Joy Ride 3 – Roadkill: Blu-ray Review
The Movie:
The nightmare begins when a group of young street racers take a desolate shortcut on their way to the Road Rally 1000. But a chance encounter with Rusty soon turns deadly as he stalks, taunts, and tortures his next victims with deranged delight. It’s a full-throttle, pedal-to-the-metal chill ride packed with killer twists and turns!
The original Joy Ride was actually my first DVD when I bought a DVD player back in the day. Immediately I dug the film because of the thrills and the secrecy of the main villain. I didn’t get a chance to catch the second entry in the series but I would imagine that it would have a similar setup to the story like this one did. That’s the great thing about horror film sequels, you don’t really need too much more of a setup than what’s already there. This film really built a lot on what the initial film had and I got into it big time. It’s not the best horror film but for it being a direct to video sequel it’s actually pretty damn entertaining. I was really surprised when noticing J.J. Abrams name popped up in the credits. I didn’t realize that he co-wrote the first film. That led to think a bit more about it and I can actually slightly see his style in it. I liked the fact that Rusty Nail was more than just a voice and actually got physically involved in the chaos as opposed to just running down his victims with his trademarked big rig. Ken Kirzinger brought out the character and gave him a personality and presence which I appreciated. You never truly saw his face in the film, even in the bright light, which kept a bit of mystery about him. A lot of the kills in the film were very creative and things I had never seen before so that grabbed my attention from the beginning. All the actors gave a decent performance but it was Jesse Hutch that had me “double taking” throughout the film. There were instances where he resembled Jimmy Fallon which was weird and funny (not that it was supposed to be funny) at the same time. This will definitely be a film that you’ll enjoy and be looking for the unique ways Rusty dispatches (no pun intended) his prey. I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing Kirzinger again underneath that beat up trucker hat again.
Special Features:
Riding Shotgun with Declan: Director’s Die-Aries – This feature is basically a BTS look at what the director has to do to get things running smoothly on set.
Jewel’s Message – The unedited version of the message from Jewel that Rusty Nail sends to Jordan.
Road Rage: The Blood, Sweat and Gears of Joy Ride 3 – A great BTS feature that digs into the practical effects, vehicles and everything else that went in to making the film.
Deleted Scenes – A decent amount of scenes that were pretty good but not essential to the film.
Pre-Vis Sequences – Instead of having computer generated scenes to go by they decided to use actual toy cars to plan out some of the vehicular stunts and chase scenes.
Finding Large Marge – This feature looks at the casting call that took place to find a Large Marge look-alike.
