Wrecker

if you have never seen Duel (1971) my suggestion is to watch that than to waste your money going to see this modern day movie or buy it on blue-ray.

Starts off as a typical road movie where two young women are driving across the U.S in a Red Mustang. After watching them talk about boyfriends for the first part of the movie and seeing endless scenes cutting to them accelerating up and slowing back down travelling roads after roads they come across a trucker towing a car that they decide to overtake.

The rest basically ends up becoming a game of cat and mouse after. They are chased to where one of the girls ends up being taken and her friend is left to chase the truck and ends up being chased down even more roads.

The woman has so many opportunities in the movie to report what has happened to people instead babbles like a wreck to just race off down road after road. Even after getting her hands on a dead traffic cops gun who gets run over she catches up with the truck and points the gun at the drivers door and does nothing, never once thinks to threaten the driver to get out in order to find out what he has done with her friend..

This movie has so many flaws it is almost laughable if it was not so boring or even worth a total review.

The plot and whole story line including acting is so weak you feel like shouting at the screen for gods sake how pathetic is that.

The ending of this movie was so much worse than the beginning

Avoid this movie like the plague...

Wrecker is in fact what we can say a kind of rip-off of the famous Steven Spielberg flick Duel (1971). Two girls in a Ford Mustang are suddenly being chased by a tow truck without any reason, the driver is never shown and nothing is explained. So far that can't be a problem but what do makes it hard to watch is the acting and the story.

The first 15 minutes I could dig and it all started rather good with an old Ford being broken down at , you guessed it, a road with Devil in it and no cell phone reception. But after 15 minutes the road goes down together with the flick. The acting of Anna Hutchison is below zero. Normally I can stand screaming girls but she doesn't understand it at all. Of course it's also her character that makes her a stupid blond. When a car is left alone on a bridge she can passes it easily but she stops just in front of that broken car, and there are so many things that doesn't make sense. The cop stopping her makes no sense at all. The gas attendant is acting terrible when she waves her gun. How her girlfriend is being put in the trunk of the Mustang is a don't know, at the diner the way she reacts is a girl with big issues.

Towards the end there's use of bad CGI can't explain when not to spoil what is happening but it's really bad CGI.

What I did enjoy was the Ford Mustang and the truck. Like the tow truck is doing it should better tow this flick to the dumpster.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 0/5 Story 1/5 Comedy 0/5

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.

How does a heavy wrecker tow truck (while also towing another car) consistently keep pace with a 2013 5.0 Mustang GT? The mustang can go 0-60 in 4.3 seconds. The heavy wrecker can go 0-60 in 30 seconds. The mustang's top speed is 155 mph while the heavy wreckers top speed is 75 mph. This whole movie is impossible and boring.

I always feel bad giving terrible reviews because ultimately this was other people's vision, budget and time but this movie is really, really, really bad. The very fact that the tow truck could outrun the Mustang causes the movie to immediately lose so much credibility that the movie is already in a hole that it cannot get itself out of.

And as others have said, it's essentially a rip off of Duel.