The House That Jack Built (2018)

This is a movie that had people walking out furious and sickened during festival screenings, so of course I had to see it. And of course it was directed by acclaimed provocateur Lars von Trier, whose films are often considered either brilliant (by eccentric film nerd standards) or hot, terrible garbage by everyone else. So all in all, this movie about an insane serial killer is a perfect storm for a review here.

Director: Lars von Trier

Starring: Matt Dillon, Riley Keough

IMDb

So why did all those people walk out of this, anyway, you might be asking? Well, because the movie is basically wholly comprised of trolling and edge-lord stuff. It's like a peek into the mind of a 4chan board or something, only done with some actual humor and good directing. I couldn't stop watching just because I had no clue what was going to happen next. It's basically like Dexter if Dexter had a lot to say about how much he hated women. It's American Psycho with no sense of irony.

It's a completely immoral movie, too, which is often the worse sin for some people. You can have some blood and guts in it, but if a movie seems to be on the Right Side™ then it's often much less offensive to a lot of people than a movie that roots for its bad guy and doesn't even try to have a message. The House That Jack Built is about a serial killer named Jack (woah, what a leap) and we get zero insight into his character, no sympathy or backstory. Just him chronicling five times he killed people over a period of years.

There's one time where he kills two kids with a sniper while hunting and then forces their mom to try and feed pie to one, which is bad because too much pie will make a child fat. And, oh, hell, who am I kidding? Making jokes like that is beneath me for this movie. It's so obvious it's like a big neon sign. The movie itself is already kind of a joke anyway and me joking about it is the extra whipped cream on top that nobody wanted.

It's horrifically, almost parodically violent – the stuff that happens crosses a line from gruesome into just plain goofy a lot of the time. I mean it's still horrible to watch, but it's so over the top that it actually kind of lessens the impact at times – like, one scene he kills a woman and then has to keep coming back over and over to make sure he didn't accidentally leave a speck of blood anywhere. That's just ridiculous. Another time he cuts off a woman's tit and then pins it to the hood of a cop car. Take THAT, cops! Do you now see the error of your ways, police officers?! What deep social commentary this is...

There's also a bunch of inner monologuing and dialogue that's mostly just him raving about nothing. It's all a lot of nonsense. A lot of it comes off like stuff you'd read on some Incel message board in a dark hole of the internet. One time he shouts at a victim that “it's always the man's fault and the woman is the victim.” A few times he goes into lengthy screeds about Nazi architecture and you even see a few pictures of Hitler. ARE YOU OFFENDED YET??? That seems to be the only real goal here. No bigger story, just provocation. As much as some reviews will point out that you barely get any character insight or development, no reason why this guy is the way he is – I don't think it's necessary. If you want to know why he is the way he is, just log into Reddit or 4chan and find one of the many alt-right rat-holes where these people congregate.

Oh, and the finale is a trippy, 2001: A Space Odyssey-esque journey into Hell full of creepy Halloween lights and dramatic sounds. Then he falls into the abyss and that's the end of it. Honestly, it would've been funnier if he went to heaven or if there was just nothing after death. That would have been more fitting than 'the Christian idea of Hell is right.' Kind of an orthodox way to end such a gritty, edgy movie, huh?

This mostly seemed like what I said above, purely an exercise in offending people. If it wasn't so funny at parts and so well acted, it would basically just be a sloppy diatribe by an alt-right dude-bro on the internet. It's hardly anything substantial. Seems like von Trier hearing what everyone said about him, including a ban from the Cannes film festival for some shit he said about Nazis years ago, and really just everything about his other films, and then was like 'I'll just make the movie everyone thought I would make, anyway.' And then he basically made a very well made internet troll comment and put that on screen. But it doesn't have the sharp, vicious point of a Dogville or the sheer misanthropy and misery of Antichrist – not even close.

