Dead End (2003)
Christmas was made for horror movies. Who can truly resist a splash of terror and violence during the season of goodwill? Like blood on snow, it gives the whole aesthetic a certain je ne sais quoi (pardon my French). One could even argue that horror movies are more realistic portrayals of Christmas than anything to be found on the Hallmark channel. It’s a day of disappointment and jealousy; a day of passive aggressiveness and drunken revelations; a day of extreme stress and and work that still somehow feels like an anti-climax when it’s all over and done with.
Or is that just my experience?
If so, maybe that’s why I love Dead End so much. For better and worse – it’s not a perfect film – it captures all the elements that seem to make up Christmas, whilst almost entirely being shot on a darkened road with only five characters. So enough chat, let’s jump right into it! As ever there will be SPOILERS!
Dead End begins with some grunge-pop music playing that was all the rage in early to mid 00s horror films, and we meet a middle aged man, his wife, their son and daughter, and her boyfriend, all in a car travelling to spend Christmas with relatives. Despite taking the interstate for years, the father (played by Ray Wise) decides to take the scenic route through the woods…and ends up falling asleep for a moment. After a near miss with an oncoming car, things start to get very fucked up indeed…
At the turn of the 21st century, there was some kind of resurgence in the road movie. Films like Roadkill (2001) – or Joy Ride as it was known in the States – Jeepers Creepers (2001), and of course the Britney Spears vehicle Crossroads (2002), all showed how the dream of travelling America can be a hellish nightmare. Dead End fits into this trend, but has its differences. While all the others are about reckless, selfish teens, Dead End is about reckless, selfish people of all ages. It’s about family. And the restriction of characters in a remote location creates an incredibly intimate film that’s held together by the actors. Lin Shaye and Ray Wise are especially well cast as the bickering parents who are desperately trying to hold everything together. Being such great character actors, they bring gravitas and heart to roles that so easily could have been one note. Funnily enough, Shaye seems like an ageing scream queen now due to her involvement in the Insidious franchise, but she’s always been in the horror ether, appearing in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and Critters (1986). Similarly, Wise was suitably terrifying in Twin Peaks and did Jeepers Creepers 2 (2003) the same year Dead End was released. The other actors are also very good. Alexandra Holden, probably best known as Ross’s immature girlfriend in Friends, provides a great straight performance in contrast to the film’s eccentricities, and Mick Cain has great comic timing as the petulant, pot-head teenage son – even if he does look about 25.
Another difference between Dead End and other road movie horrors is that it’s a thoroughly supernatural tale. Usually such a set-up gives way to psychotic hillbillies or monsters lurking in the woods, which makes the film’s unseen terror and purgatory like setting a welcome change. Doing this makes the film genuinely creepy; as a viewer, you never quite know what’s going on, who’s after them or why. It makes for an immensely spooky watch. But it also levels this brilliantly through humour and pathos. No monster required; the family are quite capable of destroying themselves thank you very much! And so Dead End becomes a rare horror in which the story is informed by character, instead of dumb actions. As characters die, the others genuinely start to lose their minds, and change as people. They feel, and have arcs, even if these are sometimes played glibly for comic effect. For example, the mother (Lin Shaye) has possibly the most undignified death I’ve ever seen in cinema: fingering her own brain through her open head wound until she orgasms, and then cries with joy as she tells her imaginary father she made the cheerleading squad, up until she dies. Weird thing is, this is then followed up with emotional string music and the father and daughter crying in a moment of drama. But even this is punctuated with a gag in which the father throws away his shotgun and accidentally shoots the mother’s corpse. Tonally, the film is maybe too erratic for some viewers, but it’s partly what makes it so engaging for me. You never quite know where it’s about to go with its tone, and therefore never feels predictable in that regard.
