Product Description: When a lonely highway is inexplicably closed five students sharing a ride to a party find themselves trapped at a deserted travel oasis. Refusing to let the new circumstances interfere with their fun they settle in only to be interrupted by odd haunting visions of severely mutilated travelers victims of a killer a killer trailing a dark force of decay and rot. Led by a blind grad student with heightened senses they must survive the night and confront what appears to be a terrifying abyss between the living and the dead. As the body count rises the bizarre mystery deepens. Those strong enough to survive are left to answer the burning question: What the hell is the Reeker?System Requirements:Running Time: 91 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: HORROR Rating: NR UPC: 097368014749 Manufacturer No: 801474
0 STARS: Well, at least it's named right because this movie reeks!!! In "Reeker", when a few young adults break down at a deserted motel in the middle of nowhere, something starts to reek, but no where near as bad as this movie reeks. While the plot seems to be set up for what could be a decent horror movie, the movie obviously never took itself too seriously by virtue of the extreme gore scenes that were sadly unrealistic to the point of being comical as well as terrible acting in situations where the characters act ridiculous making terrible jokes in what are supposed to life and death situations.
There is a twist at the end, but with this twist, "Reeker" basically rips off another movie that I will not mention as that will completely give the movie away, not that it would be much of a loss. Suffice it to say, the other movie did it better although the ending basically makes the movie pointless in my opinion, anyway.
Named aptly enough, "Reeker" is a real stinker of a movie that is really complete and total waste of time. Completely devoid of anything that remotely resembles being scary or horrifying, "Reeker" is undoubtedly a movie for the light-hearted teenagers with no real taste for horror and definitely not for the serious horror movie fans who are looking for a scary movie. Moreover, as I have said so many times before in my reviews, just because a movie is different and weird does not make it a good horror movie or a good movie at all for that matter.
With Stinker, sorry, I mean, "Reeker", I found myself bored stiff with wooden acting, ill-advised comic relief, bad direction, ill-advised plot and story direction, completely incompetent plot execution, and just an overall really bad movie. Folks, simply put, this movie smells bad, and I would advise you to steer clear...your nose will thank you.
Twisted, gross fun! What a fun ride! The beginning is freaky. The middle is a bunch of teens getting killed in bizarre ways. (Can't go wrong with that!) And the ending brings it all together and you say, "Wow! I have to watch it again! Now I get it!"
A DIFFERENT TYPE OF HORROR MOVIE Stop me if you've heard this one before...a group of college kids are out on a road trip, traveling down a stretch of desert highway when their car breaks down and strands them. They then find themselves hunted down by a maniacal killer. Sounds like the plot of about hundred horror films except Reeker takes this tired plot and twists it into something surprisingly fresh and original. First, the leader of the group is a strong female lead, Gretchen (Tina Illman). Second, there are no gratuitous sex scenes or nudity in Reeker. The female characters Gretchen and Cookie are attractive but their not your typical horror movie dumb blondes. Even the male roles are nonconforming...the men aren't brawny jocks but regular guys who are just as terrified as the women are. One of them, Jack (Devon Gummersall) is even blind and has to rely on Gretchen to lead him about.
The five get stranded at a roadside diner/motel with not another person in site. The phones are dead and they can get only static on the radios. You start to wonder if this is some sort of an extraterrestrial phenomena. Reeker holds its cards extremely tight! The first hint of a threat is the smell of death that comes in waves of nauseous vapors that end in a character being shredded by a whirling blade. Finally an RV pulls into the diner. Henry (Michael Ironside) is looking for his wife who has been missing since morning. Henry seems to know more than he is letting on, however and the rest of the group are happy to let him stay locked in his RV. Reeker is a film that leads you in one direction, making you think you know exactly what is going on, and then pulls the rug out from under you and says, "Got Ya!" Without providing any spoilers, it's a film where you really need to pay attention to all the little details that you thought were not important. The hints are there if you look for them.
While the cast members are not household names (except perhaps for the fine character actor, Ironside) they are an experienced group with a lot of acting credits. Eric Mabius was in the first Resident Evil film and since has had numerous TV credits, most recently a recurring role in Ugly Betty. Gummersall as Jack presents a unique horror film male lead, a blind man who provides a calming influence on the rest of the terrified group.
It's not a terribly gory film but it uses the gore effectively, more for shock than for the sake of it. These scenes are meant to unsettle the viewer as opposed to merely spilling buckets of blood. In one part, Nelson finds a man yelling for help from inside a trash dumpster. He helps the old man out only to find that the man's body as seen severed at the waist and he merely goes crawling off on his hands as fast as he can.
Reeker is a solid, original horror film that will have you asking questions and re-watching it over just so you get the full effect of what is going on. A film that makes you think!
REVIEWED BY TIM JANSON
Scary and Funny Reeker takes you on a journey that is both scary and surprisingly funny. You really get to know and care about all the characters in the movie. The DVD is the ideal gift for Halloween. John Livesay
CRASH REEKER is a movie written and directed by Dave Payne who was responsible for, among others, Alien Terminator in 1996 and Just Can't Get Enough: The True Story of the Chippendales' Murders in 2001. The plot of this horror film is far from being original : five students, stranded in the Californian desert, are attacked by an unknown entity and must fight it to survive.
The good news is that REEKER is not boring at all for several reasons. Firstly, we become soon eager to discover the identity of the bad guy as David Payne disseminates conflicting clues along the road such as the presence in the neighborhood of a drug dealer who's threatened earlier one of the passengers, the eventuality of the presence of a serial killer in the vicinity or the possibility of an hypothetical biochemical disaster. Another strange clue introduced to the confused audience is the alteration or the distortion of the space-time continuum when a murder is about to be committed.
The movie's direction is professional, the actors pretty good for this kind of production, and the special effects don't interfere too much with the action. Those of you who liked REEKER's final twist should see Marc Forster's Stay that handles some of the themes presented here by David Payne.
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