In a way it seems every provocative filmmaker could very easily slip into this mode. I didn't find very much depth here. It was entertaining at points just for how utterly depraved it was, and then at other points it was just cringeworthy – that tit-cutting scene was pretty awful to watch. I'm sure von Trier's point here, lashing back at critics and just fucking with everyone, was fun for him, and he'll get some views from all the controversy. But in terms of depth and actual quality it just seems like a big-budget equivalent of a guy screaming at the sky just to vent anger.

Image not mine; credit belongs to its owner.

My Bloody Valentine 3D (2009)

Valentine's Day is over and done. Did you have a good one? Did your special someone surprise you at work with a bouquet of flowers? Well, whatever you did, now that it's over, you can at least be satisfied that you didn't have a bloody valentine. That's the worst kind. I mean, if you had one of those, you'd probably be praying for a Valentine's day spent alone sulking in your room.

Director: Patrick Lussier

Starring: Jensen Ackles, Jamie King, Kerr Smith

IMDb

Co-written with Michelle.

This movie is so cool that it comes with four pairs of 3D glasses so you can experience it in the glory that it was meant to be seen in.

And nothing says "cheap piece of crap" like glasses that you have to actually rip apart yourself by the seams.

Yeah, now that I have that, I'm definitely inviting three of my best friends over to watch My Bloody Valentine 3D! I probably won't have any friends after, but fuck it, it's worth it.

(As a side note, yes, the entire movie is 3D and ends up looking ridiculous if you don't have the glasses, hence the pictures in this review looking like a drunk person filmed the movie. In addition, they don't seem to work too well when watching on a computer screen, so it's doubly stupid.)

This is a movie with the distinction of having an entire slasher movie crammed into the first 10 minutes, as we see a killer breaking out of the hospital after a mining accident. But at least he stopped to let us know he really cared by drawing little hearts in the blood of his victims on the walls!

He also sent "sorry for your loss" Hallmark cards to all the victims' families! What a nice guy.

Then we get a bunch of dumb high schoolers hanging out in a mine, including this guy, who looks like they fished him out of a cubicle in Nebraska and stuck him in the clothes of a Texan kid who gets in fights after football games.

Unfortunately for them, a killer shows up to ruin the handjobs they weren't going to get anyway because they brought their dates to a fucking mine. He slaughters a bunch of them, but a few of them survive by virtue of being main characters. They manage to stay out of the killer's way for an absurdly long time considering he's walking around right around a corner.

That is, until this one dude comes out from nowhere and starts randomly calling out “Jason? JASON?!” at the killer for no apparent reason. He steps over several dead bodies and yet somehow doesn't seem to realize the guy he's calling at killed all of his friends. You could argue he was trying to call out to a friend of his, but I think he just got confused as to what movie he was in and thought he was in Friday the 13th.

His kills are similarly implausible though. Maybe that's why the kid got him confused with Jason.

Then the main characters leave the one guy, Tom, to die in the cave because they really have to high-tail it out of there and go fuck on a beach somewhere where the Creature from the Black Lagoon is all they have to worry about. The cops kill the killer, and Tom is saved.

Ten years later, the media just comes around, completely unwanted and uninvited, every year and obnoxiously films segments reminding everyone of the killer's massacre set against empty streets.

"Please give us a story so we don't have to keep reporting on the Kardashians and how cold it is this week! Please!"

The sheriff is played by Kerr Smith, who was in the original Final Destination film, so I guess his career really came full circle. The character's name is Axel, who has a ridiculously hot, loving wife who seems perfect, so of course he's screwing some 17-year-old on the side in sleazebag motels and laughing about it.

It's only jailbait if you get caught, right?

It's particularly asinine because this is the only time we ever see these two characters together – this subplot about them screwing on the side never comes up again. So really it's just to establish how much of an asshole Axel is. Peachy! She even says she's pregnant, which also never comes up again in the movie even though she still has scenes left in the movie and dies later on! Continuity and character development? Don't use those newfangled edumacational words down here, boy!

...aw, hell, just write whatever you want. Nobody is watching this anyway.

