for Confusing Yet Stupid Twists and Unneeded Characters
Rest Stop is supposed to be a horror film, but in the end its just a mildly disgusting film that leaves you saying, “What exactly did I just watch?” The 5 out of 13 I’m giving it is generous, it would be a 4, perhaps even a 3, but it had naked boobs in it, and they were kinda nice. Be warned though, I watched the unrated version, so view the regular version at your own risk because it may not even have the boobs. Overall, still not worth the time.
More after the break.
The movie is about a girl and a guy running away to California, they stop at a rest stop and the guy and his car vanish while the girl uses the bathroom. Turns out there is a crazy guy who may or may not have been killing people since 1971, is able to intercept short wave radio broadcasts, and hook up home made porn to a tiny black and white TV…
The TV part is where I started to feel like something was wrong with the movie, because the “porn” in question is footage from earlier when the guy and girl were doing it in the car pulled off the side of the road. And when I say “footage from earlier” I mean exactly that. They didn’t bother to shoot the scene from a second angle, one that would make sense that a guy with a hand held camera might have gotten. No, instead they used the exact same footage from earlier. For the crazy guy to have filmed that he would have had to been in the car, and I would hope that even horny teenagers would notice a crazy truck driving mountain man sitting in their car with a video camera.
Then we have the girl locked in the maintenance closet in the bathroom. Except, she’s not really there. Kinda like a ghost, but its never really explained, only that it might be the ghost of a girl who died in 1971. Then a cop shows up, and its Joey Lawrence. And after a brief civil conversation with the crazy guy in the truck, he proceeds to ignore said crazy guy who turns around and runs him over. He survives, but only so he can get run over again, dragged by the girl into the bathroom, then shot in the head (twice) to avoid being set on fire. Wait… I only gave this a 5? Hmm, I should reconsider because I’ve wanted to hit Joey Lawrence with a truck and shoot him for years. I should revise the score to a 7 at least. No, nevermind, this movie is still too stupid for that, even the horrific death of Joey Lawrence can’t save it (unlike the movie Romeo Is Bleeding, which is good anyway, but having Juliette Lewis not only killed but her arm cut off by a chainsaw was a bonus that pushed that movie over into my personal favorites list).
So where were we? Oh yeah, they just blew up Joey. The girl gets away though, until she doesn’t, only when she clubs the crazy guy over the head and caves in his skull, it turns out to be her boyfriend wearing the crazy guy’s hat and shirt, and then she gets away again. Morning finally comes and she gets an old bottle of alcohol, fills it up from the broken gas line of her boyfriend’s car (oh, I forgot to mention, the car showed up with the interior covered in blood, then the crazy guy hit it with a his truck), and uses her maltov cocktail to set the crazy guy’s truck on fire and it explodes. Yay!
Only, the crazy guy wasn’t in it, or somehow or other managed to survive the explosion and kills her anyway.
Then the movie flashes to the future, and we see the rest stop is being rebuilt, the park ranger explains someone broke into his shack and burned down the bathroom, but hey, no big deal. A girl goes into the bathroom and hears a voice, she cries for help, the ranger opens the maintenance closet and there is nothing there… until everyone leaves and you see, what we have to assume is, the ghost of the girl we followed through this whole retarded movie. At least, that was one ending… the alternate ending were shorter but no less disappointing, but they all did result in the girl surviving.
But didn’t I mention unneeded characters? Oh yeah… remember the RV? Turns out there are people in it. A crazy preacher guy, his wife, their identical twin sons, and someone in the rear who keeps setting off camera flashes. That ends up being a mutant kid in a wheelchair who likes to happily snap his Polaroid camera. Upon finding the mutant, our hero is thrown out of the RV, which has been driving for 10 minutes now, only to be at the rest stop. And the RV is at the rest stop again at the end when its being fixed up. Perhaps this is supposed to be some crazy Texas Chainsaw Massacre style family, but all of these questions remain unanswered… the RV people, the ghosts, thirty odd years of killings, the school bus of torture (where crazy truck guy takes his kills)… at least, unanswered until the release of Rest Stop 2.
Someone else is going to have to watch that one, because it ain’t going to be me…