Shawn's Joy Ride 2 Review

2008 Movie # 116 - Joy Ride 2 Dead Ahead

I love the original Joy Ride. It was a great surprise the first time I saw it and I still revisit and enjoy it often to this day. It still holds up quite well. Therefore this is one of the few direct to DVD sequels I was interested in. I actually thought with a little effort they could make this one pretty damn good. Well it's not pretty damn good, but it's pretty good. At least they seemed to try.

The plot is very similar to the first movie. The same trucker Rusty Nail is stalking some young-uns after they wrong him. The character of Rusty Nail is probably my biggest complaint about this movie. His motivation in the first movie was pretty thin, which made him scary. You knew he was never going to stop, and the fact he had little reason behind it made him batshit crazy and all the more scary. In this one his motivation is still thin, but it's almost a little too thin. Especially because in this movie, he's gone beyond angry and crazy to just full blown horror movie villian.

In the first Joy Ride, he was just after the three main people, and would hurt anyone who got in the way. He still sticks to this general principal for the most part in this one, but some of it is just way over the top? The rod through the head death? The jaw death? I don't know if any human is actually capable of this. Also the dice game sequence, while fairly suspensful, felt like something out of a completely different movie. A little too Saw/Hostel-ish for me.

The acting was above average for one of these movies, but this movie makes the same mistake College did in that it seems to believe its comic relief is just hilarious when really they are fucking annoying. The one guy in this movie is one of the most annoyting characters I've seen in a movie since, well College. You will be counting the seconds until this motherfucker dies.

This movie does feature one of the worst mistakes I've ever seen in a movie. In one scene we cut to a stunt double who is actually wearing a completely different outfit than the character she's supposed to be portraying. It's not even subtle, it's a god damn close up of the character. How this one slipped through I have no idea. It's the best laugh in the movie though.

In the end, not a bad movie, especially when compared to the rest of the direct to DVD crap I've been sludging through this year. I wouldn't be surprised if we got to see a third entry in this series, and I for one am actually going to be checking that one out.

** 1/2 / 5