Eat, Sleep, Murder A Prostitute. Eat, Sleep, Murder A Prostitute. Eat.... (Roadkill 2 - Dead Ahead (DVD))

Member Name: plipplop

Product:	Roadkill 2 - Dead Ahead (DVD)
Date:	18/04/09 (177 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It gets quite nasty and it never lets up

Disadvantages: Rusty Nail is has de-nastified a bit since the first one

A review of the film only, Roadkill 2: Dead Ahead was released straight to DVD, on region 2 in February 2009. The film is a sequel to John Dahl's 2001 shocker that was released in the UK under the name Roadkill - elsewhere, both films were titled Joy Ride.

Melissa and her fiancé Bobby have decided to have a combined bachelor/bachelorette party in Las Vegas. Rather then fly down, they decide to drive down, taking the opportunity to spend time with Melissa's younger sister Kayla. Along the way, the three of them hook up with Melissa's smart-mouthed new boyfriend Nic and, albeit more reluctantly for Melissa and Bobby, the four of them continue the journey together. When Kayla's car breaks down in the middle of the desert, they are forced to go and find help on foot, eventually coming to a rundown, deserted farmhouse. With no sign of anyone having lived there for some time and with no operational telephone, they decide to 'borrow' a car that they find in the garage and go and get help at the nearest service station. What could possibly go wrong? Well, for starters, when the owner gets home, he isn't going to be very happy that he's had a visit from 'Goldilocks' or the three bears, and he soon sets about tracking them down and 'expressing his displeasure'. Rusty Nail is back in town - and it's time to start running....

If ever three words were likely to cast fear into the hearts of your average film viewer, then 'straight to DVD' would surely be the ones. Generally seen as dumping grounds for low-budget, low-aspirations and low standards, such films have generally been avoided like the plague and (usually) rightfully so. A common trend in recent years has been for studios to release low budget sequels to successful films, pretty much knowing from the outset that the film would go straight to disc, but working on the basis that the original film's popularity would carry enough momentum to make the whole exercise prosperous. The track record isn't good. The Butterfly Effect, Reeker and Wrong Turn have all spawned such sequels, none of which matched the appeal of the first film. So it will be with some trepidation that any audience member will sit down to watch Louis Morneau's straight to DVD follow up to Joy Ride. Surprisingly, however, the news is reasonably good. Of all the recent low budget horror sequels, Dead Ahead is almost certainly the best. But it's not exactly a triumph of modern film making either.

The premise is simple, if not a little worn. The sight of American teenagers taking unnecessarily long (and hazardous) road trips in less than roadworthy vehicles has been the entry point for countless similar shockers over the last couple of decades and there isn't anything entirely distinctive about this. Car breaks down, mobile phones go out of range and before you know it everyone's ended up in a house in the middle of nowhere that screams, "run!" to anybody but the most stupid. But stupid is the name of the game here and what follows is a cat and mouse pursuit between three of the teenagers and a deranged, truck-driving serial killer named Rusty Nail who has one of them held hostage in his cab.

The obvious criticisms of genre cliché aside, Dead Ahead does actually have a few tricks up its sleeve. In keeping with the first one, our hapless teens are threatened and manipulated via an old 2-way radio system, prompting the bad guy of the piece to revel in their misery as he plays one nasty game after another. Their plight isn't entirely ridiculous; the writers box off the most obvious escape routes and so the perceived threat is reasonably plausible (even if Rusty Nail's capability to see everything and be everywhere quickly becomes predictable). The mechanics of the group work fairly well, particularly the strong relationship between the two sisters, and between Melissa and Bobby and the dubious relationship between Kayla and Nic. The writers also pay strong consideration to not making this a retread of the first film and so the Duel-like chases between car and track are played right down here, shifting the attention instead some manipulative nastiness played step by step by Rusty Nail.

The film has the right balance between action and horror. Instead of overloading the piece with silly, prosthetic grot, the director limits things to a few, quite convincingly nasty sequences that put a serious edge on the "thrill" aspect of the rest of it. (A new take on the popular game Craps, for example, yields some suitably unpleasant results for the players.) Characters are portrayed very obviously, making it clear who we are supposed to like and dislike and also making it reasonably obvious from the outset who will survive and who won't. But it's just about edgy enough to keep you guessing pretty much to the end, even if you do walk away afterwards asking why you were remotely surprised by anything you just saw.

This is praise levelled within very confined boundaries, however. The film is and looks cheap, the grimy, poor quality picture representing the low budget rather than any kind of artistic effort. The director falls foul of some classic narrative mistakes, which, sadly, cheap away at the otherwise quite nasty feel to things, making vehicles explode on impact with anything and throwing cheap pyrotechnics in as if this will leave any kind of impression on the audience. The cast is of little consequence too, with the girls (Nicki Aycox and Laura Jordan) nothing more than pretty scream queens and the guys (Nick Zano and Kyle Schmid) really only there to even out the sexual appeal.

Like most super-psycho serial killer dramas, you do wonder about the limited police interest in Rusty Nail, given only that it becomes clear that he's fairly prolific and even more blasé about it all. Rusty himself seems to have lost most of his early menace too, with far more dialogue than his counterpart in part one and, as a result, rather less mystique. The whole things suffers terribly from its TV movie production values, which, surprisingly, doesn't feel entirely necessary as there's enough of a good story here to have justified a bigger budget and a better director. In fairness, Dead Ahead is better than its heritage would have ever promised and fans of the first film will almost certainly find this quite entertaining too. It does, however, now yield the potential for a Friday 13 style series that, frankly, will almost certainly hammer the final Rusty Nail in the Joy Ride coffin.

Summary: Rusty Nail's baaaaaaack.....