Route 666 (2001)
A decent concept with Lou Diamond Phillips, Lori Petty and a host of government agents besieged by the ghosts of a massacred chain gang while driving down a desert highway - but let down by awful execution.
Characters do the most ridiculous things - Phillips and a fellow agent punch it out in an old cemetery whilst another couple of agents shag in the back of an RV at the same time as the ghosts first appear not two hundred yards away amid a hail of gunfire which none of the four seem to hear until the ghosts are upon them - and speak the most risible dialogue, to drive the viewer to distraction it's so abject. Not to mention haunted Jackhammer drills. A ghost carries one of these to dispatch it's victims. It doesn't have an air hose connected yet works just fine.
The camera work when the ghosts appear is messy and flickery, again taking the viewer out of the zone when they should be riveted to the action. The film does have good points. The desert location work is very good and... no, that's about it.
The dvd from Lions Gate looks awful. Not in it's picture quality, that's fine, but in it's framing. On a widescreen tv the picture looks squashed giving figures a thin look, but any expansion of the picture means a substantial loss of image both top and bottom.
|