Wrecker

I always feel bad giving terrible reviews because ultimately this was other people's vision, budget and time but this movie is really, really, really bad. The very fact that the tow truck could outrun the Mustang causes the movie to immediately lose so much credibility that the movie is already in a hole that it cannot get itself out of.

And as others have said, it's essentially a rip off of Duel.

My quick rating - 3,6/10. Strange to rate this as a fictional movie, the whole thing is basically "how to shoot cameras from in the car, outside the car, near the car." This is all done to show new film makers the proper way to highlight the scenery, characters, etc. Did this movie intend to be anything but a flick showing how to film? Sort of, there was an occasional reference to a tow truck driver chasing after the two dumb girls in the car (I only call them dumb because of how they act in the movie. Would love to see them rolling their eyes when they read the script). I will say that this movie is very odd indeed since it could appeal to fans of "joy ride" and also could get notice from the school of film making wherever these kids were from, but combined together makes for a really boring movie.

If you've never seen Steven Spielberg's debut film Duel (1971), with a script by suspense/SciFi mastermind Richard Matheson, add a few more stars to my rating. I say this because Wrecker is almost a direct copy of that earlier work. Some of the lines of dialogue match the film and even Matheson's short story down to the letter. I am confident that if Micheal Bafaro and his crew had the talent to match the film shot by shot they would have, but this is the least of their failures. And to be fair, it would be a million to one shot to find a director and crew as talented as Spielberg and his team of seasoned journeymen. There's a reason Duel has often been saluted, but never remade. It's akin to asking your four year old who just completed his first swimming lesson to hop in a riptide.

I have no problems with remakes, even shot-by-shot remakes --- I really liked what Gus Van Sant brought to Psycho (1999). No, it wasn't as good as Hitch but Van Sant added his own trademarks and came up with some interesting stuff as well. That's not the case here, with only a few minor exceptions.

Emily (Anna Hutchinson) and Leslie (Drea Whitburn) play two Seattle gals en route to California, when they decide to take Devil's Pass as a shortcut. They find themselves menaced by a wrecker (towing a car no less) and after that... well, you can easily take any segment of Duel and match it to this film. So, if you've seen Duel, this film will put you to sleep.

if you haven't it will only puzzle and irritate you because it's so poorly made. Whitburn supposedly quit the film mid-shoot (gee, I wonder why?) and it was probably a good decision. She's the more inept of the two actresses and when she's gone, Hutchinson's short-comings are even more apparent. Glad her blonde hair and figure scored her some marks for some reviewers, but it wasn't enough to compensate for her limited range. Dennis Weaver she isn't, by about ten, in the acting department. It seems a strain for her to work up any emotion beyond mildly distressed without inducing gut-wrenching laughter from us.

Add to that the choppy editing, the dismal sound mix, and the writing that, when not copying from Matheson, just stinks. It's evident on almost all the chase shots that the footage is sped WAY up. The jittering is very annoying (that's one thing digital can't stack up to, unfortunately). Many of the stunt scenes are truncated because to let them play out fully would have been very dangerous with this group of amateurs (and so they have little coherence overall --- scenes just stop cold or look like they were badly cut).

The ending is over-the-top ridiculous and makes virtually as much sense as Hutchison's Mustang looking spotless up until the very end, when it performs an act that defies every law of physics.

Micheal Bafaro doesn't seem like the sharpest guy, but even he couldn't have been so brazen as to steal this script and story from Matheson. No, I'm guessing he paid Matheson's estate a sum of money on the estate's condition that Matheson's name appear NOWHERE on this unsalvageable wreak. And rightly so.

First, sorry for my English, is bad-bad :) sorry,please! I have not ever seen a movie worse than this, how to do such a film... I can not believe how much trash there is in this world to do a film like such a caricature, a really coarse...

A top class Mustang, talk about a V8 5.0 - is constantly overtaking by a truck rust...Really? C'mon! Blonde leading the Mustang can not overcome this rusty truck and when it does not last long and exceeds the phases before overcoming the truck ... the truck are hilarious to beat.However "Blonde" you are as a person driving is unreal how they could create these exceedances, actually inconceivable from reality.You go with 31mile(50km) behind a old rusty tug-truck and actually don't't bother to overtake even straight ... with a Mustang V8 -5.0! And if you exceeded once in the end, you are catch up by the rusty old truck to over 124mile(200km/h) !!! Dude director, you are a crazy head ?? Girls do not have GPS signal...really? GPS? That Mustang has GPS functionality and if all satellites from space fall...

