I saw this film originally at a FrightFest some four years ago and recall not being terribly taken with it. However, since I am aware that I can suffer from horror-overload on such occasions, I thought it was worth another try. Sad to say, I was even less impressed this time around. The makers had some interesting ideas, but seemed incapable of putting these into any semblance of sense or order.
The basic concept is promising: An over-stressed divorced mother played feistily by Madeleine Stowe is driving her 15-year old daughter home from a weekend with her father -- a six hour journey (taken for some reason in what appears to be the dead of the night). The daughter is played by actress/model/girl-about-town Mischa Barton, so very good in "Lawn Dogs" (1997) when she was only eleven. After a stroppy argument, Stowe faces every parent's worst nightmare when Barton storms off at a rest-stop and seems to disappear, even if the mother thinks she has seen her get into an RV with some other young people. What the director and writer manage to get across is the creepy eerieness of the people who can be found late at night at such places (as if they had nowhere else to go), but they take it too far by having virtually the entire cast involved in a conspiracy to steal bodies for their blood, making Stowe seem like the worst sort of paranoiac when she finally meets a real police officer. News: the world is not really inhabited only by vampires or followers of a blood cult. Their charismatic leader is played by ever-so-pretty Jonathan Rhys Meyers, whose fondling of Barton comes across more like child abuse than horror. In fact, the more I think about this movie, the less sense it all makes and even the "kicker" in the end shot seems stupidly meaningless.
1 comment:
I perhaps liked this more than you did the first time round but concur that what
might have been an excellent film was rather poor tosh - your comment about
Rhys Meyer's fondling being paedophilic is well-founded.
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