A foursome of college students travels through the desert on their way to Los Angeles. Along the way, they pick up a sexy/scary hitchhiker (Phoebe Dollar from Goth), and it doesn’t take long for her to show her psycho true colors. Thus begins a game of cat and mouse as she doggedly pursues the quartet of friends through the desert.
Even though Hell’s Highway (Dollar calls the road, “The Devil’s Highway”, but I guess the alliterative “Hell’s Highway” had a better ring to it) was made on an obviously low budget, it gets off to a surprisingly strong start. The opening sequence where Dollar is picked up by a guy who looks to be a serial killer finishes off with a nice little twist.
The following sequence had me worried for a second since it features the requisite stereotypical horror movie character who films everything with his camera, which leads to a lot of shaky-cam nonsense. Usually, that’s a debit in a flick like this. Luckily for us, it gives Skinamax siren Beverly Lynne an opportunity to gleefully flash her boobs for the camera every chance she gets. Lynne, it must be said, is excellent in this. They say the sign of a great actor is that they listen to their fellow actors speak instead of waiting for their turn to talk. There is one scene where she doesn’t have any dialogue but is held in rapt attention to what the other characters are saying. Not many actresses can steal a scene without saying anything at all, but Lynne is definitely one of them.
Dollar is equally good as the psycho hitcher. I admit, even though I’d be 99% sure she was gonna gut me like a fish, I’d still probably give her a lift. She also gets to do a great Leatherface-style chainsaw dance and has lots of good lines like, “I’m not gonna kill you in cold blood. I’m gonna warm you up first!” There’s also a funny bit by Ron Jeremy as a motorist who gets his dick cut off.
Sure, there are a couple of “Found Footage” sequences, but they work a lot better than most movies of the subgenre. That’s because they are used sparingly and don’t have a lot of sequences that are needlessly dragged out. The filmmakers also seem to be of the mind that these sequences are only here because Found Footage was hot at the time, which explains why a character gripes, “Next time, we bring a fucking tripod!” That line alone is enough to make it the best Found Footage movie of all time, even if the Found Footage only accounts for about 15% of the running time.
Hell’s Highway is only sixty-nine minutes, so it doesn’t fuck around like many of its contemporaries. It also boasts some surprisingly strong gore and splatter effects. (There’s a gut ripping scene that has to break some sort of record.) Director Jeff (Charlie’s Death Wish) Leroy lends the film some unexpected stylistic touches too, like the scene where the characters wait for a cellphone to ring. It’s only in the final ten minutes does it stumble and stumble badly as the “twist” ending just doesn’t work at all. That’s okay though, because there’s still enough fun, gore, and skin to be had in the first hour or so to make Hell’s Highway a winner.
No comments:
Post a Comment