Director of the Week: Don Coscarelli: Incident On and Off a Mountain Road

It was a dark and stormy night…oh wait my creative writing course is later.  Welcome back to Director of the Week: Don Coscarelli.  We have found yet another toilsome tale of darkness.   From something as mundane as a crash accident could lead to such impending terror.  So stock up your road munchies, grab that mix CD or audio book and ride on into the night.  This is Incident On and Off a Mountain Road.

 

Zoning on the road.

Buddy: They say the eyes are the spoiler to the soul. You see so many bad things in your life. It all comes in through your eyes. And sometimes your eyes lie to you, and show you things you don’t wanna see.

Anchor Bay Entertainment assembled some of the greater horror directors into creating 13 one- hour films ranging from supernatural entities to demented madmen roaming in their own worlds.  From the likes of Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Eaten Alive) John Carpenter (Halloween, The Thing) Stuart Gordon (Re-Animator, From Beyond), Joe Dante (Piranha, The Howling),Mick Garris (Critters 2, The Fly II) Dario Argento (Suspiria, Deep Red) and John Landis (An American Werewolf in London, Innocent Blood) comes morbid folk lore to the small screen.  This time around is Don Coscarelli’s turn to make you shake and quiver in terror.

Fly Moonface!!!

Driving in a secluded mountain road Ellen (Bree Turner of My Best Friend’s Wedding, American Pie 2, Just My Luck and The Ugly Truth) collides with an abandoned car on this stretch of the highway.  Prepping her insurance card and story, she notices there is no one in the vehicle but spies a trail of blood leading into the dense forest.  

Now a logical person would be calling the highway patrol, the forest rangers and the like but our plucky gal proceeds to follow the trail into the seemingly never ending forest with she encounters a deranged and deformed loony calling himself Moonface (John DeSantis of Thir13teen Ghosts, Bloodsuckers, Blade: The Series, The Dresden Files, The Hole and 30 Days of Night: Dark Days), dragging the presumed other driver by the hair in the dirt.  Only just escaping him, Ellen flees into the aforementioned dense forest with Moonface in hot pursuit.

Now throughout this particular flick we get a few flashback sequences of Ellen getting survival training from her husband giving her hand-to-hand combat, melee weapons and even some firearm instruction.   Man I normally suggest taking Krav Maga but this is even better.  Moonface finally catches up with her, knocks her out and brings her to this eerie workshop on a ridge just above an enormous waterfall. 

Just hanging..

Ellen stirs back to consciousness from this foul smell and finds herself chained in a basement with the remains of her host’s former victims.  Sitting in a corner is Buddy (Angus Scrimm of Phantasm, Subspecies, Vampirella, Phantasm II and I Sell the Dead) muttering how about Moonface’s methods and motives for his victims.

Good lighting at the kill floor!!

Okay just a few points to make about this film.  For the ladies, this is fairly graphic with its gore, there is a rape scene I too could have done without and more slaps to the face than ever needed.   For the film nitpickers, you will hear thunder and see lightning flashes while in the forest and yet no rain.  Now normally I can dismiss this with just atmospheric discharge on its way to a hard rain but the constant full moon being seen on a quite clear sky made it a bit off for me.  Then again I have not spent a great deal of time in British Columbia.  I am definitely avoiding this mountain stretch if I lack a Mossberg 12 gauge and good size kukri.