Rest Stop 2: Don't Look Back Review

Rest Stop 2 is a sequel to a much better, much scarier straight to dvd film entitled Rest Stop. For the sake of sanity, I’m not even going to try to fit this into my “why is this scary” review format, and am just going to come out swinging, as this movie deserves every bit of the fight that I want to give to this piece of crap horror film.

Rest Stop: Don’t Look Back starts out kind of interesting. A family in an RV picks up a hitchhiker and they are weird, just out of the ordinary weird. The mom of the group is over the top in her sexual advances to the stranger and eventually gets her to do him in the RV, meanwhile the rest of the family is eating dinner. The father rushers in and stops them, cutting out the eyes of the hitcher, and we fast forward to the future where the family has been mercilessly slaughtered; no real explanations are given to anything in this film, so I won’t try to explain it either.

The movie picks up in the present with a returning soldier meeting up with his girlfriend and friend. He vows to find his lost brother and his girl, who disappeared a year ago. Tom is our main character and he thinks that he can do what the police and others can’t; find his brother. So he embarks on a trip out to where he believes his brother was and starts randomly asking questions. Meanwhile his girlfriend and his brother’s best friend find themselves along for a strange ride.

Here is a trailer for Rest Stop: Don’t Look Back


The movie looks good. It is filmed in HD or at least a higher quality camera than most of these straight to dvd movies. I do credit the makers with that much, as the camera and the scene’s are filmed well. There is a good amount of gore and torture in this film. Besides eyes getting gauged out, there is also a fair amount of boobs shown for no reason and even though the love scenes are arduous at best, they offer a glimpse into the development of the characters that make you wonder if the film makers actually “tried” making this film a little bit more than just a straight boredom movement. Gratuitous nudity aside, the movie does a good job of filming it, even if the edits are a little odd, as it moves from still shots to first person view points with such a hard line to follow. The editing is hard, but we should be used to that in todays horror movie market.

The villain sucks. A mad truck driver? I can get behind that, but what I can’t forgive is that the truck and the driver vanish into thin air. There is a supernatural tinge to this film and it makes me mad because it doesn’t explain this at all. Not only that, the characters meet up with their friends and do two things: 1) Follow them into a bathroom, where they disappear and 2) have sex with them. One minute a dude is having sex with his missing friend’s girlfriend and the next she’s gone and that’s that. No explanation, just no follow through and the movie assumes you’re going to follow along.

Ok, so lets just say we bought into the stupid premise that this villain is supernatural and he’s torturing people, the good guys don’t even have a shot! They start to fight back in the third act only to have the trucker disappear! That’s right, he just vanishes! So what the heck? Only to come back and fight them to the bloody death and wins! The bad guy wins this one, and that’s where this film really annoys. Not only that, it opens up for a possible third sequel!

I’m ok with a lot of horror films insulting my intelligence, but they do so in a certain set of rules. They don’t really make you feel completely stupid, and this film does. The real pain from ghost driver and ghost truck is awesome, but then when the good guys fight back the driver is not hurt? To have a villain that you can not really harm is ludicrous to me, and only works if you explain things a bit more. This film explains nothing and just throws you into scenarios that are unlikely, and are stupid. The family in the rv that supposedly got slaughtered, come back and attack our heroes in the end too!

Maybe I’m just jaded right now, but this is one of the worst films in horror. They don’t even try, and that’s what makes me upset more than anything. There’s nothing really scary about this film, it’s just stupid.

This movie shouldn’t have been made at all. It makes no logical sense at all. You’ll be asking yourself why and what the whole time, check out the first one, at least it kind of made sense, this one just turns the story inside out and takes a dump on it.

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