Rest Stop: Don't Look Back (2008)

Due to the overwhelming critical response to the first Rest Stop, the demand for a sequel was through the roof. So now we have Rest Stop: Don’t Look Back, a sequel so good it doesn’t even have a “2” in the name to signify that it’s a sequel! Because not being able to tell if you’re getting the first one or the second one is the real way to make a good horror movie.

Director: Shawn Papazian

Starring: Richard Tillman, Jessie Ward

IMDb

We start this one off with a guy breaking down on the road and getting picked up by the family in the Winnebago from the last one. We get a couple of scenes of them being weird, but the thing that really throws me off is how these two Funny Games guys never stop drinking from their soda cups:

What they’re not showing you is the scenes of these two having to stop at every rest stop to take a piss that lasts about twenty minutes from how much they’re drinking.

So I guess the Winnebago has soundproof walls, as the family outside doesn’t notice the hitchhiker and the wife fucking inside, even though it would have been the easiest set-up in the world for anyone to notice if they’d just gone inside.

I guess it was just a set-up though, as we see the wife egging her husband on as he beats the shit out of the hitchhiker after he finds them. Then they tie him up out back and gouge out his eyes and bury him in the desert. Unfortunately for them, he doesn’t need eyes to survive as he comes back and slits their throats!

I'm surprised all the soda they're constantly drinking didn't leak out in place of blood.

I guess this guy was supposed to be the rest stop killer, killed by these Winnebago people, who he killed in return – and now they’re all ghosts roaming the highway forever. And that’s your plot for the first film which wasn’t explained there, instead shoehorned awkwardly into this one. Magical. Some loser truck driver fucked another guy's wife and then came back to life as a zombie after they killed him for it. Well gee, if that doesn't sound worthy of a full length horror movie, I don't know what does!

We then switch to our real main characters, Five O’ Clock Shadow and Blonde Bimbo. I guess their names are really Tom and Marilyn, but who cares about that? Apparently they’re going on a road trip to track down Nicole and Jesse from the first movie, because they’re close family and friends. They also team up with this dorky loser named Jared, who comes along because he’s stalking Nicole or something – see, filmmaking is easy when you can just make up characters at your whimsy and say they knew the old characters not in the movie anymore! Totally not a cheap ass way to shoehorn in a story.

"Yeah, since I'm easily ten years older than you, it totally makes sense that we hang out!"

I guess I should be glad for one thing though, as at least this is trying to follow the original story, rather than just putting out some nonsense. Though as you’ll find, nonsense and Rest Stop are pretty much synonyms. For example, check out their awesome road trip set-up they have, where Tom and Marilyn ride in one car and Jared takes a completely different one and they speak via walkie-talkie.

The most convoluted way ever to say "I hate you but am too nice to NOT let you come along on our totally pointless road trip to the middle of nowhere." Also without the gas station man telling them in an overly long scene where to go, they really WOULD have been driving to nowhere. Brilliant.

Yeah because you know, THAT’S how people take road trips! Totally makes sense. Even though later on we see that they all get one hotel room just so Tom and Marilyn can have sex while Jared sleeps in the bathtub.

"Sex is so much better when that annoying guy I hate is sleeping in the bathroom just mere feet away from us!"

That’s also how you have a good road trip! If you just reversed these two – have them all in the same car, but in different hotel rooms – it would be perfectly normal, but I guess that’s not Rest Stop.

What is Rest Stop is watching a supposedly grown adult driving a car with headphones on and playing with dinosaur toys, complete with goofy voices, while driving. Those are excellent ways to get into a car accident and die. Please, keep doing them!

Are you five years old? What the hell? This is just glanced over and never mentioned again, making it just a WTF moment. Thanks for that, movie!

There IS a thing called car speakers and a CD player, you jackass. You can always wait to listen to the latest Lady Gaga album until you get to where you're going otherwise.

To complete the triage of annoyance, he also does nothing but fart while in the car. OK, I see why they didn’t want to drive with this guy now.

He stops at a porta-potty just randomly inserted on the side of the road, and is SO SURPRISED when it has no toilet paper:

Yeah, next you'll be telling me these porta-potties DON'T have proper sewage systems for good hygiene after using them! I am just so utterly shocked!

Fortunately the killer comes to rectify his shitty situation:

Every horror movie would be better with scenes of the main character swimming in his own shit. Ohhh yeah Rest Stop 2, keepin' it classy as fuck!

