Driver from Hell

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.

You can read all these reviews, but nothing can prepare you for just how terrible this movie is. It becomes painfully evident that all driving scenes are shot on the same quarter mile stretch of road. Some how, SOME HOW, a heavy wrecker is able to keep up with a model year Mustang. And worst of all, you can't stop watching it.

I don't even know where to begin with this movie. The first thirty minutes (after a pointless and confusing pre-credit scene) is not only a "remake of Duel" but a beat for beat, practically shot for shot, at times line for line rip-off of Duel. I mean, despite the fact that there is no mention of Steven Spielberg or Richard Matheson in the credits of Wrecker, the first half of this movie copies EVERYTHING from Duel. Lines, shots, framing... Like, I'm fairly certain that someone has grounds for a legal suit here. I mean, if I just remake a complete shot for shot, line for line (plus f-words) remake of a TV movie from 40 years ago and basically call it my own work, is that just okay? After copy and pasting the first half of Duel into his Final Draft script-writing program, hack writer/director Michael Bafaro then got to work on changing the middle of an already excellent movie. The only difference in the set-up is that instead of one man on the road alone, it's two completely unlikable girls. They go through, step by step, the exact same beats as Dennis Weaver's character in the original Duel. And then, halfway through, when hack writer/director Michael Bafaro has to deviate from the original script for a variety of reasons (among them being he's not a very good film maker), he does so by writing out the other girl completely, never to be seen again. ...Then why did hack writer/director Michael Bafaro make it two girls in the first place? You'll have to ask hack writer/director Michael Bafaro.

So yeah, the other girl disappears and the remaining girl continues to get terrorized. There's some terrible acting, a lot of boring driving, a telephone booth sequence taken whole from Duel, and then it eventually ends with a terrible and lame CGI rendition of the evil tow truck falling off a cliff.

And these are not spoilers. Watching this movie is the spoiler. It spoiled my evening and my mood. If you haven't seen Duel, go watch it and stay clear of this movie. Unless, for some reason, you want to see the same script interpreted by someone with a passion for film making and storytelling (Steven Spielberg) vs. someone who has no clue and apparently has no problem plagiarizing someone else's work (hack writer/director Michael Bafaro). Then perhaps it could be an interesting learning experience. Michael Bafaro sucks.

Just for example, real quick.... The entire time you're watching Wrecker, you're like... why don't these two idiot girls just turn around and either go home or find another way to get to their... stupid ski resort or whatever it was. While that makes no f'ing sense here, in the original Duel, Dennis Weaver has an important work meeting to get to and frankly has no choice but to keep going and hope he can shake the crazy truck driver. You see, because hack writer/director Michael Bafaro is not a creative person and when left to his own devices, can not differentiate between logical character motivation and people just doing things for no reason.

Michael Bafaro sucks and so does this movie. I'm offended by Wrecker both as a writer myself and as a movie fan. Even if he was given remake rights to Duel (which I don't think he was), that's no excuse for using 3/4ths of the script and not even crediting the original writer.

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.