Friday 21 August 2020

DEAD STOP

CONTAINS SOME SPOILERS

An RV full of bickering halfwitted teens gets stuck in the desert when the van's battery runs flat: after a painful opening few reels of arguing and booze-fuelled humping they discover that they're not alone out there: there's some kind of nocturnal monster roaming the scrubland and bloodily ripping apart everyone it meets. Fortunately they've picked up a couple of hitch-hikers who happen to be seasoned travellers and one is an expert on wildlife...

Dead Stop is not terribly exciting to start with: no-one cares about the teenies' romantic entanglements and sexual infidelities, and much of the film is shot in big close-up and in the dark, which can get a little annoying after a while. Fortunately when the monster thing turns up, mostly unseen apart from glimpses (we get more red-tinted POV creature vision than we do clear sight of it), it livens up with a bit more blood sploshed around than usual, and it's not afraid to kill off the ones you thought would make it.

Not a must-see by any stretch, and you won't give a hoot about why she slept with this guy when she loves that guy, or why that other woman came on to one of them (while he was urinating), but it has its occasional nasty moments and a baffling ending. It carries a copyright date of 2016, but there's been a clip on YouTube from late 2011 when it was playing a few American festivals.

**

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