Later we get a scene of this one chick, having sex with some guy in a hotel, and then the guy reveals he was taping it all on camera. Wonderful...I love how indignant and offended the woman gets after she finds out it was filmed and he throws money at her like she's a whore. “Yeah, I'm not a whore! I just have sex with random dudes at truck stops! My morality is intact!” Then she runs outside, naked, to confront the guy as he's leaving. Because logic is for fuckin' morons.

"I'm really hoping this scene will land me a part in the next Quentin Tarantino movie! Boobs and a gun at the same time has to count for something, right?"

To lighten the mood a bit, the killer shows up and chases her around a bit. I don't know how exactly we end up with her hiding behind a bedframe against a wall and thinks that will somehow save her. But it happens, and you're probably a bit dumber just for sitting through it.

"You know, maybe I would have been better off making a run for it rather than trapping myself back here....eh, nah, it's fine."

After this, the movie basically gives up like a dumb sixth grader on a long division question. So I guess Tom has come to town because his father used to own the mine that all those kids died in, and Tom is selling it because he wants to move on with his life after a traumatic event. This makes people so angry they try to punch him when he so much as enters a bar. Because you know, that will really fix the problem.

Oh yeah, getting punched by an old man is how I want all my horror movie heroes to act. You got it right, movie!

Then it's Cliche Scenes 101 as Sarah and Tom have a conversation about why he's really back and how he's a coward for wanting to sell the mine and move on with his life. It's very hollow and I think both actors cared very little while writing this. We then see exactly what Sarah's advice was worth as Tom goes back to the mine like she said and some guy ends up dying while he's in there. Great advice, lady! Maybe this is why you never got that job at the psychiatric institute.

This woman in 10 years as a therapist: "You have PTSD after getting your leg blown off in Iraq? GET BACK OVER THERE AND FIGHT, PUSSY!" 

This wasn't even the fault of the killer. That guy was just really clumsy.

We get a really boring chase scene set in a supermarket, which is the prime location for slasher chase scenes. The scene ends with the one chick Axel was cheating on Sarah with getting killed, and of course it happened off screen and the killer had time to do this whole elaborate setup in the five seconds before anyone found the body.

Required: suspension of disbelief even greater than understanding a Holocaust-denier.

Then after that we get a sequence of scenes that pretty much put me to sleep. Some of them are about Axel and Tom fighting over Sarah in the same way they fight over who's killing all these people, because priorities schmiorities. I really fucking hate the “drama” in this movie – watching any of these characters pine after old high school sweethearts like some awful 1990s sitcom is about as endearing as day-old cat puke on your rug.

Other scenes are about Sarah conflicted as to who the killer is – either Tom, who has no alibi and showed up right when the murders started, or Axel, who has some weird stuff in their house that makes her suspicious. It's kind of like a dating show, except written by Ted Bundy. I'd really be drawn into all of this if I didn't already want to kill both of these characters by slow bludgeoning death with a foam baseball bat. But needless to say... Hitchcock, these writers certainly were not.

It turns out it was Tom who was the killer, as he starts screaming about the killer being in the room when really there's nobody there. It's actually kind of a good scene and, handled by better people, could have made this a better film. But this is just his evil switch flipping on, and he goes nuts after and they have to shoot him.

LOOK AT HOW COOL OUR 3D EFFECTS ARE! LOOOOOOOOKKKKKK! As a side note, I've done you all a favor by leaving out the several other really dumb, gratuitous shots like this all throughout this movie. You can leave your thank-you cards, gifts and free booze at the door on the way out.

Because, you know, that's how mental illness and PTSD works – you just turn into a serial killer automatically when your delusions are confronted. Thanks for being a complete worthless hack-work piece of shit with zero redeeming value to society, movie!

Eh, that's what I see every time I look in the mirror too.

Oh, and really? We're ending on a cliché “killer gets out by pretending to be a worker and covering his face with a mask” thing? I get the idea you could probably find babies with better imaginations than the writers of this movie. Seriously – fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you, My Bloody Valentine 2009.

Writers in this scene: "Oh yeah, nobody has EVER seen that trick before! We're geniuses!"

