Riffle Pictures [2009] 104′
country: United States
director: Ross Payton
cast: Holly McWilliams, David Krudwig,
Ron Ayers, Russ Metcalf, Richard Pille
Order this film from Amazon.com
After a pair of bumbling hillbillies eat a sacred race of blind albino crayfish a portal to hell is opened – out steps the Devil [a guy in a mask that makes him look like Dennis Hopper, only aged a few hundred years], who confiscates the hillbillies’ motor home and turns its owners into devoted vampire minions. The Devil then proceeds to drive around the Ozarks [Sinkhole county to be specific] raising a small army of the undead and disrupting the general flow of things by . . . well, we never actually see how, really.
Enter the mysterious Madame X, a government agent with ESP, who has a dream about the Devil and his motor home and decides to enlist the help of parapsychological private eye Phil Philby to stop it. The pair head off in their SUV and run immediately into trouble, like a gang of Albanian assassins and a local sheriff intent on imprisoning anyone who so much as looks at him. Meanwhile, the Devil continues to ride around the woods in the motor home raising hordes of the undead and ruining family picnics.
Madame X gets the department of homeland security involved, orders a nuclear strike [which fails, horribly], and falls in love with Phil, who just runs around being an awful action hero. Oh yeah, there are Russians trying to screw with things, too, not that anything ever comes of it. Eventually Phil and X realize that they’re in over their heads and call upon a pricey medicine man, who gives them a recipe for some holy water stuff that’s sure to send the Devil back to hell. Phil loads up a water pistol, shoots the prince of darkness, and saves the day.
MOTOR HOME FROM HELL should have been a fun film – how can you possibly go wrong with a story about a demonic recreational vehicle raising the undead and causing general havoc in the south of Missouri? Lots of ways, it would seem.
The DVD case promises “a wicked political satire” and “an infernal combustion engine of explosive, subversive humor”. While infernal it may be, wicked, explosive, and subversive MOTOR HOME FROM HELL certainly isn’t. The entire screenplay seems to have been built around a single pun – that the motor home runs on “axles of evil”. Get it? Axles of evil – Axis of evil? Anyway, writer Leland Payton thought so much of this single joke that it is repeated constantly throughout the story [and twice on the DVD case alone]. It’s a bit like the “big as a battleship” comparison from THE GIANT CLAW, only utterly forced and unfunny.
About the most subversive thing MOTOR HOME ever does is dare to mock the Department of Homeland Security, the Environmental Protection Agency, and our country’s relations with Russia [which is still full of freedom-hating commies, don't ya know], and it does that rather badly. DR. STRANGELOVE is an obvious inspiration here, so much so that it’s mentioned on the DVD cover ["Stranger than Dr. Strangelove," proclaims an anonymous audience comment], but what’s on display is never absurd or even consistently funny enough to warrant the comparison. The only moment that had me laughing aloud involves the Native American medicine man and his appraisal of the situation, which is present in its entirety in the online trailer for the film.
What puts me off the most about the production, though, is just how uninspired the direction is. Ross Payton’s point-and-shoot approach to photography would be fine for coverage of a family trip Six Flags, but it fails miserably as a film-making style. There’s a cinematographer credited, but just what they added to the value of the production is lost on me [would this really have looked worse without them??]. Editing, also by Ross Payton, adds another layer of unbearability. There’s no reason at all that MOTOR HOME should run a full hour and forty four minutes, and there are a number of utterly superfluous diversions that should have been excised entirely. Cases in point are the beginning, in which the hillbillies hire a homeless man to steal some Sudafed, and a scene in which Phil goes to collect an old debt, but ends up trashing a guy’s CD collection and stereo instead. Then there’s the ending, which piles on ten full minutes of post-climax tedium that never should have made it past pre-production.
I have no doubt that effort went into making this [the official site, linked below, claims two years went into shooting and editing the affair], and that it’s so disappointing is a real shame. The DVD screener I received is reasonably produced at least, presenting MOTOR HOME in its original full-screen aspect ratio in all the quality that interlaced digital video can provide. A trailer is the only extra. Perhaps the most surprising revelation for me was in discovering that the release is actually a pressed DVD5, and not just a burned-on-demand DVD-R. It can be ordered at full retail price from Amazon.com or at considerable savings from the official film website. The official site lists a special Podcast Fan edition as well as a Mystery Grab Bag as ordering options – I must confess I have no idea how either deviate from the screener reviewed here.
I was really hoping for something original and entertaining, if not particularly well produced, in MOTOR HOME FROM HELL. Perhaps having expectations was a mistake on my part, but that the film fails to deliver can hardly be denied. I’ve seen worse straight-to-video entertainment [Dave Silver's CORN comes to mind], but this will do nothing to change the format’s reputation of underachievement. Not recommended.
For more information visit the official
MOTOR HOME FROM HELL website, Rifflepictures.com