The speed of cars in the film, at one point, caught by the Mustang is 120m (193km) or more, but old rust truck chases and even at that speed the truck is not leave behind! Jesus! Road where happens the action is kind of twist road, circulated rarely and practically in the film did not see a car on the opposite way but when the blonde girl Mustang would exceed the truck suddenly it appears a car in front and can not exceed...amazing, I feel like screaming to moon!!!!!!!! Blonde girl can not exceed even a speed of 24mile(40-50km) neither, you could just pinch a little throttle, the Mustang had sprung in a sec...but no way! Finally, the scene when the truck stays on the road is hanging half... the first phase is seen under the truck a continued road, a few meters if it fall hit the road - and even when falls, when the truck is smitten the image appears where there is a chasm,abyss and the road is not there! Terrible... :) I invite you wholeheartedly for you to watch this movie just to see what was reached today to make a film.Take your friends and watch this movie in a group...will to be phenomenal! At the start of first 15min i wanted to close it, after 30min i could break my TV but out of curiosity to see how far stupidity can lead a film director and producer, i decided to see him until the end...

A terrible movie, even awkward interpretation of actresses is understandable...but what i do not understand is how the director of this film thinks it can fool the world...astonishing...inconceivable.

PS:Blonde girlfriend in the movie suddenly disappears after 40min...here on IMDb says that the actress actually left shooting during production ... Why, he was the only human with brains who realized the awkwardness filming that?

I don't even know where to begin with this movie. The first thirty minutes (after a pointless and confusing pre-credit scene) is not only a "remake of Duel" but a beat for beat, practically shot for shot, at times line for line rip-off of Duel. I mean, despite the fact that there is no mention of Steven Spielberg or Richard Matheson in the credits of Wrecker, the first half of this movie copies EVERYTHING from Duel. Lines, shots, framing... Like, I'm fairly certain that someone has grounds for a legal suit here. I mean, if I just remake a complete shot for shot, line for line (plus f-words) remake of a TV movie from 40 years ago and basically call it my own work, is that just okay? After copy and pasting the first half of Duel into his Final Draft script-writing program, hack writer/director Michael Bafaro then got to work on changing the middle of an already excellent movie. The only difference in the set-up is that instead of one man on the road alone, it's two completely unlikable girls. They go through, step by step, the exact same beats as Dennis Weaver's character in the original Duel. And then, halfway through, when hack writer/director Michael Bafaro has to deviate from the original script for a variety of reasons (among them being he's not a very good film maker), he does so by writing out the other girl completely, never to be seen again. ...Then why did hack writer/director Michael Bafaro make it two girls in the first place? You'll have to ask hack writer/director Michael Bafaro.

So yeah, the other girl disappears and the remaining girl continues to get terrorized. There's some terrible acting, a lot of boring driving, a telephone booth sequence taken whole from Duel, and then it eventually ends with a terrible and lame CGI rendition of the evil tow truck falling off a cliff.

And these are not spoilers. Watching this movie is the spoiler. It spoiled my evening and my mood. If you haven't seen Duel, go watch it and stay clear of this movie. Unless, for some reason, you want to see the same script interpreted by someone with a passion for film making and storytelling (Steven Spielberg) vs. someone who has no clue and apparently has no problem plagiarizing someone else's work (hack writer/director Michael Bafaro). Then perhaps it could be an interesting learning experience. Michael Bafaro sucks.

Just for example, real quick.... The entire time you're watching Wrecker, you're like... why don't these two idiot girls just turn around and either go home or find another way to get to their... stupid ski resort or whatever it was. While that makes no f'ing sense here, in the original Duel, Dennis Weaver has an important work meeting to get to and frankly has no choice but to keep going and hope he can shake the crazy truck driver. You see, because hack writer/director Michael Bafaro is not a creative person and when left to his own devices, can not differentiate between logical character motivation and people just doing things for no reason.

Michael Bafaro sucks and so does this movie. I'm offended by Wrecker both as a writer myself and as a movie fan. Even if he was given remake rights to Duel (which I don't think he was), that's no excuse for using 3/4ths of the script and not even crediting the original writer.