Octane

While driving back home with her spoiled and arrogant teenager daughter Natasha Wilson (Mischa Barton), the divorced and pills addicted Senga Wilson (Madeleine Stowe) stops in a restaurant on the road for a coffee break. When they are leaving the place, Nat invites a mystic and mysterious hitchhiker to travel with them. Later, Nat meets her father Marek (Samuel Fröler) and has a serious discussion with her mother, and she runs away from her mother, joining a weird group. Along the night, Senga tries to find and recover her daughter.

"Octane" is a bizarre movie, having an excellent and intriguing beginning (the first fifty or sixty minutes), but ending in a complete mess. The style in the beginning recalls David Lynch, or David Cronenberg, with bizarre situations, but the conclusion is very ridiculous. I do not know what is recently happening with the writers of screenplay of horror movies: they create good plots with intriguing idea, but the conclusions are horrible. Just as an example, "Gothika", "Jeepers Creepers", "The Sin Eater" and "Dreamcatcher" are in this situation. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Octano – O Caminho do Mal" ("Octane – The Way to the Evil")

This is a strange movie with a super cast. No wonder it isn't famous or didn't do to well despite the talent.

Mischa Barton at her prettiest, Madeleine Stowe post lip job but still lovely, Jonathan Rhys Meyers at his most way off. What more could you want? A good story. It's a strange mix of thriller horror cult with vampire like blood stuff going on.

A mother and daughter are on the road but get mixed up in strange cult led by JRM. There are slow moments then some horror and action. It's all rather distasteful and meaningless and the story isn't well written. Things don't really add up to much or come together well.

Only worth watching if you are want to see the main stars in an obscure movie.

Before I rented the DVD, I came here to check out some of the reviews ... and they weren't that good. But I trusted my gut instinct and rented it anyway. So now that I've seen Octane, I have to say it's far better then most people say, but I also agree that this movie could've benefited from some kind of explainable narrative. Only people like David Lynch can pull off extremely unlikely plot lines and weird twists that don't make sense, without the audience questioning them. In case of Octane your suspension of disbelief only goes so far, that's the only negative thing I can say about this film. the acting is good, visually the movie is worth watching (some fresh ideas and nice shots), the soundtrack is terrific and the overall mood is just the way I like it. It is a flawed exercise in style, but definitely deserves more credit than it's getting so far.

The pitch sounded good - a cult of modern day vampires stalking victims on freeways and neon lit service stations. The cast suggested quality - Madeline Stowe as the estranged mother, Bijou Phillips as the kidnapped daughter and John Rhys-Myers as the cult leader. So what happened?

As ever the script was mishandled or badly developed. The protagonists, mother and daughter are decidedly unlikeable and the POV of the narrative makes the mistake of switching sides half way through. As with George Sluizer's The Vanishing, the story should have stayed with the protagonists search for her missing loved one, but instead it focuses on the tearaway daughter and her frolics with a laughable cult of blood drinking travellers. What narrative there is soon disintergrates into a pop video and attempts to salvage the film with a third act denoument in a factory treads into Ed Wood territory.

So much for the much trumpeted Random Harvest/Four Horsemen british horror slate. Heads should roll for this one.

I did miss some of the beginning, but I think it's obvious right up to the last scene that this is a movie about a woman's last moments. She was involved in a wreck and is dying but doesn't quite realize it, and instead of facing up to reality is trying to "find" her daughter who was in the car with her, to prevent her soul from going with the Evil forces, before she herself gives up and goes into "the Light". Those who insist on seeing this as an actual movie about a blood cult, I fear, are sadly superficial. Unfortunately, that seems to be the case with all of the actors, director and crew. Stephen Volk, where are you?