Rest Stop Thrilling at Times, Very Disturbing At Others
This film, written by John Shiban, starts out with a young couple driving from Argyle Texas to California hoping to break into the acting scene. Nicole Carrow (Jamie Alexander) starts out by narrating how she has to go on this trip to find and chase away her demons. Nichole's boyfriend Jess Hilts (Joey Mendicino) stops along the road to have casual sex with her after getting high, but fails to take a pit stop.
They drive down an old road, and park at an abandoned rest stop. Nicole stupidly goes into the abandoned rest stop to use the toilet. Jess dissapears. We assume he is abducted by an unnamed driver of an old yellow truck (Nick Orefice). Throughout the night, Nicole is stalked by this sadistic maniac, while haunting things happen to her in the rest stop bathroom.
For all the talent that they have out there to make a memorable film, producers seem to be making more and more horror films these days than ever about torture. I'm really sorry to say, just because people can hold up a camera and get someone crazy to act, doesn't mean it's going to be a marvelous film that we will carry around with us for the rest of our lives.
Rest Stop has the single most aggravating thing in a horror film and that is two young teenagers who cuss, smoke, have sex, and supposedly fall in love. I'd think that for all the most of the film, if they would just, for once, start a film out with redeeming qualities, people like you and I wouldn't feel so good about rooting for them to "Get what they had coming to them" mentality".
The leading female characters in these films are always depicted as the spoiled brat who runs away from home with her boyfriend to get into more and more trouble. This is what we see here with Nicole Carrow. Writer Shiban fails to allow us to connect with her from the beginning, which makes us totally disconnected with anything she feels and screams about. Shiban brings us a another character we can supposedly relate to, a motorcycle cop Michael Deacon (played by Joseph Lawrence).
The freakiest thing about this film that becomes unclear and annoying, is that we don't really know whether Nicole is seeing ghosts or real people. When the character Tracy Kress (Deanna Russo) is supposedly discovered locked behind the utility door and then she disappears (as well as the 3 gallons of blood on the floor), that's when we really start wondering about the cohesiveness of this film.
The "RV camper on wheels family" was really the only really good thing about the sub-plots in this film. The family consists of retarded deformed Scotty (Mikey Post) who takes polaroid after polaroid of everything (which has to be quite expensive), the father (Michael Childers), the twins (Gary and Edmund Entin), and the mother (Diane Salinger). Even though we see them played as some kind of half-backed religious zealots, we struggle to piece them into the plot of this film. Perhaps (this is a long shot) the family is really like a ghost posse tries to help the people who wind up missing but are stuck in the mess, just like the KLZ-606 killer who is also really a ghost who possesses bad people that wind up killing and torturing and driving the yellow ghost truck again. Even the cop, who freakishly tells Nichole she missed after shooting him at point plank range must be a ghost. Are you getting the drift?
I'm going to give this film a 3/5 for incongruity. Hope the sequel is better somehow, but I highly doubt it. Good Luck about getting past the gore.Read full review
