Rest Stop

Rest Stop (2006): I had one grunch but that eggplant over there. If you understood that sentence, it’s a good bet you like things a bit irrational and if so, this flick is for you. Billed as a horror thriller, it left me looking for a white coat with extra long sleeves for the director and screenwriter.

A teen lassie runs off with a teen lad and a road movie is soon suspected. Mother Nature shortly requires a stop at the state run rest stop from hell. I don’t know how our heroine was able to use that disgusting stall but when she comes out; her boyfriend and car are gone. Ok, so far so good, a traditional start to classic B movies. There is an RV parked nearby but they ignore her pleading for help. As night sets in she is terrorized by a guy driving a yellow pick up who incidentally ran them off the road earlier in the day. She then breaks into the small park ranger station located next to the rest stop and finds a bottle of whiskey and a CB radio. She also finds a TV that appears to be running a tape of her and her boyfriend doing the nasty in their car earlier in the day. Huh? Is she hallucinating?

Using the radio, she contacts a trucker who says he will call the cops for her since there is no working phone at the ranger station. Is that normal for a ranger station? After absorbing much of the Wild Turkey, she comes to and finds the car has returned. She gets in and the guy in the yellow pick up slams into the car almost killing her. But he doesn’t finish her off and before you know it she’s back in stall #2 answering the call again. I thought alcohol dehydrated you but apparently not in this flick. She eventually gets the RV people to pick her up and these moon bats are all clearly not connected to normality by anything stronger than a #2 paper clip. First they won’t answer questions and just babble on to her, then they swear at her and finally throw here out of the moving RV and goll durn if she isn’t back at the Rest Stop. Where the heck had they been driving all that time? The nut job family was interesting and could have added greatly to making this and interesting movie, but they just disappear and drive off into the sunset.

Well, it’s back to good old stall #2 again, but this time she sees a naked girl locked in the utility closet. This poor soul tells her the man with the yellow truck kidnapped her and tortured her in a yellow bus. She then coughs up about 14 quarts of blood and quickly reaches room temperature. About this time a motorcycle policeman shows up and when our heroine goes to show him the girl in the locker, there’s no girl and no blood. Ok, are we hallucinating here or what? And it turns out the girl in question disappeared in the 70’s and since she looked like about 18, whatever he did to her apparently kept her from aging. At this point I was voting for hallucinations and a crazy ingénue but that didn’t make much sense either.

Now Mr. Meany in the yellow truck shows up but the cop says there’s no sign of any damage to his truck so he can’t arrest him. That’s a real bad legal maneuver as the yellow truck runs over the cop and nearly kills him. Lots of cop crushing and dragging ensue and John Law seems to forget he’s got a gun on his hip and never fires off a round or tells the gal to grab it and shoot the guy. Well, I guess they both were just under too much stress to think about firearms.

Soon the gal drags the trooper back to here favorite spot, stall #2 (Is a pattern developing here?) and yellow truck man pours gasoline into the place and is clearly planning to have a trooper roast. The cop pleads with the girl to shoot him because he doesn’t want to burn up and finally she does by blowing the right half of his head off. But wait, he’s still coherent and says she missed and to shoot him again! Aw, come on!! She does and the rest of his cranium is nicely distributed around the ladies room floor and walls. As she is attempting to find a way out of stall #2 (yellow truck man has locked them in) the cop and assorted cop parts appear to be gone! Yee gods, she must be hallucinating again. She finally finds a way out through the skylight just as yellow truck man flings in a lighter and kaboom, our ingénue and much of a rest stop leave at high speed. This is some hallucination!

Our ingénue gets away and the next day makes a Molotov cocktail by using the Wild Turkey bottle and gas siphoned from her boyfriend’s car. Mr. Yellow Truck Man comes back and she burns up the truck with cocktail and she appears to survive. There are two alternate endings and neither help much to make any sense of what the herpes is going on. I’ve only hit the high spots of the more logical parts of this mess so it’s far worse than it sounds here. Maybe she was crazy. Maybe Mr. Yellow Truck Man was actually a guard from the ‘hospital’ where she was kept and she just hallucinated a home and family. Maybe it was all a dream like the last episode of Dallas. Maybe you shouldn’t watch this movie. The movie is rated R for: appalling plot, moon bats in an RV, brief orbulation, finger pointing, finger chewing, finger carving, boyfriend carving, blood tsunami, and for the lack of any rational behavior by anyone in this disaster.