Cover Art

Credits

Director: John Shiban Starring: Jaimie Alexander, Joey Mendicino, Joseph Lawrence, Deanna Russo, Nick Orefice, Diane Salinger Screenplay: John Shiban Music: Bear McCreary Country: USA

Two young lovers are embarking on the great American road trip. Nicole has just run away from home, and together with her boyfriend she plans to make it big in Hollywood, but before they can do that they must pull over at a dingy roadside rest stop in the middle of nowhere to answer the call of nature, and that's about where, as is so often the case in our beloved genre films, the road trip goes horribly wrong as our happy campers find themselves in the clutches of something very, very nasty. In this case the turd in the road-trippers punch bowl is a pickup truck driving stalker who snatches the boyfriend and initiates a prolonged cat and mouse game with our young heroine, who is stranded all on her lonesome at the isolated rest stop with nowhere to run, and no one to help…

As well as being the first film from Warner's new Raw Feed label, Rest Stop is also the feature directorial debut of John Shiban. Shiban has an extensive background in television, having worked on of the X-Files for seven years, and more recently as a producer on Supernatural, and this background in areas of otherworldly entertainment certainly shows with Rest Stop. On the surface the film appears to be little more than a clichéd and derivative horror thriller, borrowing elements from road trip gone wrong flicks like the classic Texas Chainsaw Massacre right up to recent offerings such as Haute Tension, but as the plot develops and our young heroine encounters one or two quirky characters along the way (a Winnebago family complete with a shutter bug mutant midget kid stashed away in the back room for starters), a slight whiff of something different might just catch your nostrils. A lot of the usual genre trappings do pop up though, including characters that perform remarkably stupid actions quite frequently (including the heroine, who repeatedly returns to the rest stop throughout the film, even though the driver is bound to find her there!), and the script is riddled with plot holes, but a strong performance from Jaimie Alexander in the lead role and some effective low budget production design might help you overlook these shortcomings.

Plot holes, clichés, and character stupidity aside there is a lot to like about Rest Stop and Shiban does his best to keep the pace up, but since most of the film is set in and around a grotty bathroom some of its sequences can drag on. Once sequence in particular where Nicole must tend to a wounded motorcycle cop (played by an unrecognisable Joey Lawrence) while awaiting the next assault from the mysterious driver became bogged down by excessive dialogue and seemed to go on for far too long, however occasional bursts of graphic violence – including nasty images of power drill torture, tongue removal, finger biting, and a messy haemorrhaging - combined with a few "what the fuck?" moments ensure the viewer is never completely bored.