|
DEAD END (2003)
If you don't want the ending spoiled, don't read the title This is the kind of surprise-ending movie whose surprise ending is so obvious, and can be seen from so far off that I sometimes thought it might exist in that Rosemary's Baby zone, where everybody's supposed to know what's going on except for the characters the wacky shit is happening to. But it doesn't turn out that way; that closing scene where the Man In Black explains everything I knew with complete certainty twenty minutes in is both a sop for the dipshits who still couldn't figure it out at the end of eighty, and a concession that we really are supposed to be surprised when we find out. If I said that the twenty-minute tipoff was an image that bears suspicious similarity to that most memorable image in Jacob's Ladder, would I be giving anything away that the movie itself doesn't? Probably not, since it's right there on the front of the box. A bickering family drives down a lonely forest road on the way to some in-laws on Christmas Eve. They narrowly avoid an accident, pick up a sexy catatonic (Amber Smith), one of them dies horribly every time they see the sexy catatonic, and the road never, ever ends. Dead End's plot trods down a path so well-worn, it's not even a path, it's more of a shunt. The family does have a nicely dysfunctional dynamic about them, particularly Ray Wise as the father who'd rather drink and drive than let someone else drive, and Lin Shaye as the mother who tries to keep the peace. There's also two kids and a boyfriend, who provide moments like one time where the son goes off into the woods to whack off to a porno magazine he has folded up in his pants. Why does he have a porno magazine folded up in his pants? I don't understand why, when they pick up Smith, they make the pretty young daughter walk, by herself, in the forest, at night. Come on, you can squeeze four in the back of one of those things, and they're all skinny. The daughter could've sat on the lap of the boyfriend who didn't even offer to walk with her. Still, about halfway through Dead End it seemed like it might be going somewhere. The mom goes batshit insane, and she's hilarious. Those (probably CGI) aerial shots of the lonely car making its way down the road in this endless forest are spooky. This is also the point at which the movie seems like it wants to let us in on the Big Twist, without actually coming out and saying it. The allusions are so unsubtle for a viewer, they're kind of funny, like those Far Side pilots asking what a mountain goat was doing all the way up here in these clouds. But it doesn't illuminate anything for the characters, and they don't start behaving with any further understanding of their situation, and their ignorance stops being funny, intentionally or otherwise. As Dead End trudges on toward its Man In Black revelation, it becomes increasingly clear that this is playing it all straight and any chuckles the forgone nature of its conclusion might have provided were not intended. And why then the macabre, drawn-out ordeal? I understood why all that weird stuff was happening in...all those movies this movie rips off. Those characters could leave their lonely forest roads any time they wanted once they figured out their predicament - these ones have to be bloodily trucked away, and have to see the mangled bodies of their loved ones every fifteen minutes or so. If the same rules apply, where's their chance to figure out their predicament and leave? If the rules are different this time, how? Or is it simply that this is supposed to be a horror movie, and horror movies are supposed to have macabre, drawn-out ordeals in them? (c) Brian J. Wright 2005 BACK TO THE D's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE |