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Having grown up in a haunted house, I enjoy that genre of movie. But, dammit, anything can be haunted nowadays. Remember Haunted Honeymoon? How about Haunted Boat? I keep waiting for titles like Haunted Lunchmeat or Haunted Buttplug. If those movies existed, odds are Lionsgate would distribute them, after changing the titles and the endings.
Tiding us over until that day, Lionsgate brings us Haunted Highway, a movie whose sole frightening aspect is just how scary it isn’t. It’s long, drawn-out and ridiculous, but… it’s haunted. And I tell you, you must rent it because the word ‘haunted’ is in the title! Actually, no. Don’t rent it. You’ll end up with a Haunted DVD Player.
Greg Ross (Rand Gamble) is a sum’bitch. He’s a fashion photographer who enjoys doinking his models, much to his wife Amanda’s (Laura Putney) chagrin. When he takes up with a Japanese supermodel named Yumi (Hinano Yoshikawa), Amanda has Greg followed. She’s got pictures of Greg and Yumi together and the Big D is about to drop on their marriage. Amanda storms about the house looking for her Asian rival for Greg’s affection. Greg grabs Amanda by the shoulders and shakes her, declaring she is his one true love. Since the first thing you do with the love of your life is toss her about like a rag doll, Greg throws his lovely wife down to the hardwood floor. On the way down, Amanda hits her head on the corner of a table. Bye-bye, Amanda.
Greg does the only logical thing with after Amanda’s accidental death: he wraps the body in a sheet, puts duct tape around and tosses it into the trunk of his Lexus. Once the clean-up is finished, Greg catches a glimpse of Yumi in the living room mirror. Was she there the whole time?
Greg’s fantastic idea is drive Amanda’s body out to Black Lake so he can dump her. It’s a bit of a drive, about 100 miles. Little does he know the terrors that await him on his journey! Greg gets passed… by a motorcycle! And since this is the Haunted Highway, I have to assume it’s a haunted motorcycle! Oh, it’s a nail-biting sequence! First the bike pulls up right beside his car, then it falls back. Then, BOOM! The bike is right there again, then it goes around and in front of Greg, speeding off into the night! I got chill bumps again, just reliving those scenes, in order to write about it. It’s just so much like an actual traffic pattern.
Greg turns on the radio and listens to snippets of three different songs, yet the display on the radio never changes. Obviously, his factory stereo system is haunted! He slows down to about forty miles an hour. Okay, maybe ten miles an hour. A car behind Greg starts flashing its haunted lights! Greg pulls over to the side. The other car stops too and the Strange Man (Dan Holmes) gets out. He knocks on Greg’s window and motions for Greg to roll the window down. Greg does, and the Strange Man grabs Greg around the neck with his haunted hands and begins choking the life out of Greg! Greg ducks free and scrambles out the passenger side door. Before he can hide under his haunted car on the haunted highway, the Strange Man asks Greg if he’s okay. The strangling thing never happened. It was a haunted hallucination! The Strange Man tells Greg to be careful and not be such a bad driver. Good advice, but it is terrifying advice, because the Strange Man speaks with a slow… haunted… stutter! And stuttering men are terrifying! Will the horror never end?
At this point, I paused the movie to get some cheese curls, a 24 oz. bottle of Miller High Life and I went outside to take a whiz on the neighbor’s lawn. It’s all I could do to withstand the terror I was viewing inside.
But nothing could have prepared me for the female hitchhiker who looked like Courtney Love! Greg sees her once and just drives by. But a few seconds later, and I didn’t even predict this and say it out loud while rolling my eyes, she’s in the road again! She’s ahead of Greg! How can that be? How can she break the rules of time, space and physics… unless she’s haunted! There is no God on this lonely stretch of road and distance and perception are all topsy-turvy and wacked out! It is the Haunted Highway and nothing is normal or safe!
Haunted Highway is like watching someone else get hypnotized by the road, except you’re too bored to wake them up and you’re actually hoping for an accident, anything to break the monotony. It has the pace of Larry Hagman in a 5K run and feels like it was edited by an angry sleepwalker. At a scant 84 minutes running time, Haunted Highway is one of the longest freakin’ movies I’ve ever watched. It just never seemed to stop; you could put this movie on a replay loop and it would be like Video Fireplace. There are more thrills in electron microscope footage of cell mitosis.
Ah… but if you’re a fan of strange continuity, there are a couple of things to look for. At times, Haunted Highway plays out like a live-action “What’s Wrong with this Picture?” puzzle.
Greg passes the same tree at least five times. Was that the filmmakers’ intention? If anyone asks them, I hope they take my advice and say, “Yes. We were trying to convey the blah blah blah… symbolism… I went to film school… harrumph.” I also enjoyed the fact that while in one scene, Greg looks fine, but in the very next shot, he has huge Billy Joel-like dark circles under his eyes. Alice Cooper would be proud to have that much black under his eyes. Greg looks like he should be working at Hot Topic.
Co-writer and director Junichi Suzuki tries to combine the long-haired ghostie girls of J-Horror with the strange horror sub-genre of road pictures, notably Dead End. I’m sorry, did I say combine? I meant, “rip off wholesale like some kind of haunted movie thief, or Ulli Lommel, one of the two.” Yes, it is a low-budget flick, and there is one nicely done visual effect, but there’s nothing original about Haunted Highway whatsoever. It’s all left-overs… haunted leftovers.
Best acting award in this movie goes to Dan Holmes, doing his best Billy Bibbitt, as the Strange Man. Nobody else made much of an impression, not even leading man Rand Gamble, whose performance consists of sweating and pretending to smoke. No nudity, not much blood to be seen (unless you count the stupid CG blood, which I don’t; if you “don’t have the budget” to buy clear corn syrup and food coloring, but you can do CG, fire your comptroller) and not a single extra on the DVD means negative replay value.
Lionsgate gives us four or five decent movies a year and feeds us copious amounts of trash the rest of the time. Haunted Highway is part of the trash heap. It may be haunted trash, but it’s still trash. Give it a miss.
