Dead End: Goes Nowhere

Given a choice between writing about a bad movie or a mediocre movie, I gotta admit, I am going to prefer the bad movie most of the time. There’s something about mediocre movies that’s almost worse, that almost make me angrier. I think it’s because they tend to be so formulaic, so transparently manipulative, and that reads to me like laziness and cynicism. It’s insulting to the audience. Bad movies, on the other hand, are generally ones that do something really wrong, that fuck up something (or multiple somethings) important, and there’s a car-wreck element to it, watching the film just spiral into something beyond recovery is sort of its own kind of horror. I doubt that “oh god, what were they thinking?” is what those filmmakers are aiming for, but it tends to be a more energizing experience than another Blumhouse jump-scare extravaganza.

And folks, let me tell you, Dead End is fucking terrible. Easily one of the worst films I’ve seen in months. It goes wrong early, and keeps going more and more wrong as it goes along.

It is the story of the Harrington family - father Frank, mother Laura, and their son Richard and daughter Marion. They’re taking a trip to Laura’s mother’s house for Christmas Eve dinner, with Marion’s boyfriend Brad in tow. There is squabbling. There are disparaging mother-in-law comments. There is Richard antagonizing Brad. There is Frank insisting that he do all the driving even though it’s getting late. Frank decided this year to take the back roads instead of the interstate, for a change. Frank dozes off at the wheel, narrowly missing a car coming the other way and swerving off the road.

When the dust settles and they get back on their way, the road seems unfamiliar. They pass a cabin filled with animal skulls and hatchets. The road goes on too long.

They pass a mysterious woman in white with a nasty cut on her forehead, clutching her baby.

So we have five people in a station wagon, trapped on what appears to be an endless, haunted stretch of road, and they aren’t alone. The problems really begin with the overall tone of the film. It was made in 2003, but the writing, acting, and characterization (or lack thereof) are right out of the 1980s, as are the production values. This film is relentlessly…shoddy, at every level. In terms of production design, it’s clear that this film was shot on a soundstage or on a very limited stretch of road, with a lot of close-ups, very few exterior shots of the car in motion, and car interiors that are clearly a stationary vehicle with moving scenery outside. The windows of the car are fogged or smeared to the point that Frank shouldn’t be able to see anything out of them, and it’s obvious that that’s to hide the artificiality of everything outside. We only see the car in motion for a few yards at a time, padded by a lot of establishing shots of a bend in the road or the highway in motion, and these shots get reused throughout the film. There are some gore effects used sparingly (and mostly effectively), but there are far more shots of people staring in horror and disgust at something just off-camera, and it’s clear that’s because they didn’t have the budget to actually reveal whatever it was they’re looking at.

This pervasive cheapness extends to the characters in the film. This is especially a problem because the majority of this film is people in a car, trapped with each other. For as much time as the camera spends on them, the characters need to hold up under that scrutiny, and their relationships with each other are going to end up doing a lot of the heavy lifting in between spooky moments. And what we get are…cartoons. Frank is every inch the befuddled, out-of-touch father who bitches about his mother-in-law and gets the name of popular musicians wrong. He’s so out of touch he thinks Atari consoles are still the height of consumer electronics in 2003! Isn’t that wacky? Laura is the daffy mom, more worried about the pie she made than anything else and constantly nitpicking Frank’s driving. Marion is mostly silent, Brad is a jock who talks about being “in the zone,” and Richard…well, Richard is absolutely fucking awful. He is an iteration of the obnoxious younger brother who communicates mostly in profanity when he isn’t slumped against the window listening to royalty-free music on a Walkman (in 2003) or antagonizing Brad with a non-stop torrent of homophobic slurs for reasons that are never, ever made clear. He’s the most unsympathetic character I’ve seen in a horror movie since Sal from Altitude, and that is saying something. When they stop at one point to look for a phone, Richard, no lie, goes off into the woods, tacks up a centerfold to a tree, and starts masturbating. Who does that? In lieu of character development, they take turns freaking out, yelling, screaming, going catatonic, losing their minds entirely, or dying. It doesn’t amount to much, it’s not grounded in anything resembling real human behavior, it’s just caricature and histrionics start to finish.

In terms of pacing or narrative momentum, well, for a movie that takes place on the road, it’s surprisingly inert. The underlying premise is a little one-note - they’re trapped on a seemingly endless stretch of road, and that’s only going to take the story so far by itself. There are moments, interludes, sequences that communicate the idea that there’s something supernatural going on, but they’re too few and far between and become repetitive quickly. There’s no progress, there’s no discovery. They drive, weird things happen, they drive some more, more weird things happen, maybe somebody dies or freaks out, they keep driving. That’s kind of it. Well, things do switch up a little in the second half of the movie, in what seems like it’s supposed to be the protagonists revealing dark, upsetting family secrets under the psychological strain of their ordeal, but mostly it just amounts to people blurting stuff out, other people reacting to it (or not), and then either it goes by the wayside or gets exaggerated into something ridiculous. It’s less cathartic than it is just kind of silly.

And that gets at the last really big problem with this film. Tonally, it’s all over the shop. There are a few beats that would be actually scary, moments that would raise tension in a film that was played darker and straighter and more subdued, but here everything is played so broadly that at multiple points it verges on slapstick. Sometimes it actually IS slapstick. At the point where the family drama gets mashed into the supernatural aspects and any semblance of structure goes out the window - characters that were catatonic are suddenly fine, characters that were fine suddenly lose their minds - it’s all become so cartoonish that it can’t be taken seriously. But on the other hand, there are a few graphically nasty moments, and the juxtaposition of the two ends up being more jarring than anything else.

I think I can see the general outlines of what the filmmakers were trying to go for - it seems like it’s supposed to be a riff on movies and television shows like Creepshow and Tales From The Crypt, where you have these grisly, lurid stories with some kind of moral comeuppance at the end told in broad, blackly comic fashion, but it never coheres because it doesn’t handle any of the individual elements well and they don’t mesh as a result. Making that kind of story means evoking a very specific mood, setting, and context, and nothing about the film clearly signals that this is how we’re supposed to be taking what we see. It can’t decide whether it’s a story about people trapped on a haunted stretch of road, or about a family who have all kinds of secrets coming apart at the seams, and the result is a largely nonsensical jumble of moods and sequences and choices that are impossible to take seriously, but laced with just enough nastiness to be uncomfortable. It’s too gory and mean-spirited to be a comedy, and it’s too broad and cartoonish to be a horror film. It’s not much of a black comedy either, because that generally works when you’re playing the horror straight, and when the comedy is actually funny. It ends in pat fashion, explaining every single thing we saw and underlining it two or three times in case we didn’t get it the first time around. What a mess.

IMDB entry
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