
‘Drive Back’ depicts a couple coming back from their engagement and as they are driving, it only seems like they are driving on an unending road. To make matters worse there is a maniac on the road where the couple is heading to.
While reading this, I found the plot synopsis good and quite interesting as I understood it. Considering my love for time-travel, time paradoxes and time loops in movies and TV shows, I definitely liked that part and it was executed brilliantly in that there were times when the couple had their memories and their worlds so distorted that they, therefore, the audiences couldn’t know what was real and what wasn’t. There was also an element of mystery as the film spent some time developing the premise by asking questions that concerned the couple and the road itself. As well as this, the killer was menacing and the costume design was on point, their costume was designed for a particular purpose and it served its purpose in the overall story of the movie.
Taking all this into account, there was anticipation that the movie was going to be a slasher film in which the setting is a one of a kind road. However, this is not the case with ‘Drive Back’.
I like how the movie’s plot centers around recently engaged couple Reid (Zack Gold – Psycho Brother-In-Law) and Olivia (Whit Kunschik Country Gold) and their acting is good enough for what the film offers in terms of its writing; these characters are about as intelligent as someone would expect from a B-slasher. Graphic novelist Reid spends most of his time feeling as though life is constantly battering him, which has caused him to lose faith in himself and have a strained relationship with his father due to his troubled childhood. He has also lost confidence in the relationship with his fiancée. As the film progresses, more of Olivia\’s revealed mysteries are her own. Apart from this, she is mostly portrayed as a foil character who is the expectant fiancée and her single plot point disappointingly also does not go anywhere like the main road does with its construction. Every time the couple travels, their past continues to plague them; Reid is bestowed with much more expectation than Olivia, who would benefit from a more active role in the film.
But the characters aren’t the only aspect that makes ‘Drive Back’ such a bad film – there is also boredom and a desire to use one horror film pattern after another throughout.
In the first movement, the audience is shown only cliches from the horror movie, such as: a dead phone signal, a strange old lady living somewhere in the bushes, a hitchhiker who tells them they shouldn’t go any further, stopping the vehicle to assist a stranger, and both the main characters driving without seeing the road and literally talking. The latter is used, especially a few times, to forget about the next stage of the plot, which in itself is dull. Nor is it frenetic and I was expecting a frenetic pace It is slow and gets to what is the real purpose only at about mid-point. Even when one could tolerate this in other movies, it is because through the first half the audience is being prepared to trace the character with whom the movie is primarily concerned, but ‘Drive Back’ ignores that plan.
There’s quite an interesting concept for ‘Drive Back’ and a good payoff for the second half it’s the journey to get to the second half that is difficult. The movie sometimes randomly resorts to some sort of scare tactics and exhausted horror clichés in a bid to be scary but fails woefully at this.
Zack Gold and Whit Kunschik perform well; nevertheless, the characters that they play have a cheesy presence about them. Reid appears to be much better developed than the character of his fiancée, Olivia, whom he probably only thought off as being his pregnant fiancée. A film should not be more than 10-15 minutes long, in such a case, the writing itself would’ve been tight and so would’ve the rhythm, but as it is in a feature context, drive back and drive far for this film.
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