Highwaymen

Mel’s Messiah Jim Caviezel is sure racking up the exploitation trash. Here he swaps his humble donkey for a souped-up muscle car and raises the entertainment quota accordingly in a ridiculous but fun road-movie serial-killer thriller. Caviezel plays Rennie Cray, a bereaved husband on the trail of wacko hit-and-run driver James Fargo (Feore). Thanks to a previous altercation that cost him a couple of vital organs, Fargo looks something like Davros the Dalek; this hasn’t done much to improve his psychopathic outlook on life nor hindered his habit of mowing down random women on American highways. There are two ways to play this: camp as cowboys or straight as a die. Harmon, who has been down this road before with ‘The Hitcher’, chooses the latter and experience tells. Aided by a claustrophobic score, he ratchets up the menace, squeezing tension out of an unlikely situation while keeping the story moving with economical brushstrokes. They don’t make many like this any more; Roger Corman would be proud.