No talented writing, no good acting, no good scares – this was just awful; the complete collective void of thought of a thousand brain farts sent to die in the area where no neurons light up anymore. You could literally just make a list of slasher cliches while watching Friday the 13th Part 3 while high on pot and make a home movie in your basement and it'd be better than this.

...and wait a minute; now that I think of it...what the ever-loving fuck did this have to do with Valentine's Day?! There was no connection made, at all! Maybe the original 1980s version made more of a connection, I dunno; but in this, there was absolutely no reason for the film to be Valentine's Day themed.

I've never been so insulted in all three dimensions at once. Frankly, this is the worst thing associated with valentines since the St. Valentine's massacre. I think I'll keep the glasses, though.

Nailed it.

Images copyright of their original owners; I own none of them except for the ones I took of the glasses. I do own those.

The Ballad of The Killing

The Killing was a great show,
For about two seasons.
After season two it got cancelled,
And we thought we had seen the end,
AMC having put a bullet to its head.
But then Netflix and Fox stepped in,
Wielding great and powerful magic,
Possibly threatening AMC execs’ families,
And brought it back for season three.

Despite the fact that,
In the original European version,
It was a completely different show,
And the case stretched over two seasons in the U.S.
Was only one over there!
They had played with our emotions,
Put the show out of its misery,
And then buried it in the Pet Sematary,
And brought it back as something new.

The third season didn’t need to exist,
It was pretty much completely different
From the other two.
It followed new characters and put the old ones in the background,
While it had some captivating moments,
It was largely a different show.
There was one very captivating episode,
Mostly because of that guy who played the dad in Orphan,
(Or as some call him, Peter Sarsgaard!)
And the skillful representation
Of a man left on death row.
But then came the final episode,
In which a disappointing twist was revealed,
Such a cliche I never would have expected
From a show that did so well at covering them in the past.
And to top it all off like a cherry on a pile of manure,
The worst cliffhanger I’ve ever seen
On TV in my entire life,
Was how they chose to end this show they’d spent
So much time bringing back to life.

What a disappointment!

It was as if I’d been dumped by a girl
And then she came to my house the next day
And took a shit on my front lawn.
I left the show with disappointment
Feeling in the future I’d simply
Watch the first two seasons.
It was not even half a year later,
That Netflix waved their magic wand again
Necromancers supreme
They raised the show from the dead a third time
And announced there would be six final episodes
Masqueraded as a ‘season’
To finish off the show.

So let’s recap:
This show has been cancelled
After EVERY FUCKING SEASON.
And then brought back again and again
LIke an unwilling zombie
Forcefully reanimated
Walking living-dead,
And now they say it’ll finally be done.
I don’t know if I believe it,
I’m prepared for another announcement next Spring:
‘The Killing returns for season five! Only on Netflix!’
And all I gotta say is,
Poor Mireille Enos,
Constantly pulled back and forth
In a limbo tug-o-war
Is the show dead or alive?

I dunno.
But it sure is succeeding at driving me insane.

You’ve got one shot, guys. One. Last. Shot.

Curse of the Zodiac (2007)

I started having visions in my mind of the Zodiac killer. Even though there's no evidence of supernatural powers being a real thing in this world at all, I began to have vivid dream sequences shot in shaky-cam vomiting nausea style, with the Zodiac mostly just muttering swear words under his breath. I dunno, honestly I’m not sure what was really going on, as I then was overcome with an overwhelming desire to go pay for the services of a prostitute instead of continuing the investigation into the psychic powers of the Zodiac killer.

If that didn’t make any goddamn sense to you, well, congratulations yet again - you’re any person in the world except Ulli Lommel.

Director: Ulli Lommel

Starring: Cassandra Church, Jack Quinn

IMDb

Yes, made a year after the successful film Zodiac made by David Fincher, Ulli Lommel decided to make a fucking worthless piece of trash called Curse of the Zodiac. Surprise, I’m really not that into this one. This will be a short review, as there is nothing worth talking about in this thing. And I really don’t want to give a hack artist like Lommel any more time-of-day than he deserves. I mean, the guy looks like Dick Dastardly from Wacky Races! How can you trust him with anything?