So is he just attacking random porta potties now? Should the movie title be changed to “Porta Potty”?

Meanwhile at the actual Rest Stop, Marilyn goes to the bathroom and hears some noises while in the stall, which she immediately assumes are Tom coming in and then begins asking if it’s him repeatedly. Because any activity in the girl’s bathroom MUST be him coming in. It could never be anyone else in that public restroom! I wonder if she pulls the same shit in the Walmart or Target bathrooms – just calling out Tom’s name while sitting on the toilet every time she hears someone new enter the bathroom. Oh horror movies, always playing to our most socially awkward moments of total idiocy.

We do get an actual scary bit when she hears Nicole crying in the stall, opens it to find no one there, and then goes outside only to hear whimpering and crying and shuffling from inside again – then goes back in to find that it’s now a decrepit hellhole and not at all the clean bathroom she thought she was in. It’s actually an effective scene, and perhaps the only remotely frightening one in either Rest Stop movie.

Unfortunately the film realized that it reached its "one scary moment per two films" quota, and then decided it didn’t have to try anymore.

We get Jared finding the ghost of Nicole in the woods, only she’s played by a different actress – the funniest part is that this actress is actually better than the girl who played Nicole in the other movie. They sit down and she tells him how she was tortured and stuff. Because that’s instant sexual ambrosia, they start having sex on the blanket he bought with him, but it turns out she wasn’t really there and he had just gotten naked all by himself there in the woods.

Hate it when that happens! Also, why did he bring two different types of underwear with him on this trip?

You mean you DON'T pack tighty whities and boxer shorts at the same time?! Loser.

Then he goes and finds Marilyn at the other rest stop and they talk about how they saw Nicole. Because he’s blushing, she instantly deduces that he slept with the ghost of Nicole – I guess Marilyn just has a lot of experience with the sexual politics of the undead and anticipated this happening, because otherwise I have no idea how you’d deduce that!

Then we switch over to Tom, who’s getting tortured in the Rest Stop Killer’s Magic Rainbow Bus. We get an entirely too long scene of him threatening the killer, because I’m sure after the twelfth time he says “YOU BETTER NOT HURT ME” the killer will go “Oh, you’re right, I’ll stop now. My bad. How could I be so rude? Let's instead sit down for tea and crumpets, and talk about Blackadder, Manchester United and the Queen.”

That doesn’t happen, but it’d be funnier and more worth putting on-screen than the torture garbage we do get:

Boy, the Magic School Bus reboot isn't as fun as I thought it'd be.

He escapes and finds his brother Jesse, played by the same actor from the first movie, locked up in a cage with no tongue. The two of them escape in Tom’s truck and drive for a while, just wasting screen-time with insipid dialogue, all leading to the punch-line that, whoops, Jesse was never really there anyway! He was a ghost the whole time!

How do ghosts even work in these movies? They’re corporeal until a certain time interval passes – never the same for any of them – and then they’re just revealed as ghosts? I don’t think the writer for this movie ever watched Ghostbusters as a kid. Clearly Slimer and inderdimensional portals of Gozer are the only ways to do a ghost movie right! Well, unless you have Patrick Swayze I guess.

They all find each other again, somehow, and go to the gas station from earlier, where they find the gas station man. He tells them the only way to kill the killer is by burning his eyeballs, which nobody knows where they are. Apparently this is all part of some Indian ritual or something, which is especially baffling because everyone involved is white and likely has no ties to Native American religion, and has probably never even heard of it. But whatever, who needs logic now?

Also, how would they even know which eyeballs belong to the killer if they DID happen across a bunch of eyeballs? I dunno. Fuck logic anyway. Didn't you hear me just a paragraph ago? Fuck logic in the ass. Just obey the movie’s subtitle and don’t look back at whatever plot you made up while high on meth in five minutes. Plots are just inconvenient anyway, and a tool for the weak and powerless!

The killer and gas station man (who was working for the killer, I guess) tie up Jared and Marilyn and take Marilyn’s shirt off for some reason – because the movie hadn’t reached its boob quota yet. They force Jared to drill into her thigh because she was, apparently, unfaithful to Tom while he was overseas in the military. How does the killer know that? Why did the gas station man tell them how to beat the killer if he was working with him?

...Didn't you hear me the other two times? FUCK LOGIC FOREVER! The end is right around the corner! Just show some boobs and gore and that’s all you need.

