Road Rage (2000)

Directed by: Sidney J. Furie

Writer: Greg Mellott

 

 

Here's another review from the old blog. Click here to see this with some screenshots.

 

I don’t know how many of you are car chase scene addicts – I sure am! A car chase in a movie is like a great instrumental break in a rock song – it tends to overshadow everything else and I always wish there was more of it. Take for example the 1972 film Fear is the Key. It begins with a mindblowingly great (and long) car chase, but the rest wasn’t that good. In Bullit, which was of course a great film, car chase scene was the best part, too.



 

So what if someone made a movie consisting entirely of car chase(s)? Road Rage is that movie! Unfortunately, it’s really horrible. Okay, before we get into details, to respond to a question you’re asking – yes, of course, there’s Duel, a brilliant film, one that certainly predates Road Rage and serves as an obvious inspiration for it. However, Duel was primarily a thriller (or even horror), not an action movie. The main character being pursued for no reason by something large and terrifying and seemingly undestructible is a theme that has more in common with, say, Halloween than your regular car chase movies.

As much as I’d prefer to continue writing about Spielberg/Matheson’s masterpiece, sadly, we have to turn our attention to Road Rage, which, as I said, is a real action movie with lots of car chases and crashes. Similar to Duel, the main protagonists get into trouble straight away and are being chased to the very end. Everything else is different. First of all, there is no mystery about the pursuer’s identity – Casper Van Dien and his annoying female sidekick Sonia are being chased by her idiotic ex-boyfriend and his two equally idiotic friends. All three of them are dumb jocks (actually, two of them are, I don’t know about the third one) who look like they couldn’t tie their shoelaces, which is extremely disappointing especially if we, again, remember Duel and its mysterious antagonist whose face we never see.

 

Be that as it may, those three morons for some reason always appear on our heroes’ tail when they least expect it. They are never too upset about their truck exploding or falling off the side of the road or other similar minor annoyances. For example, they try to attack them on a gas station, hit a gas pump instead, there’s a big explosion, the truck is totally destroyed, but minutes later it’s as good as new. I don’t understand if they got a new one, or quickly fixed the one that exploded or... For a movie with such a simple story, it sure has its share of whatthehell moments. 

 

So, anyway, how the heck have they managed to ruin such a great and simple idea? Surely, a few continuity errors can’t be such a big issue. Well, the main problem is the screenwriter, who should be shot repeatedly in the head before he “writes” anything else (unfortunately, this movie is more than 10 years old and in the meantime he has “written” quite a few of them, which I’ll try my best to avoid). The characterization is absolutely horrible and the dialogs are the worst. Almost everyone has two or three (not very impressive) lines that they repeat over and over until you get sick. Take the main bad guy, the ex-boyfriend. Aside from looking like a complete dork, he constantly repeats how he loves Sonia. Remember, this is happening at the same time while he’s trying to kill her. His fat sidekick (the non-jock one) only cares about his truck not being damaged so it’s “You scratched my truck! Don’t hit my truck! You’ll ruin my truck! Don’t ruin my truck!” over and over and over again. As a bonus, his acting (if you can call it that) is terrible.

Sonia is really cute and while her conversations with Casper are made of the worst clichés ever (“You are a rich girl! You have everything!” “No, I don’t! My life sucks!” “No, it doesn’t!” “I love stars!” etc) it’s all relatively bearable until about halfway through the film when she finally loses her grip and starts yelling “I want to talk to him! Let me talk to him! Why is this happening to us? I wish I was dead! Let me die! I want to talk to him! Let me talk to him! Why is this happening? I want to die!” and similar. You get the idea. Anyone less cool than Casper would’ve probably thrown her out of the damn car under her stupid ex-boyfriend’s wheels. Anyway, Casper’s the only one that manages to fight the idiotic script and come out with some dignity left.

