Highway 395

Enjoyed identifying the different filming locations in Inyo and Mono Counties but quit early on due to lots of foul language. If I ever watch the rest of it, it will probably be with the sound muted! (Plot still hadn't really been established, either, by the time I quit.). It starts with a Mono County Sheriff following (from a distance) a speeding vehicle on 395 up to a cabin in the foothills. Coming in on backroads, he finds a drug lab and a young boy from El Salvador. The speeder sees him and drives off. After getting the boy out of the cabin, the Sheriff shoots his rifle into it, exploding it and all drugs and paraphernalia. He stops the speeder, gives him a good talking to, but lets him go because he is only the younger brother of the real drug dealer. After that, the movie just got worse. I don't have a clue what plot they were trying to establish by the time we gave up on it. I couldn't rate any of the other categories other than language because we didn't watch it long enough.

This does not seem like a movie. It is more like a TV series pilot which tries to hit every type of crime story in one TV movie. The pace is hard to follow. There is a sleazxy methadone dealing family of weird perverts. They have their own crime spree that covers almost every crime. Then there is a serial killer who hunts men at the truck stops to have sex with them and then kill them. Hunter actually saves his life at one point, while killing a different killer. Then there is one local townie who is a relapsed meth-head who has a deadly secret. Nobody suspects him. So there are three sets of criminals who cross paths at various points, and Hunter is trying to tie the loose ends by killing them all.

Fred Dryer plays the son of the local sheriff, and he tries to be his Hunter character with some Rambo mixed in. Every interaction that he has with a suspect ends in the death of the suspect, and yet there is never any follow-up, crime scene investigation, etc. Hunter just shoots people dead, and then walks away to get coffee at the local diner.

At one point a main character is getting beaten up by one of the methadone drug dealers, and Dryer/Hunter just kicks the door in and shoots the drug dealer. Then he makes a couple of funny remarks and leaves. The dead drug dealer, the drug money, the guns, are all just left behind. Nobody shows up to take any evidence into custody at any time. No ambulances, no coroners, not even a guy with a shovel to bury the dead.

Towards the end of the movie, it is hard to figure out who is killing who, and which ones are the meth drug dealers, who is the serial killer, and who are the victims. This is a movie that you should just enjoy watching Fred Dryer/ Hunter killing almost everyone in the town, and let the "crime scene investigators" figure it out later, if they ever show up!

Fred Dryer really took the reigns of this film and went with it. He did an excellent job of transferring mood, visuals and emotion to the screen in his motion picture directorial debut. I had seen his directing on HUNTER, and was curious to see how he would do with a film. Dryer really did a superb job with this material. It is well worth seeking out and I am anxious to see what Fred Dryer, the Director, has in store next.

Anytime a filmmaker can sum up the films point in just a couple of opening scenes, he's onto something. The camera work stands up against any picture I've ever seen. This is so much more than a road movie or even a thriller. It's a smart, tightly written and directed psychological gem. Every performance is on the money, especially Dryer's low keyed, eagle-eyed cop, and Diane Delano's gun-toting psycho chick. She almost steals the picture. Forget Hunter -- think Coen Brothers and Quentin Tarantino. Highway 395 has just replaced Fargo as my favorite flick pick.

I've seen my fair share of naff American tv movies, but this one takes the biscuit, the plot was terrible. The story is all over the place to a point you haven't got a clue what's going on, don't even get me started with the highly annoying flash backs which happen constantly throughout the film. I really haven't got a clue where Fred Dryer got these actors from but it definitely wasn't from acting school as it's some of the worst acting I've ever seen apart from Poor Geoffrey Lewis he must have been really hard up to star in this, or he was doing it as a favour for Fred Dryer.

No wonder why this movie is only available on YouTube.