- Directed by David Charbonier, Justin Powell
- Written by David Charbonier, Justin Powell
- Stars Lonnie Chavis, Ezra Dewey, Kristin Bauer van Straton
- Run Time: 1 Hour, 28 Minutes
- Link: https://amzn.to/3xJP1OU
Synopsis
A single car drives along the lonely road past the oil pumps towards a single, isolated house. The driver opens the trunk and a couple of children are tied and gagged inside…
Six hours earlier… Kevin and Bobby are out playing. They swear to move to California together someday. They throw the ball down the hill, and when they go to get it, someone grabs them and locks them in the trunk of the car. They take Kevin out of the car, leaving Bobby inside alone. He eventually breaks the trunk open, but he doesn’t know where he is. He starts to run away, but then remembers that Kevin is still in there somewhere.
Bobby sneaks around inside the house and sees and hears various adults doing things. He hears crying coming from behind a door; that must be Kevin, right? One of the men spots Bobby and says, “It’s OK, you don’t have to hide from me. I just want to talk,” which Bobby doesn’t believe for a second. They do the cat-and-mouse thing for a while. The man slips and knocks himself out on the way down, but he gets up just as Bobby’s holding a knife over him– and accidentally gets stabbed to death. We see, but Bobby doesn’t, that his watch has a countdown timer– 38 minutes until… something.
Bobby goes looking for Kevin again. He talks to Bobby through the door, but can’t get the door open. He can’t find the keys to the door, but he does find the man’s car keys. Bobby can’t drive, but he does get the car rolling downhill. He jumps out, and the car keeps on going without him.
Bobby finds an old dialing phone like his grandmother has, and Kevin has to explain how to make it work. Just then, the timer in the watch goes off. He calls 911 just as another car arrives. 911 says they’re tracing the call, but Bobby hangs up the phone too soon. Meanwhile, Kevin breaks a fingernail, the most cringeworthy horrific thing in the film so far.
Bobby frantically tries to clean up the bloody mess in the kitchen before the other kidnapper finds him. He rolls the man’s dead body out the back door and down the steps. He watches as the other kidnapper puts a pile of cash in a hidden safe. The other kidnapper finally catches on to Bobby’s presence and hacks down the locked door, Shining-style.
Just then, the police arrive and knock on the door. The other kidnapper turns out to be a woman, and she explains everything to the police officer while keeping Bobby locked in the room upstairs. She acts suspiciously, so the officer comes inside, where she kills him with her axe. Now the kidnapper has the cop’s gun, and Bobby only has his nightstick and handcuffs, which he promptly uses against her. She still manages to shoot Bobby in the leg, so that’s gonna slow him down.
Bobby finally gets her keys and goes upstairs after Kevin. Kevin’s wearing some kind of electronic collar. It’s a shock collar that won’t let him past the door. Bobby does more battle with the kidnapper, and he passes out from the pain of her sticking her finger in his bullet wound. Kevin forces his way downstairs, despite the shock collar, and makes his way to Bobby.
Meanwhile, the kidnapper gets out of the cuffs and starts to pursue them. The boys get into the police officer’s car, where they find a hand Taser. Kevin gets on the radio and calls for more cops, but he doesn’t know where they are. The kidnapper pulls Bobby out of the car, but she gets Tased by Kevin before she can kill him.
There’s one final battle, and the cops show up just in time. Later on, the two boys actually do go to California and have a happy ending.
Commentary
It’s all very dark and atmospheric, and they both make the same mistakes little kids make all the time. Not knowing how those old phones work, not understanding a stick-shift car, and not killing the bad guys when you have the chance. I love how Bobby says, “I’m sorry,” when the male kidnapper cuts himself Bobby’s knife. The acting from both kids is excellent.
The murders are pretty typical for this kind of film, but I found the fingernail scene excruciating, and the grabbing-the-knife-blade scenes were pretty nasty too. I lost track of the number of times they disabled the kidnappers and then just left them alone to get up and continue the pursuit. Kids don’t generally think about killing people, so there’s that, but it got a little unrealistic after a while.
Overall, I did like it. No monsters, not the fun kind anyway, but enough gore and suspense to make it interesting.