It
is a familiar horror movie convention—one wrong turn can lead to a grisly
death, so get yourself some GPS and join triple A. Alas, the misdirected teens who wander onto
this stretch of pavement will become permanently lost in Yam Laranas’ Filipino horror
film The Road (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
This
has been going on for a while. In 1998,
two sisters vanished without a trace on the road to nowhere. Ten years later, their grieving mother approaches
a decorated rookie officer specializing in making everyone else look bad,
convincing him to re-investigate the case.
Yet, it quickly becomes apparent the circumstances of their
disappearance parallel an active high priority investigation involving two
cousins and their slacker guy friend.
As
if two time frames were not sufficient, Laranas then flashes even further back,
showing the audience how the tragic childhood of the thus far unseen psychopath
destroyed his innocence and set in motion a chain reaction of bad karma. It turns out his father’s hyper-Christianity
was a contributing factor. To be fair, dear
old dad is really not a bad guy at heart, but the future killer’s shrewish
mother enthusiastically adopted his strict rules governing the boy, simply out
of meanness.
Laranas
actually sets the creepy scene quite well, hinting at the supernatural, but
never quite delivering on it. Still, he palpably
evokes the ominous dread of grudge-like remnants haunting the proceedings. His big twist also comes as something of a
surprise, if only because it creates huge logical problems for the film in
retrospect.
More
fundamentally, it is just not a lot of fun to see the Roadie tormenting the
young girls who fall into his web. These
are not E.C. Comics characters that more or less have it coming. Frankly, horror movies like The Road would be much more entertaining
if Laranas and his colleagues would pick on people more their size.