"We could have just killed both of our victims, and neither movie has shown us to do ANYTHING like this to our victims before, but hey, that wouldn't allow us this SUPER COOL climax coming up!"

Then we get the final battle, which is really riveting as now most of the characters are limping around:

Yes, the heroes hobbling on one gimp-ass leg each slowly to battle. You sure know how to get the blood pumping, movie!

They don’t even really find the killer’s eyes; they just kinda kick him around and then blow him up – glad the burning-eyes thing was in the film at all when it had zero relevance to anything.

We then switch to a scene some time later where Tom and Marilyn are in bed – but whoops, Marilyn’s actually a ghost the whole time and the killer apparently got her off screen! Tom is still completely fine somehow. How did the killer get HER alone and not him when they'd both been together the entire time? Maybe it's implied that she got killed by the drill back in the gas station, but I dunno, that seems like it'd be giving the movie too much credit for subtlety.

"It's okay, honey, you don't have to put Rest Stop: Don't Look Back on your resume. Just forget about it like I do: by drinking a lot of alcohol."

This whole movie was nonsense. It tried to have more of a plot than the first one did, and even attempted to explain a few things. Unfortunately, it didn’t even really do that very well – the whole story feels half-assed and unfinished. I really mean that, as the ways they try to explain the stuff from the first movie come off as rather hasty back-tracking – “look, we CAN explain the randomness from the last one, honest!” But very little actual importance or drama is attached to anything that goes on, so it's not like you get invested in the story, even when they do try to have one.

I really think they just had zero real ideas and wanted an excuse to show off boobs, gore and explosions. I think this would have been a more enjoyable movie had it simply stuck to the idiocy and complete unabashed randomness of the first movie, which, while technically a worse film, was also more entertaining than this. As is, while this has a couple funny scenes, it’s short-change compared to the first Rest Stop film. All in all, a disappointment. Shame on you Rest Stop, I expected better!

Images 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.

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

The Collection (2012)

Apparently it took three years of director Marcus Dunstan banging his head against a wall, but a sequel to The Collector, which nobody in the world ever wanted, finally arrived. I gotta level with you guys: I still gave this too much credit. Once again, after watching the often jumbled and incoherent first film with its lack of any plot, I figured maybe THIS one would finally explain some of the things that needed explanation and give us a slightly more cogent film.

Heh heh heh … man, I’m an idiot. Excuse me for expecting even the least bit of intelligence, even the evidence of one brain cell used at all, in a movie. I’m sorry – I’m so sorry for expecting something so outrageous.

Director: Marcus Dunstan

Starring: Josh Stewart, Emma Fitzpatrick

IMDb

We start off with a little girl and her father in a car, with the dad saying he’ll always protect her and be there for her. Given cinematic laws of irony, of course a truck slams into the car right then, violently overturning it and starting a fire – you know, it happens. The father is thrown out of the vehicle, but the daughter is caught inside. Luckily, some random guy is there to save her. I’m just so glad we kicked off RIGHT where the last movie left off.

Then we get some news reports about how The Collector is this serial killer who can’t be stopped, he’s killed so many victims, blah blah blah – we get several scenes of policemen and firemen recounting exactly how powerless they are to beat this guy. The basic gist of these scenes is “We have no idea what we’re doing!” This is the same killer who couldn’t catch a ten year old girl in the last movie, mind you – just throwing that one out there.

"Yeah, we really have no idea what we're doing in this city anymore. The killer has clearly won the battle and we are surrendering to him. In fact we're going to hand him the keys to the city and let him be the new mayor!"

We also get some background information on Arkin and his situation – apparently he’s a thief with multiple convictions and the lady from the first movie was his wife. Why wasn’t any of that in the first movie again? It wasn’t like you just had so much else going on in that fuckin’ movie that you couldn’t have said a damn thing to explain YOUR MAIN CHARACTERS at all?! Hey though, I guess it’s understandable. We really needed every second of that one; even the scenes of the wife with the mafia debt! Which, by the way, is never brought up again – never even mentioned once – in this entire movie.

We then get even more stuff that connects to the last movie when we get a teenage girl whose boyfriend stands her up because he has to work. She gets a call from her best friend, though, and says no, she wants to stay inside. Two seconds later she looks out the window and sees her friend’s car in the driveway, and this suddenly makes her want to go now. Yeah, because crossing out the line in the script where she said she definitely didn’t feel like going would’ve been too much work, huh, assholes?

