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DVD Review


DVD cover

Roadkill 2
Dead Ahead

 

Starring: Nick Zano, Laura Jordan, Nicki Aycox, Kyle Schmid and Mark Gibbon
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
RRP: £15.99
3865401000
Certificate: 18
Available 02 February 2009


Two college couples embark on a road trip to Las Vegas. Taking what they believe is a shorter route, they are soon left stranded in the desert when their car breaks down. Spotting an isolated and apparently abandoned house in the distance they go and investigate. The phone doesn’t work but in the garage they discover a well-kept classic car and decide their only option is to borrow it to drive to the next town where they can then rent a car to continue their journey. The conscientious one of the group leaves a contact number, but when the owner rings up it begins a nightmare chain of events instigated by a truck driver with a penchant for eking-out his own brutally-violent and sadistic punishment...

So Rusty Nail is back. I didn’t even know he’d been away... or here for that matter. This time around the first quarter of the film is almost certainly adapted from the Ladybird Book of Film Teen Horror Clichés, if there were such a thing. College students (one sensible, one fun-loving, one an unpredictable outcast who’s not what he seems, etc.) take a long-distance drive (Jeepers Creepers, Reeker), leave the main highway (The Hills Have Eyes, Dead End), and break-down (oh, please!) to be left at the mercy of the local sociopath (too many examples to mention).

Fortunately, the story does pick up a little afterward, but you just know from experience that all bar one of the main characters will be used as canon fodder for the resident nutter. The core essence of this movie, like it’s predecessor, borrows heavily from Duel, which was written by script-writing genius Richard Matheson and directed by a young Steven Spielberg. The difference here being that the Road Kill films take it to the next stage by having the truck driver commit, or have his victims commit, depraved acts of violence.

In Duel the driver is never seen, and the whole thing is more nervy because we don't know why he/she/it has it in for Denis Weaver. Roadkill 2 tries this, but glimpses of Rusty Nail somehow reduce his power over the viewer. And why oh why did director Louis Morneau have to add the totally ridiculous epilogue? It only brings down the rest of the film.

Extras include two behind-the-scenes featurettes and deleted and extended scenes.

6

Ty Power

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