{"id":9591,"date":"2006-10-09T14:02:46","date_gmt":"2006-10-09T18:02:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=9591"},"modified":"2006-10-09T14:02:46","modified_gmt":"2006-10-09T18:02:46","slug":"rest-stop-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2006\/10\/09\/rest-stop-2006\/","title":{"rendered":"Rest Stop (2006)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"reststop3-1\"<\/a>A cell phone that isn\u2019t working, a gritty rest stop, no phone in sight, a bitchy wife, an inept husband, a mysterious man behind the wheel of a car, and a lot of screaming. Well, now that we have all the clich\u00e9s in order, let\u2019s make a movie! \u201cRest Stop\u201d wants to be \u201cWolf Creek,\u201d it wishes it were \u201cThe Hitcher,\u201d it vies to be \u201cDuel,\u201d but in reality it\u2019s not even as good as \u201cJoy Ride.\u201d If this is what we\u2019re getting from direct to video, I\u2019m shocked that I\u2019m still a horror fan. \u201cRest Stop\u201d is a sloppy hackneyed piece of dribble that derives much of its plot from different survivalist horror films only to be called a survivalist horror film.<\/p>\n

It also steals clich\u00e9s from grind house flicks only to attempt to be called a grind house flick. As usual, two people are traveling across country, and they decide to stop along the road. The push over Jess and his bitchy girlfriend Nicole are running away from home to go to Hollywood. The first of many problems with Shiban\u2019s film is that he creates characters that are unlikable from start to finish, and it doesn\u2019t help that no one in this god forsaking endurance test can act to save their lives. Did you see that pun there? I\u2019ll move on. So, considering the Park Ranger\u2019s office is only a few feet away, it seems the bathroom that Nicole is left in to fend off against the car driving psycho has been used as a base for murders and kidnappings for a long time. But we don\u2019t find that out until later.<\/p>\n

Before that we have to stay with Nicole who is a trifecta as an annoying unlikable character, a one-dimensional horror heroine, and is played by an awful actress. Jaimie Alexander\u2019s performance is incredibly atrocious filled with levels of sub-par delivery of clunky dialogue, and scenery chewing. After being attacked once or twice, she hides in the park ranger\u2019s office where she sits down to drink and engage in some porn viewing with a big smile\u2026 regarding the fact that her boyfriend may be dead. Meanwhile, she commits some more idiotic acts such as returning to the bathroom where she was attacked, and learning the origin of our killer through scribbling\u2019s on the bathroom stall. You see we\u2019re supposed to believe that people under great stress in the bathroom can tend to scribble on the walls as a sort of SOS, considering it\u2019s a basically deserted area.<\/p>\n

She then discovers a denizen in the bathroom, a young woman hiding out (or being stored) from the killer, but\u2026 how did the denizens in the bathroom survive all that time? Who knows? If the Driver was so intent on killing this girl, why did he call the cops? Why introduce a cop character only to have him offed and remain basically useless for the rest of the film? Why cast Joey Lawrence? Everyone knows he\u2019s a horrible actor! Shiban\u2019s writing is so sloppy, so hackneyed that the main villain himself becomes nothing more than a MacGuffin. Characters throughout the film do nothing but bounce around ideas and theories about the driver for the sole purposes of running around in circles.<\/p>\n

Some people say he\u2019s not human, some people think he\u2019s a killer, the wall says he\u2019s been around since the sixties which means he\u2019d be in his fifties which means that someone eventually would have escaped his trap, which means that he was written for the sole purpose of having a villain and not expanding on him. His origin is never explained, and the writer can never stick to one origin or theory to give us an idea of what this guy is. The director would love to think he gave us a mystery to stay with. But really it\u2019s nothing but a horrible MacGuffin that insults our intelligence. With boring direction, horrible writing and a recycled plot, Shiban\u2019s film is a pointless exercise in wasting money to fill a resume. It\u2019s an embarrassing half assed horror film that goes nowhere, and I couldn\u2019t stand it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A cell phone that isn\u2019t working, a gritty rest stop, no phone in sight, a bitchy wife, an inept husband, a mysterious man behind the wheel of a car, and a lot of screaming. Well, now that we have all the clich\u00e9s in order, let\u2019s make a movie! \u201cRest Stop\u201d wants to be \u201cWolf Creek,\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,12],"tags":[477,813,1008,1012,1087],"class_list":["post-9591","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-halloween-horror-month","category-movie-reviews","tag-horror","tag-r","tag-supernatural","tag-survival","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9591","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9591"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9591\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9591"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9591"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9591"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}