Oh, forget it – there are worse things to complain about. Like how the friend for SOME reason is bringing her little brother along and lecturing him about how to get laid. Because you know, most young women love bringing their dorky teen brothers along on nights out and ALWAYS lecture them on how to get laid! This is real life, I swear!

They go to some dance club where the bouncer, I guess, is trying to be Punk Rock Genghis Khan:

The Mongolian warrior race is taking awkward steps into the new world.

We then get, in this 75 minute movie, a few minutes of nothing but people partying. I really think these scenes were necessary to the movie! After all, what would this experience be without shots of people dancing to dubstep music at a club? Certainly not complete, I do say! What, do you think horror movies should be about horror? Pfft.

The Director's Cut has another hour of just this. The rest of the movie is the same shit, but there's another hour of nothing but the partying scenes. I personally think this would be a transformative once in a lifetime experience and everyone should see it! And I'm totally not lying or being sarcastic about anything in this caption!

But unfortunately that wonderfulness comes to an end as soon as the main girl, Elena, wanders off and trips one of the Collector’s traps … yes, he put traps in a dance club. I guess he was really counting on some random person wandering off into a dark enclosed room and tripping over a wire. Also, where was security in this? It would sorta make sense if he bought them off – not really, it’d be stupid, but at least it would be an explanation! But they never say so, so I guess it’s more of Dunstan’s “full frontal lobotomy” style directing – as in, you’d have to have one to enjoy anything in this piece of shit.

We do have more gore, though! We have industrial-size razors descending from the ceiling and slaughtering everyone en masse:

And also a steel cage that slowly crushes everyone inside it to a bloody pulp:

Yeah, you know those characters the movie just spent ten minutes sorta building up as important? They all just died horribly with very little climax or resolution! I so love writing, especially the kind where you don’t actually have to tell a story at all – you can just mash your fingers on the keyboard and send off whatever dribble comes out. Or so this movie is teaching me.

But fuckin’ seriously; let’s do some math. This movie is 73 minutes long, and we’re about 15 minutes in when Arkin shows up for the first time. That leaves us with less than an hour of actual movie that’s moving the plot forward with characters we actually see for more than a scene or two. Last time I checked, even Uli Lommel’s fetid feces-pile of a movie Black Dahlia was longer than that. This is practically home-video length. I mean come on!

This movie would be improved by black and white shots of the cops talking about eating breakfast I think.

On second thought, I should be praising Dunstan for making this goddamned abomination of a film as short as possible. Next time I will personally fund his movie if he agrees to cut out all footage down to 10 minutes total, including credits at the beginning and end. Open offer, Dunstan! Take it any time!

I just have to wonder, did these people even go to a legitimate rave? Or was this whole thing just some underground seedy event at a slaughterhouse out in the middle of nowhere?

Speaking of that, what was the Collector even thinking doing this? What was his thought process like? We know he likes to do bloody kill scenes and only take one person – so what difference does it make whether or not he kills a whole warehouse full of people? It’s never really established whether or not he planned to take Elena specifically. In fact, it does seem to be just random, which is dumb on its own. But dude, if he did really want to take her, if that was the case, why do it THIS way? Why not ambush her car, or do it at her house?

As much as I’d like to think ANY of this had a structure or a point to it, no – I’ve already been fooled by this series too many times and we’re not even halfway through this one yet. Every time I think there’s some sort of explanation to a plot hole, it turns out there isn’t and it was just empty, thoughtless crap. Thoughtless crap used as a vehicle for GORE!!! And nothing else. You goddamn hacks.

Sigh … so, fortunately for the universe, Arkin survived this long and escapes from a window Batman-style, leaving Elena to be kidnapped. What an awesome guy.

He looks beat up now, but in about ten minutes he'll be moving perfectly fine and it'll be like this never happened. I guess Arkin was such a piece of shit that his body literally had no softness or humanity left in it; that must be how he survived this fall!

Arkin gets picked up by some medics and police, who arrest him on the spot. But what’s really funny to me is the only thing we hear the paramedic say: “Please note this scratch on his arm is self-inflicted.” Yeah, because when a guy comes into your ambulance bloodied up to Hell and having just fallen out of a second-story window, it’s important where ONE SCRATCH came from!

"Please also note that he has a freckle on his left shoulder."

So in the hospital, Arkin is approached by a strange man who offers him a chance to get out of jail time if he helps them go back into the Collector’s lair and save Elena. The guy also says he’s a vigilante from some rogue mercenary group, so I’m really not sure how they’d ever get Arkin a pardon from jail time. But I guess Arkin is a mentally retarded person, so this never crosses his mind and he accepts immediately.

