Stars: Steve Zahn, Paul Walker, Leelee Sobieski, Basil Wallace, Jessica Bowman, Stuart Stone

Director: John Dahl

Summary: College student Lewis Thomas takes a trip across country to pick up his dream girl, Venna. On the way he is joined by his brother Fuller and together they play a practical joke on a trucker over a CB radio. Now the trucker wants revenge...

Director John Dahl knows his way around a thriller as few contemporary filmmakers do. He revitalized the film noir with his darkly witty films, RED ROCK WEST and THE LAST SEDUCTION. With ROADKILl, Dahl streamlines the plot and ratchets up the tension. Two brothers, Lewis (Paul Walker) and Fuller (Steve Zahn) are driving home cross-country. Fuller bullies Lewis into using the CB radio ("Prehistoric internet," Fuller calls it) to play a mean-spirited practical joke on a trucker, and it backfires horribly. The psychotic trucker comes after them, but they get away. Foolishly thinking they're out of danger, they pick up Venna (Leelee Sobieski), the girl Lewis has been pining for, on the way home. The mysterious trucker, who they know only by his CB handle, "Rusty Nail," goes further than they could ever imagine to exact his revenge. Zahn is pitch-perfect here, capturing both Fuller's charm and his stupid recklessness. Dahl builds the suspense beautifully, creating a real sense of being out on the highway in the middle of nowhere. The script, by Clay Tarver and J.J. Abrams, brings three strong characters to life with sharp, funny dialogue, fleshing out the bare bones of the plot.

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Director John Dahl has made more ingenious thrillers than Roadkill, but few with quite its sense of terrible consequences arising from a minor prank. On a road trip, jailbird Fuller (Steve Zahn) persuades his younger, student brother Lewis (Paul Walker) to pretend to be a girl on a CB radio; they set a pushy trucker up with a date with an obnoxious guest at the motel where they stay for the night. The results are far from funny--the guest ends up dead and they find themselves being chased for a while by a large sinister truck. And then, when they have picked up Veena (Leelee Sobieski), the girl with whom Lewis is in love, it all gets worse, much worse.

Dahl has picked up on one of the most sinister aspects of hostage situations, which is that quite minor concessions in negotiation can often be more meaningful than they seem. If the film has a weakness it is that the irresponsibility of the two young men is eminently plausible and not especially sympathetic, and the trucker, rather like the faceless driver in Steven Spielberg's Duel, is never more than a monstrous force of nature. Along the way, though, Roadkilldelivers an appropriate number of thrills and sudden reversals, which all makes for an exciting journey into terror.

On the DVD:Roadkillon disc has commentaries by the director, by the writers and by stars Steve Zahn and Leelee Sobieski; it also has a fascinating wealth of alternate endings including one in which the whole third act of the movie goes in a radically different direction. It has a widescreen anamorphic visual ratio 2.35:1 and vibrant Dolby 5.1 sound that pumps up the tension in some crucial scenes. --Roz Kaveney

Aspect Ratio:	2.35 Wide Screen, 16:9 Wide Screen
Main Language:	English
Region:	Region 2
Special Features:	29 Minute Alternate Ending, 3 Audio Commentaries, Joyride Featurette, Deleted Scenes And Alternate Endings, More Than One Rusty Nail Video, Theatrical Trailer, Scene Access, Interactive Menus
Subtitles:	Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish, Turkish
Year:	2001
Release Date:	February 17, 2003
Runtime:	93 minutes
Certification:
Catalogue Number:	20195 D V D
Label:	Regency
Keywords:	General, Joy, Ride, Wide, Screen, Horror, Occult, Roadkill, Sci, Fi
Genre:	Horror/Occult