Shhhhh...ut the Movie Off

Incident On and Off a Mountain Road (Masters of Horror, 2005)
Director- Don Coscarelli
Starring- Bree Turner, John DiSantis, Ethan Embry

Ellen (Turner) must use every survival tactic she learned from her abusive, crazy exhusband (Embry) to escape the maniacal serial killer she comes to know as 'Moonface' (DiSantis). After inadvertantly running right into his yard populated by crucified victims, all missing eyes, she faints and gets herself caught. She wakes up in time to have an annoying coversation with "Buddy", an old captive who lives inthe basement and is looney as hell, then she must watch as a hapless victim gets her eyes drilled out.

I have very little good to say of this movie. I've actually learned to expect little from the Masters of Horror series, but every time they manage to take me to new levels of disappointment. Where do I start?

First, it's awfully convenient to have had a crazy survivalist husband with conspiracy theories in the same woods as a maniacal freak without even knowing it. It get even more stupid when Ellen wastes all this time making boobytraps when she could have simply run from the guy. Or if she found the nerve to fight, she should have fought him. Either way, she wasted a lot of time trying to be clever.

Buddy's acting was bad. His constant dialogue and switching from one subject to another and singing was annoying and badly delivered. Moonface jumping majestically onto the road made me think a 6th grader originally wrote this script for a comic. The director was more obsessed with making a bunch of noise, apparently to distract the viewer from the fact that this is just a stupid movie. Ethan Embry's acting was good until he suddenly decided to rape his wife (To exploit her weakness? To teach her a lesson? I don't really get why he did it except that the director needed more reason for the viewer to hate him).

The ending could have been cool, except Bree Turner's "trying to sound cool" acting screwed it up. Moonface could easily have been a mountain man, another abusive guy, etc. There was nothing exceptional about his character, and I was initially led to believe there should have been.

Rating: 1/5 Bonedaddies.