Director: Bryan Bertino
Writer: Bryan Bertino
Stars: Zoe Kazan, Ella Ballentine, Aaron Douglas
Run Time: 1 Hour, 31 Minutes
Link: https://amzn.to/2FSYRcf
Synopsis
We see Lizzy cleaning the filthy apartment while she listens to some seriously sad-sounding country music playing in the background. She clearly takes care of her way-too-dependent mother, Kathy. Kathy is supposed to be driving Lizzy to her father’s house, but instead sleeps all day and has to take her there at night. Lizzy secretly plans to not come back after this visit.
They argue a lot, but continue down the country road until they have a blowout and hit a wolf in the road, killing it. They call 911, but they don’t exactly know where they are, so it may be a while before help comes. We get flashbacks showing how Kathy is an alcoholic. They spend a lot of time waiting on the deserted country road, and they look at the dead wolf and see that it was pretty chewed up before they hit it; they find a huge tooth embedded in the wolf’s skin. Hours pass, and not a single car drives by. We start getting shots of something watching them and the car from the woods.
Finally, a tow truck shows up. They watch the truck driver do his work and soon notice that the dead wolf has vanished. The tow truck guy, Jesse, says no one ever takes this road anymore. Jesse gets started hooking up their car to his tow truck. They have a broken axle, so he has to do some work on it before he can simply tow the away.
Lizzy gets out of the car, and she finds the wolf further off the side of the road, still dead, but now there’s less of it. We see the creature behind her, but she doesn’t. We get more flashbacks of Lizzy and Kathy’s awful life together.
Jesse is taking forever to fix the car, and then they get out and noticed he isn’t there any more. His truck is still there, but he’s vanished; he even left his flashlight under the car. We hear something that makes a noise right out Jurassic Park. Something throws Jesse’s severed arm at the window.
Jesse, who still isn’t quite dead, crawls back to their car and bangs on the door to be let in. The thing finishes him off right in front of Lizzy and Kathy.
The thing then pulls Kathy out of the car and starts chewing on her, but it gets frightened off when the ambulance finally arrives. Kathy and Lizzy are put into the ambulance, but the paramedics get preoccupied with finding bits of Jesse lying on the road. And then there are no more paramedics.
Kathy and Lizzy drive off in the ambulance, but they are soon rammed by the creature and knocked off the side of the road. The ambulance is on its side, so they aren’t going anywhere in that. Seriously injured, Kathy says she’s going to die really soon whether she goes outside or not, so she makes a torch and tries to lead the creature deeper into the woods while Lizzy runs back for the tow truck.
The monster tears Kathy apart. Lizzy, who doesn’t do as she was told, hits the monster with a hammer and drives it off, but Kathy is done for. Alone ow, Lizzy uses what she has on hand to survive.
Commentary
It’s explained why they get off the highway, and also why the road is deserted, but they never explain why a road like that way out in the woods has so many streetlights. No one lives anywhere near there, so why the streetlights? Because we wouldn’t be able to see anything otherwise, but they could have tried to explain it.
We get it already: Kathy’s an alocoholic, and Lizzy’s home life was awful. We don’t need to see that many flashbacks. I’ll watch monsters eating mechanics all day long, but strung-out addicts beating on their children is not entertaining. The monster in the dark and the two girls’ terror works really well, but the flashback scenes really drag. They need to set up why Kathy needs her redemption at the end, but I stopped caring about that pretty quickly.
The monster effects are really good. It looks like a velociraptor from “Jurassic Park” crossed with the title character from “Venom.” There’s no explanation at all for what the monster is or where it came from. Alien? Mad science experiment? An extra from the one of the Jurassic Park movies?