We then get introduced to the most generic group of mercenaries ever. I’d like to issue a public apology to Ghost Rig, as this movie’s mercenaries makes theirs look like the cast of The Thing in comparison. What are their personalities, you ask? They’re assholes … that’s it … I know, stop the presses; my heart is just tearing up right here. I’ll be devastated if these characters die.

Most of these guys are never identified by name. Well, at least they didn't try TOO hard. I mean giving your characters personalities beyond "angry mercenary assholes" would have busted a brain cell I bet.

Oh, and guess how Arkin finds the location he was taken to, even despite having been in a box the entire time? You’re gonna love this shit – apparently he made tally marks on his own flesh every so many feet, and also memorized exactly where the vehicle he was in turned. Through this, Arkin has somehow figured out exactly where the Collector’s secret hideout is. You know, I was all prepared to decry this as completely insane and unrealistic, even less plausible than the traps in the first movie. However, I’m also pretty sure this is just how they teach Boy Scouts to navigate the woods these days. Just, tie ‘em up in a burlap sack and make them carve lines into their flesh to figure out where they’re going. It works, I swear!

"I also have a map of New York City carved on my belly with a butter knife from the last time I was in this situation."

They go to the abandoned hotel where the Collector apparently has set up shop in his Jigsaw Killer-wannabe lair – in fact I’m almost positive he’s just a Jigsaw-worshiper; probably sat in his room as a kid jerking off to kill scenes from SAW 1 and 2. Oh, am I talking about the Collector here, or Marcus Dunstan? Guess it’s hard to tell.

One guy, looking at the hotel, says “It looks deserted.” Well gee, personally I expected the Collector to be operating out of the Hilton down the street, but whichever! They go in and the movie just gives up and becomes a shitty First Person Shooter game with “zombies” coming out and attacking them:

Press X! PRESS X!!!

After that, we get Elena somehow easily escaping from her box – oh, who am I kidding; it doesn’t surprise me at all that he’d make it this easy to get out. It wouldn’t be something worth mentioning if not for the incredibly dull and cliché scene where the Collector is “searching” for her. I put that term in quotes because really it’s the same crap as every modern serial killer movie – he doesn’t really try to look, instead he just moves around slowly while she lies immobilized, then he lets some spiders walk around over her:

Oh put a sock in it. It's just Andrew Garfield's little buddies coming to save the day!

Snooooooooooooore.

After that, we get some aimless wandering around the Collector’s house. Nothing’s really going on, but the movie just wants to show us how cool all the scenery is! This warehouse is literally every over the top serial killer cliché ever, from the grimy looking walls to the petrified human beings in glass tanks and the abundance of goofy looking mannequins and kids’ dolls:

It’s just worthless shit; I don’t have any other words and I see no reason to beat around the bush. Clearly Dunstan and whoever he actually conned into working on this crap had no real ideas, and just fell back on the most bottom-of-the-barrel, dead-eyed cliché that only hack writing and lots of pandering could come up with.

So Arkin stumbles upon a girl nailed to a wall, begging for help. True to his character, he hides and watches while she gets murdered, even though he clearly had time to help her out. No, he never dwells on this, and the movie does not treat it like a big deal or even like he did something wrong. I really hope this piece of shit character gets what’s coming to him in the end – like a bee hive over his head and a blowtorch to his balls.

(Hint: he doesn’t get any of those things.)

"I could save her right now, knock him over the head while his back is turned, but that would require effort! Plus it would actually make sense and make me a likable character, and we can't have that!"

Then we get the mercenaries finding Arkin and threatening him because he split up from them. I’m so glad the movie worked SO HARD at making us like these abominable assholes, because then we get the old “killer appears right behind them and they don’t listen even when main guy tries to warn them” trick. If I still had any faith in mankind at this point, I’d be so disappointed! He strings up the one lady and just lets her swing around upside down. Presumably she’s going to be tortured, but I think it’s funnier to imagine if she just kept swinging around upside down forever in a continuous loop.

They find Elena and Arkin then has a brilliant idea to try and get help – he leans out an opening in the window with his gun and shoots a homeless person. Yes, the main character of the movie just shot a homeless person – you didn’t imagine that.

I'll give the movie this one measly caveat - there's no other film where the hero shoots homeless people. But then, I don't think THAT is a goal worth celebrating!

