The basics for this franchise are rooted in utter simplicity and improbability. Truckers are a misunderstood, generally feared, and easy group to pick on (who hasn't complained about a truck on the road every now and then?) So, these movies cast a shadowy evil trucker as the bad guy who, like most of these kinds of movies, has supernatural powers that are never explained and an appetite for death and dismemberment that cannot be sated.
Joy Ride (2001)
This is an odd film from its very inception. It was written by two guys, one of whom was J.J.Abrams. Released as both Joy Ride and Roadkill, it stars the late Paul Walker and was actually released after his rise to stardom in The Fast and The Furious (the first one). It also stars Steve Zahn, who is a very good actor in his own right and has been in such good movies as That Thing You Do, Dallas Buyers Club, and the Knights of Badassdom.
Paul is the poor kid who is making good by having gotten a scholarship to a good college and he hops in his newly purchased crappy old used car to go pick up the girl he fancies (played by Golden Globe nominee Leelee Sobieski) who is several states away. On the way, he picks up his always-in-trouble brother played by Steve.
Steve's playful side comes out when they taunt a trucker over the radio (voiced by Ted Levine of The Silence of the Lambs and Shutter Island fame) by having Paul imitate a woman's voice and they eventually set him up for a rendezvous with the jerk in the motel room next door. Hilarity ensues as the pissed off trucker hunts them from state to state and they run for their lives without calling the polcie, as there is no way to avoid any of this getting out over the police radio (and truckers have an innate knowledge of all things radio and CB).
As a thriller and horror film, it's not actually all that bad. It has some very good acting, a generally acceptable script, and some decent dialog. While the general idea behind the bad guy is a bit stretched beyond belief, and the omnipresent, omniscient nature of the bad guy is a bit rough. I have certainly seen worse movies - recently. In fact, to see some worse movies, read on to the sequels...
3.0/5
Joy Ride 2: Dead Ahead (2008)
What if you had the rights to a movie franchise, and the first was successful, but you didn't have the money for any of the big names that you had in the first movie (including the bad guy who appeared as only a voice and will appear in all subsequent movies)? Time for a direct-to-DVD sequel that has a bunch of no-names, is labeled as "unrated" because who wants to bother getting things rated these days, and replaces the creepy voice of Ted Lavine with Mark Gibbon's more sultry tones.
Mark, who you may have seen in Man of Steel or Chronicles of Riddick, did a very odd thing - he sounds almost exactly like Clancy Brown (of Starship Troopers and Shawshank Redemption fame). The story is predictably less believable than the first, with under-powered actors doing barely passable jobs with characters that have no depth and the audience never really cares much about.
There's a strange flirtation with genuine creepiness in this movie, as the trucker seems to be obsessed with sex even moreso than the little bit that got him into the trouble in the first place. He makes one girl strip to her granny panties (and yes, she is a hot chick who for some reason wore granny panties) and he makes one of the guys dress up in drag. Then the guy in drag is threatened with castration amongst the other badness... it just all seems really odd.
The movie is poorly written, poorly directed, the acting is not great, the effects were pretty bad, the dialog was cruddy, and I would certainly not recommend this movie to anybody. Is it the worst of the trilogy? Read on...
1.25/5
Joy Ride 3: Road Kill (2014)
The best thing about the second movie was Mark Gibbon's acting. So, for this second direct-to-DVD sequel, they toss Mark on his butt and grab a guy who is best known for playing Jason in the Freddy Vs. Jason movie - they are clearly not pouring on the money for talent. Don't expect the money saved to be spent on effects, though, because they just plain aren't.
The movie wildly tangents away from the tried-and-true Joy Ride way of doing things by adding strange and interesting ways to kill people that appear to have been the rejected suggestions for slaying from the Saw franchise. Unlike the reflection on social morays and the forced introspection that those Saw movies sought to bring to the big screen, this movie brings only sadness and an empty feeling in the pit of the stomach.
Ken Kirzinger's way of acting the part of the disgruntled trucker is to grit his teeth most of the time, which is not the way he was portrayed in either of the previous two movies. Like the last movie, however, he does not tangle with victims who have an abundance of intellect. These people are supposed to be a rally racing team, and their Subaru WRX is highly featured throughout the movie. It's unusual to have a race car with full back seats, regular seat belts (that no one uses) and that cruises at 5500 RPM at about 15 MPH.
The acting was horrendous - it made the previous film look like it was filled with the Royal Shakespearean Theater troop. The effects were inexcusable for 2014. The story was laughable. The dialog was barely written - I'm pretty sure the director just said, "Make some stuff up, we're burning daylight." For many of the other issues, I would simply say that physics shouldn't always be ignored to further a scene.
0.5/5