We start off with some shaky-cam seizure-visions for the opening credits that make it pretty clear exactly what the intent behind this was - send all your viewers into a blind comatose state so they can’t pay attention to the rest of the movie. Heh - “movie.” That’s a good one.

Then we get a text scroll summarizing the Zodiac killer, which is really awesome because it shows Lommel was able to read Wikipedia, which IS awesome since I wouldn’t have guessed he was literate otherwise. Other than that, no, I don’t think a despicably short and plain-looking series of text slides on a boring black background was a particularly good way to tell this real life, interesting crime story that you instead boiled down to an insultingly Neoandethal-ish pile of crap. But hey, serial killers are awesome, man! They’re so dark and tormented and shocking and stuff. So anything about them, even if it’s the worst thing since Rock n’ Roll Frankenstein, must be interesting, right? Right?

We then get an astounding opening with all the poetic wit Lommel could muster - the Zodiac Killer speaking in a raspy voice more befitting of that weirdo on the subway, and calling this journalist guy “fat fuck” over and over. I guess the journalist guy is supposedly investigating Zodiac, but really we never see him do anything but read from books at an agonizingly slow pace in dimly lit rooms.

How about turning up the lights, you fucking idiot? Oh wait, that wouldn’t give you the best excuse ever to not read the script for this movie - carry on, then.

About half of this film’s dialogue is pretty much just made up of the Zodiac muttering obscene nonsense about killing women, and frankly I didn’t even need to hear it the first time, let alone the other 50 times. For some reason at the beginning, he keeps going on little tangents about how his name is spelled; saying things like “You know how my name is spelled, with a Z…” Uh, okay then? Is this a Zodiac Killer children’s picture book, complete with ABC lessons and games? Maybe I’d read that. But only if Jake Gyllenhaal narrated it for the audio-book version.

The other main character is this skittish, skinny white girl who keeps having weird dreams about the Zodiac killer coming to kill her. She blabs about it to her boyfriend/husband/whatever, who is a suave tan-skinned hip hop-looking guy who doesn’t even look like he belongs in the same room as her, let alone a relationship. But why start making sense now?

These two characters look like they were both pulled from two completely different movies. The girl looks like she belongs as a background character in a meet-cute indie romance comedy, maybe at a coffee shop, and the guy looks like he needs to be in a 1970s period drama about an art school.

They have an annoying conversation about whether or not she needs to see a shrink. It kinda goes like this:

“You should really seek help about these visions of a serial killer you’re having in your dreams!”

“ARE YOU SAYING I NEED A SHRINK?!? I’M NOT CRAZY!!! REALLY!!!”

“I know, but you should really seek some help about all of these weird dreams!”

“I’M NOT CRAZY! WHY ARE YOU SUGGESTING I SEE A SHRINK?!?”

She also says he’s “getting out of his league” by suggesting she seek help for the obviously distressing dreams she’s having. Getting out of his league? But I love this guy...whatever his name is. Itt’s really asinine for her to be so bitchy to him for just trying to help her out when she’s obviously upset. You’d hope this would just be another one-note kill character, but nope, she’s the heroine for the film! Heh heh heh...somebody get the straitjacket; I think I’m going to need to go away for a while after this review.

We then get a scene with a boring guy who constantly talks like he’s half asleep and a girl whose direction, I believe, was “be as bitchy and rude as possible.” She’s chewing him out for not spending enough time with her, because, yeah, she’s really giving him a lot of incentive to hang out with her! The awful attitude, the constant whining...total hang out material!

Is it bad that all I want to do here is make shadow-puppets against the background?

Fortunately the Zodiac kills them, or something - if sticking a gun in her mouth mafia-style while there’s a split-screen with psychic-visions girl holding her head and moaning counts as killing, then I guess that's what happens.

