- Directed by Roxanne Benjamin, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin
- Written by Roxanne Benjamin, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin
- Stars Chad Villella, Matt Bettinelli-Olpin, Kristina Pesic, Larry Fessenden
- Run Time; 1 Hour, 39 Minutes
Synopsis
Two criminals, bloody and terrified, make a run for it as credits roll. As they drive, they see a weird thing floating in the sky. They’re heading southbound on an unnamed highway. They stop in for gas at a diner, and strange things start happening to them, but no one else notices. Mitch sees that thing outside in the air again.
They drive away from the diner, but soon find themselves right back there again. Now they see two of the things in the sky as they approach the diner again. Mitch gets out to go home, but Jack refuses. The skeletal-angel-of-death-looking-things kill Jack.
Mitch enters a bloody motel room and finds himself home with his daughter, but he still is in a confusing recursive house with rooms leading into themselves. The maid comes by and puts a “do not disturb” sign on the doorknob.
Sadie, Kim, and Ava open the motel door next to Mitch and come out. They all climb into a van and leave. They’re doing the three-girls-on-a-roadtrip thing when they have a flat tire. AAA is at least four hours away, so they unpack the van and start drinking warm beer. At last, another car comes along. Betty and Dale offer them a ride, and against their better judgment, the girls go with them.
They arrive at Betty and Dale’s house. Bunny and Ray and their weird twin sons come over for dinner. Ray says a kind of “Satanic Grace.” Sadie is a vegan and doesn’t eat meat. A couple of times there is mention of a fourth girl, but we never saw a fourth girl. “If Alex were here, things would be different,” complains Kim. Then the girls who ate the funny meat start throwing up. Once Dale gives them their “medicine” they get a lot calmer, don’t want to leave, and pass out on the bed.
Sadie goes to sleep, and when she wakes up, the other girls have gone out to a bonfire with the two twins. Sadie watches the others do a Satanic ritual out in the desert. Sadie gets her foot caught in a bear trap, and Kim and Ava come after her.
Sadie runs out into the road to flag down a car, but the guy is on his phone and runs her over. He calls 911, but they can’t help him. Lucas loads Sadie into the car and heads south and eventually finds a hospital. The place is abandoned. The 911 operator talks Lucas through intubating her. Suddenly, a surgeon starts talking through his headset. The surgeon talks Lucas through cutting her open and compressing her lungs manually.
Sadie dies, and Lucas hears laughing in his earbuds. Who was that on the phone? Pucas finds that he can’t get out of the hospital. Lucas cleans himself up, including a blood-free white shirt, gets back in his car, and drives away in a car that doesn’t have a broken windshield anymore.
We see that the woman he’s been talking to on the phone is on a payphone. She goes into a nearby bar, but almost immediately, a guy with a gun rushes in. “Robbing this place is way more trouble than it’s worth,” warns the woman. He isn’t here to rob them, he’s here to find his sister Jesse, who is in this town somewhere. The guy shoots the patron, who oozes instead of bleeding and soon starts howling – clearly not quite human. The gunman takes Al the bartender out on the road to take him to Jesse.
Al calls the gunman Danny and starts laughing. The eye tattoo on Al’s hand winks at Danny, but he does take Danny to see Jesse. She says that Danny’s gotten old, and he says he’s been looking for her for thirteen years. Danny blows Al’s head off and pulls Jesse into his truck. The road ends, but he keeps on going. Jesse explains that she killed their parents and she doesn’t want to leave this place. Just then, four naked men pull Danny from the truck and eat him. Jesse then goes back to where she came from, bumping into a girl at the restaurant.
The girl, Jem, is on vacation with her parents. They arrive at the place they’re staying, The mother asks the father, “Do you think she’s ready?” There’s a knock on the door and the father says to call the police. There’s several men outside wearing masks. The men search the little house as the family hides. Violence happens, and soon Jem finds herself alone with the three masked intruders.
The men kill the parents, then remove their masks, revealing Jack and Mitch from the opening sequence. Jem beats them all up with a baseball bat, but she doesn’t last long. The death-demons crawl out of Jem’s corpse, and as they run outside, the big one comes out of a hole in the ground and eats the third assailant.
Commentary
Everything connects. It’s kind of an anthology, but it’s also one big continuous story. The death-demons are really cool looking, and all the gore is very realistic.
The acting and cinematography here is excellent, the story is good, and the pacing is mostly fine, although the hospital scene seemed a little too long. The DJ, played by Larry Fessenden, does Wolfman-Jack commentary throughout the segments, which is fun.
Overall, it’s really very good.