"Oh
hell woman! It's time you open yo eyes! We're a million miles from dick,
Cashie's trippin' and we got some kinda freak stalkin' us! ... and you're
tellin' me ... that I'M over-reacting?"
Loopz / Yo-Man
(Aaron Buer)
(Spoilers.) Aka Hell's Highway and Cannibal Detour. No, we're not talking about a remake of the 1945
Poverty Row masterpiece Detour (trailer
/ full film)
directed by Edgar G. Ulmer and starring Tom Neal and Ann Savage, which was already
pointlessly remade in 1992 by Wade Williams (starring Tom Neal Jr.). Nor, for that
matter, are we talking about the long-forgotten, public domain, pre-code chain gang crime drama
from 1932 entitled Hell's Highway (full film)
starring a bunch of equally long-forgotten names — Richard Dix (18 July
1893 – 20 Sept 1949), Rochelle Elizabeth Hudson (6 March 1916 – 17 Jan
1972), and C. Henry Gordon (17 June 1883 – 3 Dec 1940), anyone? —
and directed by "the largely forgotten" Rowland
Brown (6 Nov 1900 – 6 May 1963). The movie at hand here is the
totally unknown rip-off of The Hills
Have Eyes (1977 / trailer)
written and directed by the still-unknown Steve Taylor, and starring a bunch of
names that will never be known, much less forgotten. (OK, supposedly cult fave Tiffany Shepis is somewhere in the flick, but we missed her.)
Our DVD says the movie is presented by The Asylum, and indeed it
follows the typical Asylum business model of rewriting and remaking bigger-budgeted
films to cash in on the publicity of the "real" movie, so in all
likelihood Detour is, alone due to
the date of its release, more of a rip-off of Wrong Turn (2003 / trailer)
than the popular Wes Craven flick that laid the groundwork for both of these and
many other movies (and also got remade [trailer]
3 years after this flick here came out).
Here, instead of a typically
dysfunctional American family confronted by a family of killer cannibals on
their way through the desert — or a variety of young couples in the backwoods
of Buttfuck, Nowhere, who run into a family of misshapen killer cannibals — we
have a group of over-aged, high-school party animals returning from a desert
rave who, when making a detour to find a legendary peyote patch, run into an
extended family (?) of peyote-freaking cannibals. (Yep, in the end, Detour is actually an anti-drug film, but
it manages to hide its message so effectively that you almost don't notice it.)
To say Detour is a good movie would be a lie.
Oddly enough, however, though a mass of badly constructed plot developments,
truly crappy make-up, and almost no tension or logic, we sort of found the
movie mildly entertaining and almost effective at times in a Z-movie way. We
will definitely never watch it again, and would be hard-placed to recommend it,
but, well, we can't say we hated it. There were simply a few too many things we
sort of enjoyed.
But one thing we
really didn't like, however, was the character Loopz aka Lawrence (Aaron Buer),
whom we nicknamed "Yo" in our minds: he gains special notice for
being the stupidest, most pointless, gangsta-talking white guy ever found in a
movie, direct-to-video or not. (That he survives somehow echoes real life:
those who deserve to die, never do. Why else is Trump still alive?) The rest of the fodder was, for the most
part, far more believable as characters.
Not that there
weren't enough other failures in the narrative to induce the occasional
unintentional guffaw: our loudest came with the Molotov Cocktail from nowhere,
followed by the hilarious glued-on hair of the big bad guy. Aside from guffaws,
there are also a good number of groaners in the movie: for example, when
Michelle (Jessica Osfar) and Lee (Ryan De'Rouen) go hiking up a hill to try to get a signal
for their mobile phones (they have sex, which allows for some tit-flashing, so
they die), or when Neil (Brent Taylor of Starkweather
[2004 / trailer])
not only drops his gun but runs straight down the middle of the road when being
pursued by a pick-up truck instead of suddenly sprinting left or right or off the fucking road (he
dies).
OK, so what did
we like? Well, the cinematography is occasionally okay and the use of filters
effective; also, the opening rave was edited and colored in a manner that
(barring the brief intercut scenes of dismemberment) was extremely reminiscent
of the X-fused raves we used to go to. And, for a change, the movie managed to
believably present the fodder as either friends or acquaintances, and thus
their reactions to the given situations sometimes achieved a mild
verisimilitude. We also liked that the person with the biggest balls was a
woman — Tara (Ashley Reed) — and while it does in
the end take the joint effort of the three survivors to survive, she is the
driving force. Likewise, the death of Lee was rather funny (and not badly
shot), and Michelle's demise did hurt to watch.
Detour gets more things
wrong than it gets right and misses many an opportunity to be a better movie,
and its low budget is as obvious as its script is full of holes. Still, for a
grade-Z movie it passes quickly enough and manages not only not to piss you off
too often, but to keep you mildly interested. But don't think we're actually
recommending it...
"I
love big, hairy, man ass!"
Loopz / Yo-Man
(Aaron Buer)
No comments:
Post a Comment