Joy Ride (2001)

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If director John Dahl has a forté, it's his ability to take a story featuring backwoods cops, seedy desert motels, filthy truck stops and dimly lit bars full of lowlifes and make it enormously entertaining. He also has an uncanny knack for taking marginal B and C-list talent and making them seem like Oscar contenders, even though the material is more akin to stuff you'd find in a made-for-cable movie.

Actually, Dahl's two best films - Red Rock West and The Last Seduction - debuted on pay cable, a medium that is taken slightly less seriously than Tara Reid's chances of winning an Oscar. The Academy doesn't even let films like these qualify for their little year-end party, which was a shame because Seduction's Linda Fiorentino deserved a Best Actress nomination (she won the Independent Spirit Award, as well as trophies from critics in London and New York).

But Joy Ride is a different story...or is it? The film is getting a wide release from a major distributor, but it's still set in the desert and is populated by the same small-town cretins we grew to lovingly despise in West and Seduction. There are no big stars here, and there are barely any little ones, either. And the scariest thing of all is that Ride has been sitting on the shelf nearly as long as O, the monumentally delayed modern update of Othello (filming wrapped in early 2000).

But Ride is a surprisingly good little flick. It's about a straight-laced Berkeley student named Lewis (Paul Walker, The Fast and the Furious) who has a crush on a girl from his New Jersey hometown. Lewis buys a used car to pick up Venna (Leelee Sobieski, Here on Earth) in Boulder, hoping the two will bond during the cross-country drive. But right before he leaves, Lewis finds out his older brother Fuller (Steve Zahn, Saving Silverman) has just been busted for a DUI in Salt Lake City. No problem - Salt Lake City is on the way to Boulder, so Lewis bails Fuller out and agrees to drive him as far as Denver.

Grateful for the bail and ride, Fuller buys Lewis a CB radio so the two can monitor police activity as they speed through the dusty west. Saying the CB is like "a prehistoric internet," the bored Fuller talks his brother into impersonating a woman to lure a desperate-sounding trucker with the handle "Rusty Nail" to a hotel room with the promise of a good time. The boys stay in the room next-door and listen like a couple of giggling schoolgirls before falling asleep.

They awaken to a grisly scene in the next room and shortly thereafter find out Rusty Nail (voiced by Matthew Kimbrough) knows who they are and is hell-bent on revenge. Dahl expertly ratchets up the tension into an edge-of-your-seat frenzy that only gets the slightest bit silly when Rusty Nail's truck is trying to run them down (it's too much like Christine, Jeepers Creepers or that dopey Metallica video). Dahl never shows us what Rusty Nail looks like, which helps to make the story all the more disturbing.

It's a pretty simple idea, but the whole thing is brought to life by Ride's two screenwriters, who have each directed enjoyable television shows (Clay Tarver, Upright Citizens Brigade and Jeffrey Abrams, Felicity). Like Dahl's previous films, he gets great performances from his actors, too. Walker shows his decent performance in Furious wasn't a fluke (although I'm still not entirely convinced - he's way too pretty to be any good, right?) and even gets naked with Zahn for one scene.

1:32 -R for violence/terror and language

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