But of course, this is a horror movie. So fuck all this humanity and shit – where’s the terror? Well, as I previously said, the film’s supernatural take on the road movie really makes you feel as if you’re trapped on a road in the middle of nowhere with these characters. It’s almost suffocating. The ariel shots of the car moving through the deep woods are extremely unsettling, and beautiful to look at. My colleague Ryan and I discussed how they were shot; at times it looks like fine, subdued CGI, maybe even model work, while at other times it looks like full on helicopter shots similar to the opening of The Shining (1980). And although we don’t see much of a “villain” per say, the glimpses we do get are utterly terrifying. The back car (I’m not sure what it is but it looks like a cross between a hearse and something The Penguin would drive) that smoothly drives by with a different character each time pressed up against the back window screaming for help, induces goosebumps every time I see it. Along with this there are some supremely creepy moment such as when the mother picks up her son’s cellphone and hears a woman on the other end sobbing that her baby’s dead. There’s never any jump scares, instead superbly crafted set-pieces and moments that burrow themselves into your skin and make you shiver. The atmosphere of the film is also enriched by the score, especially when the ghostly black car bleeds out of the darkness. My fellow reviewer Ryan made a good point that these days such a shot would have strings screeching at full volume, but here it’s just a soft, pulsing rhythm.
The film’s biggest flaw is its ending. It tries to have a Twilight Zone style ending, but ends up being more like the Sci-Fi channel. So after the daughter is spared by death, she wakes up in a hospital where she is quickly told she needs to rest etc. The nurse taking car elf her is just clocking off and gets into a conversation with a man who looks like an Anime idea of what Death looks like. Anyway, it turns out the nurse’s name is Marcott (the name of the place the family were driving to!!!!) and she ends up getting a ride off the guy who’s obviously Death (and he’s driving the same spooky car from earlier!!!!). It tries way too hard, especially since it makes no sense whatsoever. With Twilight Zone endings, there was always a point or a reason for such an ending, whereas this just feels pulled straight out its arse. That being said, it’s an achingly obvious ending to anyone who knows half their shit about horror. Anyone who’s seen Carnival of Souls (1962) or Jacob’s Ladder (1990) knows this tried ending already – horror’s equivalent of “it was all a dream”. Even in the end credits the film tries pushing it further by having two fellows cleaning up the car accident actually find the father’s note he penned, as if dimensions are somehow being crossed. But it just means shit. But hey, it’s the journey that matters man, not the destination – this is a road movie after all.
Now, despite feeling as American as apple pie, Dead End was written and directed by Jean Baptiste Andrea and Fabrice Canepa. On the “Making of Dead End” documentary, they claim they had a lot of trouble in France getting any projects funded, due to all their scripts being influenced by American genre films, as opposed to European social realism. Pandering exists in many forms. However, they eventually got a modest budget of $900,000 and moved to Hollywood to produce the picture. Unfortunately, not much happened to either filmmaker after this film was released. I’ve no idea what happened to Fabrice Canepa, although Baptiste Andrea went on to make The Big Nothing (2006), which is also a very entertaining genre film that maybe proved too odd for mainstream audiences. Nothing has been made by him since. It’s a shame because his take on genre films are part of a tone that didn’t make it into this decade: the sincere horror comedy. Those comedies from the 00s like Shaun of the Dead (2004) and Dog Soldiers (2002) that were hellbent on not just doing the funny stuff well, but also doing the scary stuff well. I don’t mean to sound dour, since the state of horror is always in flux, but it currently seems if something isn’t a repetitive possession movie, it has to be a pofaced indie horror with a “message” rammed down your throat. Dead End provides a strangely warm film for horror fans to watch at Christmas. It’s the anti-Christmas movie that still somehow creates those same fuzzy emotions, with the added layer of fear. It’s quite a cocktail! It would be easy to say that Dead End doesn’t re-invent the wheel, but what it does do is tell a good story, with strong characters, in a creepy, entertaining way, with heart and humour…which increasingly seems better than re-inventing the wheel.
Kris’s Grade: B +
Ryan’s Grade: B +
Odds & Ends
- The film is fairly dated, with its jokes about “Marilyn Bronsan” and Playstations.
- Amazingly, the whole film was shot on location. Apparently the filmmakers struggled to find a quiet road so much they nearly set the entire thing in the desert. Then it would really have become an Americana road horror in the vein of Roadkill or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974).
- Love the tidbits we get about the family we never meet. “I hope your mother doesn’t experiment with the turkey this year” and “Your brother jerks off to gun magazines!” are personal favourites.
- Ray Wise’s outfit in the film is stupendous. Ryan claimed it’s how he’d be dressed had he been a Columbo villain.
- “Who are all these people in the woods?”. Terrifying line delivered so cheerfully by Lin Shaye.
- When Ray Wise goes to his dead wife he cries out “Laura!”. It’s uncannily like Twin Peaks, almost to the point where you wonder if it was intentional (although I doubt it was).
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