Or is he? There’s a scene when he and Sonia are out of gas and they stop a ranger (played by Catherine Oxenberg) to try to get a ride. The bad guys appear and immediately attack, Catherine gets out of the car and shoots at them, but they hit her and she rolls over to the side of the road. So, surely, our heroes immediately go there and help her, right? Wrong! They take her car and get the hell out of there without even turning their heads to see if she’s alive! And I presume we are supposed to root for them? Remember, this is Casper’s wife we are talking about! He probably had a lot of explaining (and dish washing!) to do to make up for that. If anyone cares, the ranger apparently did survive, but she didn’t appear again. Her sole purpose was to provide a new car after Casper’s limousine ran out of gas. 

 

Also, one of the first scenes in the movie is Casper being headbutted by that loser ex-boyfriend, which sucks big time. Johnny Rico would certainly have none of that!

 

Fortunately, the movie is not completely unwatchable. The action scenes are pretty cool, especially at the beginning, but there’s also some nice car chasing through the beautiful Canadian country at the end. Too bad they didn’t hire someone at least competent to write the script. Hell, I think even Kevin Smith would have written it better!

Det okända. (2000)

Directed by: Michael Hjorth

Writers: Michael Hjorth, Tomas Tivermark

 

Det okända. (complete with a dot in the title) is some kind of a Swedish answer to The Blair Witch Project, and of course it’s completely inferior to it in every possible way. Throughout the rest of this babbling, if I ever need to refer to the title, I will use the English version (The Unknown), because that dot is pissing me off.

Anyway, the story here is actually not bad and draws its inspiration primarily from films like (Invasion of the) Body Snatchers and The Thing. Five biologists are investigating the effects of a large forest fire or something similar, somewhere at the north of Sweden, far away from any civilization. They encounter a strangely disfigured carcass, take it to their camp for analysis and then of course crap starts to happen. First one of the girls gets sick and starts acting progressively stranger and whatever the hell causes it starts to spread to the other members of the team and you can pretty much guess where it goes from there.

The Blair Witch Project’s influence is, apart from the fact that for some reason all the characters share names with their respective actors, mainly in the visual domain. First, there’s that burned (burnt?) forest that’s creepy almost by definition, and the style of filmmaking which worked so well in BWP, but causes nothing but skin irritation here. Strictly speaking, The Unknown is not a found footage film (because, to begin with, there wasn’t any footage to be found). The events aren’t filmed by any of the characters in the movie, but that surely doesn’t prevent the director to win the Golden Asshole award for the most remarkable achievement in the handheld camera abuse. It goes without saying that it’s constantly flying all over the place, whether it’s justified by the context or not, and most often it’s NOT (think of Lars von Trier’s Melancholia, multiply it by ten... million, to the power of infinity, and you might start to get a slight idea how it all looks).

Okay, honestly, it’s not something we haven’t seen many times before, but what made me want to kill that director bastard is the fact that that damn camera, in all its frantic moving, conspicuously avoids to show anything even remotely interesting! Some really cool stuff happens here – there are bizarre disfigured carcasses, there are alien parasites in people’s throats, there are some animals killing each other etc. etc. but we never see any of that! Just when the camera starts panning down and you think you’ll FINALLY see something – boom! – it suddenly goes straight up and films the treetops and the wonderful blue sky while we have some loser describe the proceedings for us. Well, thanks for nothing, bitches! Imagine you watch Cloverfield and they never show the monster and instead you see only the characters talking like “Hey, there’s a really huge and nasty monster mofo in front of us! It’s so scary! If only you could see it! You would really be TERRIFIED! Gee, I haven’t seen such a scary monster since John Carpenter’s The Thing! Did I mention how scary this monster is?” Well, it’s something like that. This should have been called Det Infodump instead.

Add to this that the characters are extremely irritating and that they’re constantly throwing in our faces their private stuff which I’m sure nobody gives a rat’s ass about. Who cares if that blonde was with Tomas for a few weeks before she met Jacob? Who really gives a crap??? I mean REALLY?!?!? Well, I certainly don’t! Instead of that stupid high-school drama queen crap, I’d prefer to see some nasty body horror, but nooooooo sir, not here. Fail.