Pick Me Up

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!

Who would have thought serial killers would be territorial? The story starts out when a bus breaks down in the middle of nowhere (of course), when a seemingly friendly truck driver offers to take the passengers to the nearby trading post. Only two passengers take him up on the offer, while two more stay with the bus along with the bus driver. One passenger decides to start walking by her self. Meanwhlie a friendly cowboy walks up to the bus and asks for a ride. It turns out the cowboy and the truck driver are both serial killers! Walker who hitch hikes, and Wheeler who drives picking up hitch hikers. After they dispose of their victims the fight over who gets to kill the last survivor of the bus. And like a good western we have a show down to see who gets to finish the victim off.

This is definitely not scary but it is a good fun movie to watch. It's got some funny moments, some suspense, and a message: Don't hitch hike and don't pick up hitch hikers! Oh! The ending really makes believe in karma!

Larry Cohen has been a 'Master of Horror' especially during the 70's and 80's (with sublime movies on his repertoire like "It's Alive", "God Told Me To" and "Q – The Winged Serpent"), but starting from the 1990's, he merely became the writer of popular mainstream thrillers like "Guilty as Sin" and the more recent "Phone Booth". It has actually been a while since Cohen delivered some genuine horror, so I didn't really know what to expect from his contribution to this series. His episode "Pick Me Up" certainly isn't the best entry in the series, but nevertheless a very entertaining little movie with an original plot and a fair share of gore. The plot revolves on a showdown between two sadistic serial killers and the stake is the last remaining passenger of a bus that broke down in the middle of nowhere. The oldest killer (deliciously played by Michael Moriarty) is a trucker whose victims are usually the hitch-hikers he picks up and the other one is a hitch-hiking drifter who kills the people that offer him a ride. A premise like this could have resulted in a very suspenseful cat-and-mouse game, but Larry Cohen and scriptwriter David Schow (creater of "The Crow") preferred to make it a sick black comedy with some grotesque plot twists and insane characters. Typical serial-killer situations and clichés seem to added on purpose and there are loads of subtle references towards classic horror films for the genre-specialist to discover. The deserted two-lane highway running through the backwoods forms a great setting. Sadly, the denouement goes ONE step beyond the acceptable.

++++++++++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.

Larry Cohen's entry into the series has to do with a broken down bus and the two serial killers who happen upon it. One of the killers is an old trucker (Cohen regular, Michael Moriarty) who kills anyone he gives a ride to, and the other is a hitchhiker (Warren Kole) who murders those who pick him up. Both set their sights on the lone remaining passenger (Fairuza Balk) of the bus, which leads to a battle of wills to see who can get her first.

This story of two dueling serial killers is perfectly suited for the episodic "Masters of Horror" format, as it's merely a fun little idea with hardly enough material to sustain a feature length film. Throw in Cohen as the master behind this one, and I was expecting to sit back for one of the more entertaining episodes of the series. I have to say that I was disappointed. For starters, it had definite pacing issues. Yes, an hour-long episode dealing with an idea as threadbare as this one suffers from a poor pace. Some of the performances also really brought it down for me. All of the people from the bus (aside from the driver and Balk) were just terrible. Worst acting of the series from these folks, and I wanted them to die immediately so I wouldn't have to put up with it.

Michael Moriarty was fantastic, though. He nailed his role, and Kole was quite good too. I loved the interactions between these two and how they would try to one up each other. We also get a decent helping of morbid humor, and the skinned alive girl was a surprisingly gruesome touch in an otherwise tame episode. As for atmosphere, it was sorely lacking here. Maybe I've just seen too much of British Columbia from this series, and I know it's for budgetary reasons, but I felt that the locations weren't very fitting for the story at hand. Cohen's direction is generally uninspired with the exception of an overhead pan of the rooms during the motel sequence. The absurd ending also fails, all plausibility going right out the window.

"Pick Me Up" needed less of the bus passengers and more of the killers facing off. At least it would've been a bit more entertaining that way. Two good performances, poor episode.