Review: Roadkill (Joy ride) 1991

My co-viewee was put off after finding out that the English title for this is ‘Joy Ride’.

Much less scary, she scoffed.

I’d have to saw that personally I can let this tragedy of a name lie.

If there’s any ‘book’ that you can read by its cover, then it’s a horror... movie. There are basically three types: good, good-bad, and bad. Sometimes, something that looks bad turns out to be good-bad; sometimes it’s the other way round. This, essentially, is the algebra of horror. And this, essentially, was rubbish. Not rubbish in a hilariously-bad-SFX-and-ironical-script’ kind of way, but terrible as in; ‘what-was-the-actual-point’.

To be honest, when I came to write this review I searched google for others, expecting my own words to have been put in a far more eloquently hilarious way than I could have put them. I was wrong. Somewhere between watching Roadkill, and writing about it, most of the reviewers thrown up my search appeared to have forgotten how truly terrible the film was. The most accurately ennui-ic reviews I read are Amazon’s ‘this film is all right (sic)’ and ‘Steve Zahn is a good and sometimes funny actor’.

There are many ways of supporting the argument that this film was, in fact, entirely pointless. For a start, the film is set up as if a potential love story. College guy talks to semi-nude college girl on the phone, college guy is aroused by his by proxy-proximity to her clunge, road trip is arranged. Cheesy-horror love-fest is established and the ending of the movie is already evident – all will die, couple will live, some how this will make up for death of everyone else. That’s not what’s going to happen? Right, so this is going to be a mould-breaking thriller of a movie? No, it’s still crap, they just couldn’t quite manage to pursue the whole love interest storyline. UH reet.

Furthering us towards the point-of-lessness is the female characters in the first place – the male characters are crap, yes. The female characters are something else. The female lead, Vanda, is she of the ‘will they… no… no they wont’ storyline, who vaguely goes missing towards the end of the film. Even less point-fueled is her friend and future room mate Charlotte, who drops in a one liner (along the lines of “aren’t you a big boy. Chortles”, leaves film, we find out later she has been kidnapped, then she arrives at the end of the film -get this- alive. Yes, alive. What is the point of the gratuitous dead girl, if we do not see her being kidnapped, and then she turns out to be alive.

Apparently the original edit of the film had romantic scenes between Vanda and each of the brothers. This might have made the film seem slightly less pointless, but then again thank God we weren’t subjected to any longer looking gratuitously at the cold, dead eyes of LeeLee Sobowski. She's about as plausible as a sex pot as a muller pot with tits.

I’d guess that the people who made this film were relying on it having enough success to warrant a sequel. One of those proper sequels with the same characters and a cinema release. Instead the straight-to-DVD next part came along 8 years later, and with Steve Zahn already having moved on to playing past it white policemen (see: national security) the bells had toled on the chances of him and Walker reprising their college boy and rebel brother roles.