I just...cannot for the life of me understand why this directing choice was made. It is so asinine, so pointless and so amateurish that it’s pretty much indefensible. Lommel has been directing films since the late 70s, and this is really the best he can do? The only conclusion I am forced to draw is that he’s doing this on purpose. You absolute ass-monger. You commander on this sea of shit!

Then there’s another scene of the girl and her hip hop, beret-wearing, wine-sipping boyfriend, who apparently has nothing to do all day but sit in the exact same spot as he was the other scene. In fact, did he even move at all?

"My job includes sitting on the couch, drinking wine and watching Desperate Housewives. In fact I think my ass may be glued to this couch!"

They talk about how she met the reporter at the police station (who turns out to be the “fat fuck” guy the Zodiac taunts sometimes) who agreed to help her research the Zodiac. This sequence of events is never shown, just told here - yes, because seeing THAT scene which would have moved the plot forward would have been lame, but THIS scene, in which the boyfriend asks if the reporter is attractive, is TOTALLY useful! Because why have any likable characters at all?

Sigh...so what, there’s another scene where some prostitute is arguing with her pimp and the Zodiac is narrating more garbage over-top about wanting to kill her in some sick way. The camera tilts around like the cameraman just tripped and fell over while filming and then they just decided to use that take, as they clearly did not care:

...and the whole scene is about as unpleasant on all fronts as humanly possible. It’s literally a fucking assault on your senses. The picture quality makes old 1970s no-budget horror movies look like a James Cameron blockbuster, the camerawork makes no sense, the dialogue between the prostitute and the pimp is just a bunch of screaming and shouting you can barely understand, and the Zodiac’s narrating over-top is a constant stream of misogynistic, hate-filled garbage that more denotes someone who should be euthanized rather than allowed to continue making films. It is so omnipresent in near every scene in this film and so lacking in anything resembling taste, that I just have to call it what it is - absolutely deplorable, disgusting filth.

Ugh. I really just can’t. The rest of the film is pretty much like this: the Zodiac preys upon some girl in horrible picture quality, muttering more bullshit about how he’s going to kill her, then he does it in some boring manner, then we get some scenes of the psychic-dream girl holding her head and crying, then we get a bunch of shaky cam scenes trying to look all artsy and demented. Rinse, repeat and hate yourself - that’s your movie. Was it good for you?

I'll translate to Lommel-ese, for the uninitiated: LOOK HOW ARTSY I AM! SMELL MY FARTS AND PRAISE ME AS A NEW GOD OF CINEMA!

There’s really only a few other things worthy of note - in the scenes where he’s stalking the girls and muttering, why can’t they hear him? I guess it's supposed to be his inner thoughts or whatever, but it's so poorly done you can't tell half the time, in the beginning anyway. If he’s really right there, it’s either A) he’s muttering so low nobody can hear him, which makes him a total weenie loser, or B) the white static noise in these girls' heads in place of cogent thoughts is so loud they can't hear anything else. Neither one would surprise me. The scenes where the main girl is seeing visions just make less and less sense as this thing goes on. Is the Zodiac psychic? Is he astral-projecting his murders into her brain? Why her, anyway? Why not any other person? What’s so special about her?

The answer to all of these questions is “Fuck you, I’m Ulli Lommel, I don’t have to make any goddamn sense.”

There are maybe two scenes of actual investigating, you know, that thing the girl and the reporter claimed to be doing, but they're not very long and nothing of importance is discovered in them. Instead we just get a scene where the reporter gives up on all that boring detective work and instead hooks up with a prostitute. He goes outside to have a smoke, then while he’s doing that, the Zodiac sneaks in through the air vents and kills the prostitute. Yes, I am dead serious about that, and yes, my soul died a little bit even writing it.

"Hey, I liked that window view; get out of there!"

The guy comes back in, sees her dead and doesn’t care. Like literally I’m not even exaggerating - he doesn’t show a reaction at all. I think that about sums it all up. I could reiterate what about this film is so awful, but frankly, I think this one speaks for itself.

Images copyright of their original owners. I do not own any 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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