The ambulances get there in like two seconds flat; what, were they right around the fucking corner just lounging?

The Collector somehow traps them all in a cage. Arkin tries to reach the latch and let everyone out, but he can’t do it unless they re-break his arm – basically just an excuse for more gore. But any excuse to hurt Arkin is fine by me! And military chick re-sets Arkin’s arm immediately after they get out, anyway. I personally would find it hilarious if they got stuck in another cage right after and had to re-break and re-set Arkin’s arm all over again. But the movie isn’t catering to my sense of humor.

Instead we get a lame-ass fight scene, where the Collector is somehow beaten down by Arkin – yes, he’s beaten up by a man with a broken arm. I’m so close to the end at this point, I just don’t care.

We also get some despicably lame slo-mo shots of Elena destroying everything afterward – really, you’re trying to pass THIS off as epic? Really now?

Yeah, you go, heroes; one's an asshole who shoots homeless people and steals from people who trust him, the other is a bland girl who we don't know anything about! Truly worthy of heroic music! Put that music in more 75-minute worthless pieces of shit full of nothing but torture garbage, please!

So they all get saved and go home. We then cut to another scene of the Collector arriving home. He turns on the radio broadcast to some stuff about his murders, but is surprised when it’s switched to banal music that sounds something like a less imaginative Meshuggah – which is saying something. He goes downstairs and Arkin is there, waiting for him with a gun to his head.

Arkin says he’s going to “make the Collector feel everything he felt” with a smarmy, shit-eating self-obsessed smirk on his face. Then we fade out as he starts making out with the Collector passionately.

Am I making that last part up? Who gives a shit; it’s not any less stupid than what actually happens anyway.

I hated this movie – like, burning, blood-red, worst-enemy hatred. When I started writing this review, I was filled with an overwhelming urge to just skip talking about the film and spend the review bashing Dunstan and the movie unrepentantly, without any remorse. I’m really not exaggerating at all – this movie filled me with a rage unusual for this blog, and it’s not something I really like to incite in myself – I don’t do these things exactly on purpose. I may watch some bad movies, but watching something that hurts me this much is not the intent behind Cinema Freaks, not at all.

This is a waste of time as big as any I’ve seen, with absolutely nothing redeemable about it. What miniscule scraps of plot we got from the last film are long gone, replaced here with silly “joke” horror alternating with SAW-fellatio to a degree so flagrant the only way it makes sense is because, surprise, Marcus Dunstan was the guy behind the last four (also god-awful) SAW movies. Because really he isn’t even trying anymore – even the set design is indistinguishable from a SAW sequel. You might as well have just slapped SAW 8 on the cover; it wouldn’t matter anyway. There’s no imagination, no scares, no character – nothing but pure, undiluted hate for the audience, and for horror in general.

If you want some more specific critiques ... well, the killer is never explained, his motives are left almost entirely untouched. Not every horror film needs tons of exposition, but with one like this, focused solely on one man doing such specific, strange things, you at least need some bare scrap of it so our imaginations can have something to work with.

The plot threads from the last movie are pretty much discarded. Both the little girl who Arkin saved from the house AND his own family, in trouble with loan sharks who may or may not have been involved with the mob, are never addressed here. They were barely there in the first one, and they're nonexistent in this one.

That would be fine if the new plot elements in this were better, but even the plot introduced in this film is just glanced over, and for what? Gore. Gore, gore and more gore; and oh, don't forget the tepid horror cliché all over this yet again like dog turds on a newly cut lawn. If the film didn't even try to set up anything beyond the gore, it would be one thing. It would still be bad, but at least it wouldn't have any pretense about what it is. The fact that they set up such a flimsy, half-assed story to try and posture this as an actual story we were supposed to get invested in just comes off as extremely dishonest and like Dunstan didn't really give two shits what he was doing. The places where you're supposed to care about the characters are glazed over like a drunk college student doing a term paper the night before, and as a result, the entire thing is frustrating at best and absolutely deplorable at worst. It's a lazy, trashy, poorly done movie in every aspect.

When I finished watching this, I was mostly just sad. I was sad I had spent my time even watching this filth at all; sad that anyone would spend time watching this instead of doing anything else at all. I felt bad for wasting 75 minutes of my life on this crap instead of reading a book, doing some writing, watching any other film – pretty much anything would’ve been an improvement over watching this movie.

So let this be a warning, dear readers … this movie is the cinematic equivalent to getting curb-stomped.

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