesome movie about a rest stop with ghosts and torture and an RV full of crazy people that adds NOTHING to the overall story!” “Sounds awful. How’d you come up with such a mental abortion?” “I was taking a shit and…” “Oh.”

After she gets killed, we get introduced to our main characters, Jess and Nicole – a couple heading out for Hollywood to become movie stars. Clearly if they were going to star in anything good, they would have done that instead of appearing in Rest Stop, I mean you know THIS isn’t gonna be a shining point on your resume when it has a several minute long sex scene put in for no damn reason, and filmed in really awkward close-ups. I mean I for one am glad the characters in this movie aren’t porn directors. They’d probably just focus on the elbows and knees of the participants.

And yeah, while you’re wondering – it really IS a good idea to have sex in the middle of the day in some random field right next to the road. Gotta live dangerously! And no there’s no point to this except to add in some nudity. I guess they couldn’t figure out a way to shoehorn THAT in with everything else and the kitchen sink later on.

So what are these characters’ personalities, you ask? Well, Jess is an asshole boyfriend. In the beginning of the movie, he’s introduced to us by pretending to let Nicole get in the car, then pulling away. Who does that? Also, most of his dialogue is comprised of telling Nicole “not to be such a fucking baby” in regards to going on this road trip and not telling her parents. Yeah! Because not telling your parents and making them think you’re dead, kidnapped or something else horrible? TOTALLY grown up. What an asinine character. I sure do hope he gets murdered with a disease-infected rusted rake with acid covering it.

This really does put a thorn in the side of anyone arguing AGAINST the "girls only go for douchebags" argument...sadly.

Nicole pretty much just cries a lot when the camera zooms in on her. It’s not even dramatic movie crying. It’s baby-crying.

They come to this rest stop so she can take a piss, and when she comes out, Jess and his car are both gone. She stomps around like a temper-tantrum-throwing toddler for a bit and then intones angrily to herself about what an asshole he is. She isn’t even that surprised that he left – she just thinks he’s an asshole for it. That’s how much of a worthless dick-cheese this guy really was. “Dammit, he did this to me again! I should really learn to stop going on road trips with assholes who just leave me at random rest stops in the middle of nowhere!”

Yeah I'm sure they'll answer the fuckin' door if you try a TWELFTH time. I mean, maybe they just didn't hear you the other eleven godforsaken times you knocked.

Also, HOW LONG could she have been in the fucking bathroom for Jess to have been taken by the killer already? Did she just drink an entire aquarium that morning before they left and was in there for a half hour just peeing? Or does the killer of the movie just take after The Flash in terms of his superpowers?

So then we get the best use of time in a movie ever: Nicole just sits around for hours and hours in a security guard shack drinking a Wild Turkey and doing nothing. Yup, apparently after a few minutes of being stuck there, she just gives up all hope, hides in a dark room and starts drinking herself to death – on alcohol that doesn’t belong to her, no less. What a great main character.

Seriously though, you can’t just start walking in either direction and look for some car to help you?

No? No proactive ideas beyond just sitting around on your ass?

Sigh. Wellp, I guess that does it. Truly sitting in the dark drinking is the solution here! WASTING TIME IS THE ULTIMATE PINNACLE OF CINEMATIC FILMMAKING! I’m so glad we’ve come so far from The Great Train Robbery on through Dr. Caligari and then to Citizen Kane and Casablanca, and then to Bonnie & Clyde, The Shawshank Redemption, Pulp Fiction and more, all leading up to the cinematic genius of Rest Stop, with its masterful understanding of economy and time in storytelling. Truly this wouldn’t have been the same without a near-five-minute scene of the main character doing nothing. It doesn’t even matter that it’s the complete antithesis of good writing, as the main character should be taking some kind of action in any scene that occupies the screen so dominantly as this does. Because, really, the main character doing nothing but admitting defeat and drinking heavily is the height of our cinematic progress in the modern world.

On second thought, no, I don’t really like this.

Then she goes outside and gets attacked by the killer. She escapes by leaping headlong into that weird Winnebago that’s been sitting outside the rest stop THE ENTIRE TIME up to now, which for some reason is now leaving. Yeah because you know, I guess the people inside were just hibernating the entire day until now. What the fuck were they doing sitting there ALL DAY? Maybe they don’t require oxygen to perform basic utilitarian functions, because they’re idiots – I’m going with the second one.

