Movie Review – Southbound
Genre: Fantasy, Horror, Thriller
Director: Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath, Radio Silence
Starring: Chad Villella, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Kristina Pesic
Release Year: 2015
Opinion
Rather than looking at it as a feature film, it is more a collection of ideas. And those ideas are not that of stories but of scenes and sequences or even dialogues. The end result is a mashup of all these disconnected thoughts bundled into a grotesque presentation with just par acting and production values. When I said ideas and these disconnected bunch of them got approved for production, there must be some good ones and they are – few and far.
Synopsis
It is very difficult to provide a synopsis for something that doesn’t have a head or tail, much less a body. Features five different loosely connected stories in a deserted stretch over one long night. Jack and Mitch are escaping a botched up operation and going in a loop towards a gas station. Sadie, Kim and Ava are members of a band stuck on the road due to a flat tyre and are offered a night’s stay by a creepy couple. Raymond runs over a woman while driving and is ready to do anything to save the woman from dying. Dale is looking for his sister for 13 years and finally found a lead while Daryl has taken his family for a small vacation before his daughter goes off to college.
Review
There are some innovative ideas – especially the visuals of the creatures/spirits they show in the beginning that follow Jack and Mitch. There is a level of mystery and suspense that lets you invest into its bizarre narrative for most part waiting for a common factor across different stories ** spoiler alert ** which never happens. Some storylines are completely uninventive like the one with the girl band which was done multiple times over in many C grade movies or the last homeinvasion episode involving masked intruders and they seem unnecessary. It does try to put people in extreme situations and extract some drama out of, but nothing we might not have seen before.
Verdict
An anthology that lacked innovation, purpose and connect. Easily avoidable.
