31 Nights of Halloween Horror - Night 29 - Southbound
Southbound
89 mins.
Dir. Roxanne Benjamin, David Bruckner, Patrick Horvath, Radio Silence
USA/2015
The first in our double feature of anthology films ending out this Halloween season. First up is Southbound, an anthology where being on this road in the middle of nowhere is never a good thing.
Broken up into five stories each intersecting with each other. All taking place in a desolate area in the south west off a road in the middle of nowhere. Our first story begins with a pair of guys on the run, from what we do not know, but something is after them and eventually finds them. These winged creatures that float around with the torso of a skeleton and bat wings appear out of the ground and watch from a distance until the time is right to strike. They eventually get hold of one of the guys and chase another into a motel, where our second story takes place.
In that same motel, a all girl rock band is on tour. They check out of the motel and head to the next gig when their van breaks down on the side of the road. They get picked up by and man and woman who offer them a place to sleep for the night and a meal. They are fed some kind of unidentifiable meat which one girl does not eat because she is a vegetarian. The food makes the other girls sick vomiting some kind of black substance, which they are later given another unidentifiable substance to drink to make them feel better. Later that night the Veg, wakes up to an empty house and heads outside to find the homeowners, her two bandmates and others in the middle of some kind of ritual. She gets her foot stuck in a bear trap which alerts the coven who head out after her. She makes a break for it out to the road where she gets hit by a car.
Which leads us to our third story. The driver calls 911 to try and get help, the dispatcher sends him to remote hospital which is apparently empty. Suddenly a surgeon gets on the phone and tells the driver he needs to perform the operation to save the girls life. The driver attempts to do so but fails, ultimately killing the Veg girl. The 911 dispatcher tells the driver it wasn't his fault, provides him with new clothes and new car to send him on his way and tells him this will never be spoken of again. As he drives off we hear the dispatchers voices and see her as she hangs up a pay phone and enters a bar where story number four takes place.
Guy rushes in the bar shotgun blazing looking for his sister. He knows she is somewhere in this town. After shooting the hand off a patron who reveals to be some kind of creature, he gets one of them to lead him to his sister. He eventually finds her after having looked for 13 years. He tries to bring her back, but she doesn't want to leave. He eventually forces her to go with him where she reveals she killed their parents on purpose not by accident and she is now where she belongs and he should just leave. He refuses and is ultimately attacked by these naked men creatures and she drives off in an I told you so moment. As she heads back to her where was she passes a character that leads us into our final story.
Mom, Dad and daughter are at their vacation home when they are stalked by three masked men. Men kill mom and dad and one of them gets clobbered by the daughter. The men take their masks off to reveal they were the guys from the beginning of the movie. In the daughters attempt to escape one the guys accidentally kills her. Suddenly the demon creatures from the beginning rise up and the chase is on bringing us back to the beginning of the movie where it all comes full circle.
Anthologies are tough. Sometimes they can work, case in point Creepshow. Sometimes they don't, case in point V/H/S (which actually features some of these directors works). Southbound is somewhere in between. I appreciate the linking all the stories together. Beyond the description I gave there are many more links between all the stories that tie them all together. However while the stories themselves are all solid pieces of work. None of them really stand out as great pieces of cinema. As with most anthologies, rarely is every story good. You might get a stand out like the Zuni fetish warrior in Trilogy of Terror. But to have all the stories be really good, is quite an exception. If you can get at least half of an anthology to be good, I would say you have a success, but that is pretty hard to do. Especially when you are throwing in quite a few stories like Tales of Halloween, where the bad outweighed the good. While Southbound's stories features some creepy elements none of them are really stories that will keep you up at night, since they all pretty much deal with someone who has done some wrong and tried to cover it up until retribution comes looking for them.
Tomorrow we will take a look at an older anthology and see how it compares to some of the newer ones that have been released.
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