'Dead End'

Dead End is rather obscure. I've been looking for information regarding it and it's a pain in the crack. The directors are ghosts (pun obviously intended), the actors are hard to track and try as I might, I can't find the fuckin' theme song anywhere. Which is a pity, because I actually like it.

Here's what I found. Apparently two men, called Jean-Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa (I knew it couldn't be made by Americans...) both directed and wrote this, Andrea being a little more popular than his partner in crime and having also written and directed a movie called Big Nothing (2006). As actors are concerned, by far the most known is Ray Wise, playing Frank. You will recognize him from Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003), Good Night and Good Luck (2005), probably 24 (playing Vice President Hal Gardner), and the Western adaption of One Missed Call just last year. Plating the mother, Laura, you have Lin Shaye from Snakes on a (Motherfuckin') Plane. Mick Cain and Alexandra Holden are TV series actors, the Lady in White starred also in American Beauty (1999) and that's about it. This movie appears very early on any of their careers and apparently did a lot of good for them all. In fact, it won its directors several awards and a nomination in Fantasporto. I can see why: you look at this from a distance and you honestly think, like I did, it's gonna suck...

If you ever took a countryside trip somewhere during the night, you know it's spooky. It's miles and miles of trees, not one car in sight, no lights, nobody to help you if something happens. And if you're taking a trip, let's say, South, you know a good part of your way will be made in a straight line, in the middle of miles and miles of trees. It's spooky shit country. Scary stuff is begging to happen. And the USA, who have some of the most crowded cities in the world, and some of the greatest lengths of free woodland crossed by roads known to Man, is the perfect place for something like this to happen. Dead End is about a family on their usual yearly pilgrimage to Grandma's house for Christmas dinner. The father decides to take a shortcut through the countryside, and eventually the whole family finds itself trapped in a looping road, which seems to go nowhere, while a ghostly woman dressed in white and a black car seem to chase them about, killing one by one. At this point the movie is already pretty spoiled, so I'm gonna leave my usual SPOILERS alert here. Don't want to have this one wrecked for you? Don't read past the red. And this is the sort of movie that really spoils if you know the story.

What happens here is explained in the Tibetan Book of the Dead. This family is caught in a pre-death dream. They all doze off inside the car -including at one point the father, who is driving. The car crash they think they nearly had, they actually did have. And in the dream, they proceed to die one by one, presumably in a way representative of how they died in reality, and usually starting from the one who was killed faster (mauled into shit) onto the one who survived the longest (heart attack, we assume), up to the sole survivor. I liked how this was done, because not only this logical order was respected, but even the entities haunting the family in the woods have a meaning: the lady in white was in the car they hit, and the man in the black car was the one who reported the incident and called an ambulance for the sole survivor of the crash.

While actors are pretty much unknown, I did like the acting. A lot. A lot indeed, keep in mind this is the B-series, and we were taught not to expect much from that. All my five R go to Lin Shaye, who did one of the freakiest death scenes I had ever seen, and looked positively terrified (or insane) throughout the whole thing. The weakest actor, in my opinion, was actually the first to go. Cheers!

The sound is amazing. You hear all sorts of noises while the family is stranded in the road. Common woodland sounds, odd background music, strange stuff from everywhere... I mean, turn the lights off and the sound up and try it. It was one of the few movies I showed my family they watched in complete silence from the beginning to the end: no comments, no jokes. And, once again, this is a B-series. Went straight to video. I found it by sheer chance because, as you can see from the above picture, the cover is nothing special. Nothing that would've caught your interest up first. Reeker (2005) was much inferior and had a much more mysterious cover, in my humble opinion. So what happened here? How is it this managed to be awesome where others fail?

It went by everything I have been saying throughout the years. Good usage of a small budget: they can't show a lot of things because they don't have the cash for awesome special effects, they keep most stuff hidden. In fact, this is one of those movies where it doesn't make much sense that you see a lot of stuff. We're in the middle of nowhere and it's dark...

Then, not over-complicating the plot. You don't have the budget to manage a lot of things, so don't add a lot of things. A family, a car, two antagonists, one stretch of woodland road as scenery. They're going to their Grandma's, they get stuck, they die, small twist at the end (in fact, a twist within a twist, if you fast-forward the credits and see the small scene right after them), that's all. Nothing big. The creators realized that this wasn't supposed to be impressive. Nobody needed to get out of this movie commenting on the awesome effects or the actors they've seen here and there: the movie just had to be a good, run of the mill movie, and that's what they did.

Third pointer: if you got away with one good movie, don't make any sequels. Up until now, everything okay. I'm glad there's a movie that proves my theory that the bigger the budget, the bigger the chance to mess up. Dead End is easily downloadable and also rentable, so check it out.