Rest Stop is the first movie from Warner's new DTV horror imprint, Raw Feed, and while it's good to see a major studio giving the genre some new blood, it's too bad their first effort is such a derivative mess that cribs from better movies in spades (there's shades of Duel, Saw, and various other flicks in writer-director John Shiban's script) and tries way too hard to be unnerving without realizing that the horror movies that work the best are ones that manage to creep under your skin (and they usually contain at least some logic and likeable characters, of which Rest Stop has neither).

Nicole (Jaime Alexander) and her boyfriend decide to run away from home one morning and go on a road trip that will take them to Hollywood where her beau can pursue his dream of becoming an actor. After arguing a bunch, then having some makeshift sex in a field (therefore giving a body double actress some work) and almost being run-off the road by a dirty old pick-up truck, they stop at a highway rest stop just over the California border.

It's rundown, in the middle of nowhere and the only other vehicle there is a seemingly abandoned motor home. It's the perfect setting for something bad to happen to them, and we know it soon will, but considering how Shiban has established his characters we really could care less. When the main characters that we are expected to spend almost 90 minutes with are deemed unlikable in the first five minutes we meet them it's hard to feel any sort of sympathy. Alexander's character is portrayed as a spoiled, whiny brat and the boyfriend isn't much better as in early scenes they're constantly bickering and he's continually making fun of her because she wants to check-in with her parents (who apparently treat her horribly, although we're never given any proof of this).

After Nicole returns from using the grungy bathroom (which no sane person would use), she finds him, and his car, missing. At first she believes he's playing a joke on her, or that he just took off, but things soon turn for the worst when the shady pick-up driver from before shows-up at the rest stop.

The remainder of Rest Stop has heroine Nicole making some of the dumbest decisions I've seen in a horror movie for quite some time as it turns out her redneck stalker is a psychopathic killer who's been murdering people at this specific location for years - and he also has a penchant for taking them back to a rusty old bus and torturing them with various sharp tools.

And what a second half it is. Shiban throws in everything he can possibly think of as his main character manages to get drunk off her ass (something everyone should do when they're afraid of being killed by a maniac), takes a ride in and is kicked out of the motor home which happens to belong to a bizarre religious family (yes, it truly has no place in the movie, in case you were wondering) and even has a vision of a girl trapped in the bathroom who starts puking blood all over the place. There's even Joey "Blossom" Lawrence who shows-up near the end as a state trooper who gets caught-up in the situation, is paralyzed when his are legs run over and gives a really bad and laughable speech about his son's birthday right before asking Nicole to shoot him in the head (but they don't even mention using his gun for the longest time - even when they had numerous chances to shoot the baddie point blank).

Packed with a decided lack of sense, Rest Stop is one of the poorest written horror movies I've come across in a little while. Shiban's story is all over the place and never once has any sort of real purpose or flow, you get the feeling he was just trying to make a movie filled with "moments" that worked in previous horror movies (the entire sequence with Alexander and Lawrence trapped in the bathroom reminded me so much of the first Saw movie) - problem is he fails miserably at it. Plus there's a really bad "vengeance" ending and an equally rotten "prologue" moment that sets up a sequel (that I hope will never happen).

Review is based on the unrated version, although I'm not sure why it is as there's not a ton of gory stuff on hand (a tongue cutting is probably the bloodiest thing) and plenty of other movies in the past few years (like Hostel) that were R-rated were a heck of a lot more extreme than anything here. (Chris Hartley, 10/16/06)

Directed By: John Shiban.
Written By: John Shiban.

Starring: Jaimie Alexander, Joey Mendicino, Deanna Russo, Dian Louise Salinger.

Picture Ratio: 1.85:1 Widescreen.

Picture Quality: For a lower budgeted flick Rest Stop actually looks fairly professionally done and the transfer tells you no different as it's a solid looking one that suffers from a few jagged lines from time-to-time but otherwise looks perfectly fine.

Extras: As if the first effort from Raw Feed wasn't bad enough, they certainly didn't seem to try overly hard to give horror fans much to see after watching the movie. We get a trailer, 3 alternate endings which are worse than the one used (hard to believe, but true), an "On The Bus" featurette that's a brief tour of the 'torture bus' and its victims, and "Scotty's Blog Expose" which is basically deleted scenes meant to look like they were shot by the deformed son of the motor home family (why add more to a useless, and pointless, subplot... who knows).