Serial criminal and biker Thomas Pain (Jonathan Haynes) is gunned down by a cop after a successful and peaceful, if armed, robbery and dies. Fortunately or unfortunately (it depends rather heavily on the strength of your wish for this film to end early), two overacting, bug-eyed "scientists" (deserved quotation marks are in the actual movie, charmingly) have found an olde booke of magick and its little bonus content, the Potion To Raise The Dead. The lab-coated duo somehow manage to acquire Pain's corpse to take their research to the next level after illegal animal experimentation.
Mister Pain revives rather too well, kills the two cackling madmen and makes off with book and potion. He hasn't changed a bit since he was alive, so he gets his old biker troupe together to do the things people who tattoo their names on their fists are wont to do.
They start out (their plan for world domination? their summer vacation?) by grabbing themselves a nice shack in the woods near the small Southern town of Plain Dealing, killing the owner while they are at it. Stage two of Pain's master plan consists of terrorizing Plain Dealing.
Too bad there's neither time nor budget for a lot of terrorizing, so Pain and his troupe barely have time to kill the sheriff (who never heard the one about avoiding to let the badguy with the gun get behind you) and abduct another man and sacrifice him to Satan while everyone swills the magic potion before a quickly built vigilante force of local yokels under the lead of a not-Ash named Matt (Carl Weatherly) shows them the true meaning of Southern hospitality (perfectly incorporated in Matt's helpful advice to "shoot first, ask questions later").
Too bad there's still half a movie to go. So, things being as magically and undead as they are, the bikers are dying quite easily, yet the poor mudered murdering dears return from the dead a few surprisingly decomposition-free weeks later to take vengeance.
Will the excitement never cease!?
Road Killers, directed by a certain Derek E. Welch, is quite a peculiar little movie. Too backyard-produced to even have an IMDB page, possibly meant as a comedy, not funny in the way it is supposed to be yet very funny indeed, without any make-up effects for its undead and featuring undead people who may be called zombies by the supposed good people of Plain Dealing, but who always only act, move and look like your usual hobby actor playing a biker, the film is full of the kind of little wonders of stupidity that make humanity such a loveable mess.
More than once while watching this, I had to ask myself questions like: "Is the dry, inflectionless drawl of our hero supposed too sound so flat? Is it so flat to make it funnier? Is it written so flat as not to overtax Weatherly's dubious acting abilities? Why do I even think about this thing so hard? Oh, look, a decapitation!".
The quality of its direction is about what one would expect. There's one or two Evil Dead inspired shots, much camera on groundlevel or crotchlevel business, no attempts to place any of this in any reality I know of, no comical timing to speak of etc etc.
Which does not mean that this isn't entertaining or funny. It is actually both, just not in the way it was meant to be entertaining or funny. Road Killers is one of the very exciting cases of a horror comedy where the true hilarity of the proceedings is based on every joke falling flat, becoming a very different kind of joke (and funny!) through its own ineptness. Truly,this must be the kind of paradox some Greek philosopher-mathematician would approve of, hopefully forgetting all about turtles in the process!
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment