Greg is a photographer who is having an affair with a Japanese model of his. When his wife, who seems to know all about it, one day confront him, they get into a big argument which leads to Greg accidentally killing her. He puts the body in the trunk of his car and drives towards a place called Black Lake to dump the body. But the ride there proves to be anything but easy.
With a lot of Japanese people involved in the making, including the director Junichi Suzuki, Haunted Highway feels a bit like a Japanese horror movie with an all American cast. Well, except for Greg's Japanese girlfriend that is. I really don't blame them for trying with this Japanese/American mix even though the end result could've been better. Still, I felt that Haunted Highway, previously known as Death Ride, had a few things going for it and in the end I consider it to be watchable. The good stuff includes that the movie kicked off right on frame one with no real build-up, but instead it dived right into the horror straight away. This can of course be considered negative as well as positive, but talking about this film here and now, it worked quite well.
I have to admit that when I'm about to watch movies like this, that is new horror flicks that you've really heard nothing about, I'm always a tiny bit scared what I'm in for. That is scared in the sense of the movie being bad, rather than scared as in that the movie will actually scare me. My biggest worry is always about the acting, because if the acting proves to be crap right from the start, I just can't focus on the movie as much as one should. Luckily, the acting here was decent, and I thought that Rand Gamble who plays Greg did an excellent job. The only complaint, acting-wise, that I really have would be about Hinano Yoshikawa who plays Yumi, Greg's mistress. She felt a bit too stiff, and the way she delivered her lines didn't sound natural at all. Nothing to get too wound up over though, but at the same time, it sure could've been done a lot better.
Basically, it goes like this: Greg is having an affair on the side which apparently his wife knows about. They have a big fight and Greg accidentally end up killing her. He puts her dead body in the trunk and starts driving towards a place called Black Lake. Black Lake is the place where him and his wife got married and he figures he can dump the body there (romantic kind of guy eh?). But on the (high)way there Greg starts having ghostly visions and seeing things that he doesn't know if they're real or not. Now this is the biggest part of the film and we actually get to spend over an hour with Greg and his car on the road. During that time, Haunted Highway offers tons of scares with some being kinda effective and some being kinda stupid which translates to being non-effective.
For the fact that so much happens at all times, the movie manages to keep your interest up, or at least that's how I felt. Story-wise it's nothing special but it gets the job done, scare-wise it could've been a lot better but I have to admit that some of the scares actually worked quite ok. Although there are too many non-effective scares that drag things down a bit, but it still delivered on some levels. For a horror movie, while it's not great, it's definitely not bad either. If you ask me, I've seen way too many horror flicks so all the scares were a bit predictable, still I felt that some of them were ok and did the job even if I didn't really get scared literally. Other than that, it had some good atmosphere going for it and the score wasn't too bad either.
While Haunted Highway might not a be a great horror flick, there are tons of worse movies out there, and at least this one had a few decent things to offer. For the fact that so much stuff happened all throughout the film, it was quite easy to keep the interest up. Don't expect too much (or anything) and it could might be worth a look.
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ALTERNATIVE TITLE: Death Ride
MOVIE YEAR: 2006
DIRECTOR: Junichi Suzuki
WRITING CREDITS: Koji Steven Sakai, Junichi Suzuki
GENRE: Horror
CAST: Rand Gamble, Hinano Yoshikawa, Laura Putney
COUNTRY: USA
RUNTIME: 84 min
RATING: 5/10
Haunted Highway Website/IMDB Click here
Haunted Highway Trailer Click here
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