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.