Okay, guys, I’m gonna level with you here: what happens next was probably part of a different movie just accidentally spliced into this one – or maybe it was on purpose as a joke, as the actual story doesn’t make sense with itself anyway, but I digress. Nicole enters the Winnebago and is greeted with a crazy old lady who constantly talks about masturbating, and two creepy teenagers who I think are on leave from the set of Funny Games:

But trouble starts when Nicole sees some flashes from the back and goes to check, finding ……… a weird baby midget thing playing with a camera.

It’s never explained, has no relevance to the story, and is completely ridiculous to boot. Maybe if we had any context as to who these people are or what their story is (or even why the fuck they’re hanging out at some random rest stop in California) it could be weird in a TCM-ish way, but we get nothing. Oh, except the crazy lady screaming and calling Nicole a whore.

Don't eat me!

Oh, well in THAT case I totally see the point of all this! Hilariously enough, they drop her right back at the stupid rest stop where she started. So that whole bizarre thing you just watched was sort of like a commercial just haphazardly shoved into the middle of the movie. We now return from these messages from our sponsors at Barnum and Bailey’s Circus to your regular showing of ludicrous bullshit.

The truck guy chases her back into the bathroom again, because most good movie heroines do nothing but cry and hide, you know? There she sees that apparently everyone killed by this Rest Stop Killer wrote very detailed graffiti on the walls about what happened to them – y’know, in case a shitty horror movie was ever made about it and the main character needed a hackneyed way to find out the killer has been doing this for years! Just picturing the victims crawling back into that bathroom stall and taking the time to write all that shit on the wall about what the killer did to them, is so funny it's insane to me.

Then she finds a naked girl in the closet of the bathroom. She talks to the girl and finds out her name is Tracy, and that she got tortured by the killer for an indeterminate amount of time. It’s eventually revealed that, gasp, she was a ghost the whole time and wasn't really there, and this was all a big ol’ red herring! Apparently she died in the ‘70s. It makes sense though, as she said she was going to see the Rolling Stones, and nobody in 2006 would really do that ever.

Oh, great, disgusting torture scenes; that's what horror's about....eh, I've talked too much about these scenes in recent reviews. Copy paste generic "torture scenes suck" rant here.

Then it’s time for the old cliché “cop shows up and gets killed” scene – we get the true rising star of the police academy coming to check out the rest stop and finding her panicking and scared. Oh, wait, you say that isn't quite what we get this time? Well, color me surprised! Not to spoil it, but what happens is actually even more ridiculous, however...

He gets her inside the guard cabin and asks her a series of way-too-slow questions that don’t accomplish anything – he COULD just take her away from there, given she’s obviously panicked and something is going on there, but nope. He has to go outside and talk to the guy in the truck that is CLEARLY exactly what Nicole was describing. But because the guy lies and says he’s just asking for directions, the cop does nothing.

Yeah, buddy, you just stand there at the site where a dangerous madman is potentially lurking and ask her dumb questions about what he looks like. I'm surprised he doesn't go into even more inane detail in these questions. I mean, why not go all the way? Have him ask her to describe the killer's hat, his boots and the tires on the truck he's driving! It's all adding up to nothing but a contrived scene where things go bad again, anyway.

… I just don’t get it. How did they let this guy be a cop at all? I mean, clearly since the girl is so scared, it at least merits some questioning, as well as taking Nicole away from the area to safety. But nope, he just lets the guy go. And so the killer is free to do wacky things like run the cop’s legs over, then back up and do it again, then back up and do it a third fucking time:

Well, personally I think the cop deserved that, so I’m good. It is pretty funny that the killer seems to agree – I don’t really know why else he would continually hurt THIS guy and not the girl he’s supposed to be hunting, anyway…speaking of which, why hasn't he captured her, again? He clearly has many opportunities to do so, and she's so dumb and helpless it's like hunting a wounded, retarded, blind animal. You'd think he would have just kidnapped and tortured her after this many hours of cat-and-mouse nonsense, but I guess that would make the movie too short!

So she drags Mr. Super Cop into the rest stop bathroom again, because it’s the stupidest option available – it’s closed in, there’s nowhere to run and it puts Mr. Super Cop in agonizing pain every time she lifts him up under his arms to move him. Clearly she’s as qualified for this as Roman Polanski is to run a girls’ boarding school. But I digress.

The cop then takes an agonizingly long time to complain about how he’s dying, and shows Nicole pictures of his family. He says his son wants to be like him – oh ho ho, buddy, I don’t think that’s a good idea. You’d better call him up in your last breaths of his life and tell him to follow his dreams as an escape artist/stuntman/alcoholic, because clearly that would be less dangerous than imitating YOU. This scene just goes on for way too fucking long – he clearly isn’t mortally wounded if he's still cogent and able to talk this long, so I don’t get all his ballyhooing about how he’s dying. And Nicole just sits there and cries while the camera does more close-ups; we haven’t had enough of that yet, please give us more!

