I feel like I came to this movie because of weird nostalgia. Once I was heading down this road I knew I had made a wrong turn on a dead-end street in the wrong part of town.
Rabbit was/is part of witness protection as a key witness to testify against a mob boss Benny “The Buzzsaw” Buffalino. The only problem is that Rabbit disappeared off the map and has been hiding from the Marshalls as well as Buzzsaw’s gang. Now he’s been caught by US Federal Marshalls Jack De LaRoca and Steph and they are in charge of getting him to his hearing to testify. They end up in a shoot-out with a few of the mob thugs and are forced to go on the run as a group. As the Marshalls flee from the gang trying to kill them, they happen upon a deserted section of route 66 that has been closed for years. Seeing it as their only means of escape, the convoy makes their way onto the desolate stretch of road as Jack starts to have weird premonitions and hallucinations of a grizzly murder.
Along the stretch of road Agent La Rocca sees a roadside cemetery and is strangely drawn to it. As he searches among the headstones he finds something unexpected, his father’s grave. See Jack never knew his dad. He was a convict that disappeared before he was ever born. One of the other agents in the convoy explains that a group of four convicts working a changing were all killed in an accident along this very stretch of route 666. The other agent, P.T., makes the connection that one of the cons was La Rocca’s father and the two get into a fight. While the group is waiting for everyone to be done with their personal ghosts the hitman hunting Rabbit catches up to them and goes in for the kill. He is stopped by one of the U.S. Marshalls and is killed. He lays on the pavement bleeding. What he, and the rest of the group, don’t know is that his blood hitting the pavement is enough to stir the dead spirits of that chain gang, and they appear out of thin air to kill anyone alive on or near the road. Now Rabbit AND the Marshalls are on the run and need protection.
I can’t seem to find reliable information that this movie was ever released in theaters. That should say a lot. From the very first moment the movie started, I knew I was in for a rough road. The opening credits show a dotted white line in the road streaming by the camera. As this happens the credits (literally) flash on the screen three images, all subsequently getting close to the screen. Simple black and white credits. Flashing on a screen. For three entire minutes. I get the effect they were going for, but it is literally painful to watch. Imagine sitting in a dark theater and having this happen for three solid minutes. The editing issues didn’t end there. There were shots with the crew in the background. Shots with the boom mic on screen. Gunshots in places where guns were not raised. Sound effects clearly missing from scenes where they should have been. It’s horribly edited, to say the least.
That entire paragraph above only scratches the surface of the issue with this movie. It is just a poor movie all the way around. I dare say it treads really close to the territory of “so bad it’s good” but it manages to stay above the title of B-Movie. I mean… it’s bad don’t get me wrong but not on a level of like half-star reviews on Netflix. It had an apparent budget of 2.3 million dollars but honestly, I think every bit of that went to just hiring Lou Diamond Phillips, Lori Petty, and Steven Williams. If you want a bad movie that isn’t bad enough to be watchable, this one has risen to the top of my list this year. Don’t watch it… or … do. I don’t care. It’s free to Prime subscribers at the moment.
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