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There's something going on in this film directed by X-Files scribe John Shiban that has eluded me. You get that feeling as the film moves that everything is not what it seems, yet I feel the movie fails at giving you enough to go on to truly care afterward. It's about perception. There are characters the heroine Nicole(Jaimie Alexander)meets in the film that she talks to that up and vanish. This might seem like a spoiler, but it's something that really only inherits a wee bit of focus on the filmmakers' part. They seem to be poking fun at us as we watch curious at whether we should trust what Nicole is seeing or not. It never gets a proper answer and I for one was a bit clueless at the point. There comes a time in a film when ambiguity can just be frustrating because the viewer is led on a wild goose chase that ends at a dead end with little explanation at what we just saw..it ultimately feels like an exhausting exercise instead of a thrilling psycho-drama. Now there's nothing wrong with ambiguity itself, but give us something to latch onto or you will evade us. That's how I felt as I watched "Rest Stop." This film is supposedly about a young woman named Nicole who decides to run off to California with lover Jesse(Joey Mendicino)to make it big in Hollywood. They make what is supposed to be a slight detour at a rest stop so that Nicole can pee, but it descends into terror for her when she finds that her Jesse is completely missing. Someone in a crusty, dusty yellow truck is a nut job who seems to be causing a lot of trouble to Nicole and we soon realize that he is behind Jesse's disappearance when things start to occur, signs provided to her if you will, she will have to find a way out of a very difficult situation. Nicole is far from any existing town and with limited resources to defend herself against a maniac who provides her with some strong evidence of how evil he can be.
That's the easy part. When a female character comes into play, the film makes a really bizarre leap from logic as we are not sure where she ever came from, how she got there, and more importantly where she goes once Nicole tries to break her free from her supposed prison in the restroom's utilities' cabinet. She meets another, a Police officer in the area(Joey Lawrence), who might seem like her savior, but when he too is a victim of the truck driver startling things occur again that questions if he was ever actually even there to begin with. The truck driver commits torturous acts to Nicole(like holing her up in the restroom and as she tries to untie a wire that the killer has wrapped around the door lock, she receives a nasty bite from him). He then sets fire to the restroom leaving her without a lasting place of refuge from the beast.
It's the timing of the truck driver's attacks that has me listless. Perhaps he just likes tormenting her, but he appropriately appears in certain situations where Nicole has time to flee or prepare. It doesn't make much sense, his motives, which propel the film into an illogical idea. Why does he make himself so obvious? Why does he allow her to prepare? It seems, I'm going out on a limb here, that he likes having his quarry believe they can find a way of escape only to stomp that hope out when he comes up with his next grisly attack. Yet, why does Shiban decide to play with the viewer by having Nicole experience odd meetings with people that don't exist? What is Shiban and the writing team trying to say? And, to cap off the film's unhinged weirdness is a family in a RV. They play a small part in the scheme of things as religious bigots themselves, but the film doesn't do enough for the viewer to explain why they should be in this film at all.


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