"I could actually try to act, but that would be more than this movie deserves, so...have fun with nothing but endless crying scenes from me!" Seriously, I could do a whole other review-length post with nothing but the pictures of this girl crying - it's insane how much of that there is in this.

"Yeah, I'm really dying here; that's why I have time to make this over-five-minute scene with nothing but faux-emotional sappy drama! And yes, we're really doing this tired, trite scene again even though you've seen it in a dozen other films!" 

Then they finally get an idea to DO SOMETHING. Nicole sticks her finger out the door to try and unlock it (I guess the killer locked them inside while we were being bored to death by Super Cop’s amazing stories…), and then the killer comes up and bites her finger off:

Did he just have shark teeth implanted? Otherwise, no, I have no idea how he just bit her finger off with just his teeth.

It is astounding to me how many shots there are in this movie of her whiny ass crying. At least this time it's because of a legit reason - she got her finger bitten off. But if I didn't tell you that, you wouldn't be able to tell this scene apart from the other three dozen close-ups of her scrunched up face whining like a bratty child.

I personally think it’d be hilarious if this actually wasn’t the killer biting her finger off, but instead just some random homeless guy walking by. That’d be pretty funny.

More hilarity comes when the killer starts dousing the rest stop bathroom in gasoline and trying to blow it up. Not wanting to die in fire, the cop tells Nicole to take his gun and kill him right there. He tells her to put it in his mouth, of course, because THAT’S also the stupidest option available – seeing as how shooting someone in the mouth might not automatically kill them. Why not just tell her to shoot you in the forehead, where it’s much less likely to miss and leave you alive still? Which is what happens exactly – she puts the gun in his mouth and misses, leaving a big hole in his head, and has to shoot him a second time.

To go with the easy joke of "he just didn't have a brain," or to not go with that joke...tough choice....

While I think it would add to the comedy to have her keep missing and having to shoot this moron even more, the movie doesn’t have time to waste – yes, this movie is done wasting time now! So she goes out on the roof and does a Die Hard jump off the rest stop building just as it’s blowing up. Amazing. I’m sure this obvious Die Hard rip off will really add to the movie’s charm levels.

Yeah, somehow not as good as Bruce Willis jumping off a burning building with a firehose around his waist...I can't imagine why that is....

So after some more running around aimlessly in the woods, it’s daytime now, and she takes off her shirt to give the audience some more boob shots – I guess it’s been so long since the beginning of the movie’s nudity, the director figured he’d show some mercy and have more at the end. She goes outside, fills that Wild Turkey bottle with gas from a car, and then firebombs the fuck out of the killer’s truck. But he appears behind her, looking like a cartoon drawing of the Boogeyman when you were young, and presumably kills her:

Then later on, the rest stop is SUDDENLY full of people, including cops. Where was all this for the whole rest of the fucking movie? She was there for nearly a DAY, and almost NOBODY showed up! Did they just decide that after a dozen fucking people had gone missing there, NOW it was time to remodel the place and start making sure no one else died there? Some girl goes in the bathroom, hears Nicole’s ghost saying help me, and then we get this dumb shit to end the movie:

Oh, fuck off; what, did you use all your money on the amazing gore scenes from earlier and now you just have to resort to crappy third rate Halloween vampire makeup from the party store?

This was amazing. I really can’t believe this movie was serious at all. It being a complete joke is the only explanation. Nothing made sense – every single random plot element, from the overly long drinking and doing nothing montage to the crazy Winnebago people and the cop’s humorously overlong “dying” monologue, just served to pad the movie out unnecessarily. It’s literally just like the director was getting paid by how long his movie was, so he added in random bullshit that had nothing to do with the story – it’s hard to convey exactly how pointless so much of this film really is to the overall “serial killer tortures woman at rest stop” plot.

Not that THAT plot is really good at all either. It’s mostly just a generic “serial killer is CRAZY and gets his kicks TORTURING PEOPLE” thing, with added insanity by way of having the kills date way back to the 1970s – picturing a geriatric old man doing all this does make it funnier though. And isn’t that really the greatest thing Rest Stop can lay claim to? I mean, it is pretty fucking hilarious. I’ll take that any day over super-serious, pretentious ass-shit like The Collector or its even worse sequel. As these are truly standards to be proud of, Rest Stop can rest easy knowing that.

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