Īs they drive through the countryside, a mysterious driver in a rusty old delivery truck tries to run them off the road. The current of fetishistic erotic violence invites all sorts of interpretation in fact, fairly or not, this may be the first horror film for which knowledge of the director's well-publicized past seems likely to make some parts scarier. The production design is shoestring brilliance, helping make his highway and sewer pipe sequences genuinely spooky. And why establish an aesthete-predator at all if you're only going to have him jump out periodically and kill, like any Freddy Krueger? Salva has complained about last-minute budgetary restrictions yet so much has gone wrong by the final half hour, dissipating tension, squandering sympathy, indulging in camp, and the worst misstep calling in his deus ex machina voodoo chile, that it's hard to see what more money could have done.Salva's imagery, however, is always striking. Why bother subverting expectations early on if you're only going to resort to cliché later? The clairvoyant character is lifted from "The Shining" the police station siege is a "Terminator" retread. But where Romero is famous for exploring the dimensions of his deceptively simple premises, Salva retreats from them into mannered predictability.Narrowing his scope to a cat and mouse game, the writer-director fritters away too many possibilities even before the second act is out, and the third act is plainly bad.
Especially good is Salva's patience in developing his sibling protagonists, their dialogue and reading good enough to establish what most genre work can't even dream of - plausible characters.
What he accomplishes in the first act is a quite masterful bogeyman set-up, disturbing yet inviting, and for a moment, we may think we hear Tobe Hooper's chainsaws.
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