By guest contributor Chris Ward
Every so often a movie breaks through the barriers of genre, dares you to question what you think you know and threatens to make you think differently about horror movies and how they can challenge and defy social norms. Road Head (2020) isn’t that movie, mainly because at its core it’s a slasher with a twisted sense of humour, but thanks to a few key elements, it could be one of the freshest takes on a familiar format we’ve seen in a while.
In proper The Hills Have Eyes/The Texas Chain Saw Massacre style Road Head sees a van with three friends contained within travelling to Lake Isola in the Mohave desert. Why are they going there? Because one of the group, Bryan (Clayton Farris), went there as a child and wants to return to take pictures as he is now a photographer. Who are these people? Well, Bryan owns the van, his boyfriend Alex (Damian Joseph Quinn) has come along as he thought he and Bryan would have a romantic break together, but on the backseat is Stephanie (Elizabeth Grullon), a friend of Bryan’s who has a rather antagonistic relationship with Alex and has just split with her boyfriend David, who makes appearances throughout the movie thanks to Stephanie’s drug-induced hallucinations.
So far, so standard fare, but when the trio gets to the lake they discover that the water dried up years ago, leaving the area a barren wasteland, but, unperturbed, Bryan still wants to take some photos while Stephanie crashes out in the van. All well and good until a chainmail-wearing behemoth of a man wielding a broadsword enters the scene and the movie becomes a fight for survival as friendships are tested, quips are fired out like bullets and some of the weirdest antagonists in recent horror history are introduced. Safety and glory, indeed.
Promoted as a LGBTQ horror comedy, Road Head is rammed with camp humour right from the off as Bryan, Alex and Stephanie make their way across the desert in their Scooby van, and immediately these are characters that are so likeable and pitched perfectly that the witty dialogue feels completely natural. In fact, the first few minutes of them bickering in the van sets them up so well that when the first attack comes, the violence – despite being gloriously gory and completely silly (in a good way) – threatens to shift the tone a little too much. It doesn’t, mainly thanks to an electrifying performance from Elizabeth Grullon as the feisty Stephanie, but as the movie approaches its second act it feels like it could fall apart any moment if the threat from the villain is taken too seriously.
Luckily, Hellraiser: Judgment’s Paul T. Taylor is on hand to add the necessary whimsy to this movie’s equivalent of Texas Chainsaw’s Sawyer family in a scene that could have come straight from a British sit-com from 30 years ago with one or two linguistic twists (and two words have never been as funny when repeated as “Safety and glory” in a movie for a long time – it really has to be seen). The finale comes round fairly quickly and the filmmakers remind you that this is supposed to be a ‘horror’ comedy and so throw in some more gratuitous Shogun Assassin-style gore to end on a high note just before the inevitable slasher movie kicker; oh yes, Road Head hasn’t forgotten its influences and anybody with a knowledge of slasher/backwoods movies will have seen it all before, but when it is done with this much love you’d be upset if it didn’t go there.
Let’s get this straight – Road Head is not a game-changer nor is it ever going to be labelled as a classic. However, it is tremendous fun and is clearly poking at the corpse of the classic slasher genre to try and tease a bit more life out of it. It mostly works thanks to the strong performances, sparkling script and lightness of touch to the direction that means it never gets bogged down or comes to a standstill like so many similarly-themed movies do. The tonal differences threaten to clash every now and then, but the actors seem to be clued into what they are doing and handle the material with apparent ease, and although the horror elements are a little past their sell-by date and not exactly scary it doesn’t matter, as Road Head is hugely entertaining and basically a good laugh throughout. Safety and glory!
Road Head is available now on digital platforms.