Pick Me Up

In PICK ME UP, a truck-driving serial killer (Michael Moriarty) meets his match in a deadly drifter (Warren Kole). Fairuza Balk plays the young woman caught between these two madmen and their battle for homicidal supremacy.

One of the better MASTERS OF HORROR offerings, it has a nice mix of terror and humor. It also has a ghoulish twist at the end.

Director Larry Cohen does some of the best work he's done in years. Re-teaming with Moriarty is a big plus. These guys always made great low-budget horror films together...

I can only guess, why not so many people seem to like this one. But it hit the right button with me. I loved it (watched it with a friend of mine, who was as excited as I was). I thought it was unique, told something different and made the most out of it's time frame (had to be less than an hour long, for TV reasons), had excellent actors (some well known, others not so much).

Maybe some think, that it just has too much in it and therefor is does not concentrate on a straight path down the road. That's exactly what I loved. You probably will guess, what is going to happen quite a few times, but the way it is played out, really got me going. Nicely written dialog and very self-aware (but not to the point, where it gets annoying ... not to me anyway), this was one great episode, from one great writer/director!

Larry Cohen has accomplished some wonderful things, including "Q: The Winged Serpent" and "It's Alive." His horror films go beyond Indy B-movie to touch something innately human, somewhat like an early Stephen King novel. Unfortunately, all of this is missing from "Pick Me Up," the weakest Masters of Horror entry so far: a meandering mess of Moriarty and nonsense. Although there are a few short moments of satisfying splatter, the rest just serves as an attempt to give Michael Moriarty one last chance to resurrect his career.

Sad to say, if this is the best the Master can come up with now, perhaps Cohen should stick to writing scripts like "Cellular," and letting someone else direct.

++++++++++Landis: "Deer Woman"- The pictures are really simple but still interesting. The approach is entertaining and humorist in just the right amounts. You can see that here is a true professional at work. The style fits perfectly in the tradition of episode-movies, but it also takes it forward and works as an independent movie. The acting is good enough, the cutting, the "flow" and the script are tight and thought. The actors are unknown (to me at least), but undoubtedly because of good directing, interesting, and they do their bit of the work very well. This is the most humorous of these episodes this far. There is also a good amount of sweet eye-candy (in the form of a woman). Landis manages to fill his one hour-space with quite a lot of events, there is not a single boring moment. Again this shows how much you can include in such a relatively short time. Time flies when you watch this kind of entertainment, and it leaves you wanting more.

++++++++++McGee: "Sick Girl"- Never heard of this director. In the beginning this movie looks and feels like some "young adults" soap opera series. There is some well made computer effects/visuals (I mean the bugs). Again David Fischer's production design looks good, this time there is a lot of pastel colours being used. Music is quite terrible (also kind of "young adults"-poprock), but it fits to the context. The characters are repulsively dumb, I mean totally brainless. They are not very believable. The script is childish, I don't know what age the guy who wrote it is, and what he wanted to achieve, if anything. But also the directing and acting is really bad and incompetent. For sure it is meant to be campy, but it's campy in not at all funny or interesting way. There is a staged feeling also in the lighting and other visuals, which I don't quite understand, but I assume that it has something to do with the idea of keeping it campy. Maybe there's supposed to be some "humor" in the script also, but it don't make me laugh. And what's the most interesting thing: There is no horror, none, which makes it little hard to understand why this is included in the "Masters of Horror"-series in the first place. Useless fast-forward garbage. But there always has to be some flops in this kinda series.

++++++++++Cohen: "Pick Me Up"- I know Larry Cohen has done some interesting work, but I haven't seen any of them. Again, right from the beginning, this seems to be one of the better (actually most of them are in this category) movies in this great series. Eye candy (this time in form of Fairuza Balk, seen before in American History X) intelligent-enough script. Again you see that the director is not a first-timer and he knows his instrument perfectly. Again the story takes place somewhere in the "deepest" parts of North-America, this time in the middle of beautiful nature. Good acting and casting. Strange, interesting, and multi-dimensional (=living and real) characters. Inventive and odd plot. I like the liveliness and unpredictability of this movie, it really has it's own style. This director clearly has his own vision of movie making. Small things make this more creative horror than most of the horror you'll see: Not necessarily the plot, but the very subtle nuances in the directing and acting. It really takes some special skills to do something like this. The actor who is playing the truck driver is really good, his character is maybe the most important element in the succeeding of this work.

Like John Landis' 'Deer Woman,' Larry Cohen's contribution to the "Masters of Horror" series coasts on the director's pitch-perfect dark humor. There are few scares in 'Pick Me Up,' but a strong satire of serial-killer clichés (in this case, the hitcher and the hitched) and a layered character study that is quite fun to watch unfold. Wheeler (Michael Moriarty) is a semi driver who picks up hitchhikers and slaughters them; Walker (Warren Kole) is a hitcher who murders his rides; and Independent Woman Fairuza Balk is the tough heroine who runs afoul of the duo. While Cohen may seem like a wild-card addition to the series, 'Pick Me Up' injects an intellectual angle into the proceedings that is refreshing (especially in light of the "gore = more" approach most of the episodes have taken). While this episode lacks Cohen's trademark 'guerrila' style, he hits the right notes of irony and absurd comedy in David J. Schow's script, as when the two killers (united in Wheeler's truck) stop as a rattlesnake crosses the road; or when Walker tortures a woman in a motel room, putting a quarter in the 'Magic Fingers' as porn plays on the TV; or a climactic fight between killers over their prey. The performances of Moriarty, Kole, and Balk are uniformly spectacular, possessing a true knowledge of character that adds much to the episode as a whole.

(Side Note: anyone collecting the MOH DVDs has come to expect the usual supplements, but 'Pick Me Up' contains a highly entertaining interview with Cohen, plus a surprising number of past collaborators offering insightful and often hilarious recollections.)

6.5 out of 10