Rest Stop: Don't Look Back (2008)

You won't be disappointed!

It's no definitive masterpiece but it's damn close.

Admirable film.

Very good movie overall, highly recommended. Most of the negative reviews don't have any merit and are all pollitically based. Give this movie a chance at least, and it might give you a different perspective.

The plot: Searching for his missing brother, a soldier runs into the killer ghost from Rest Stop, with predictable results for him and his friends.Rest Stop 2 follows many of the conventions of the first movie, but manages to excise some of the pointless filler, replacing it with extended scenes of gory torture. Also, the origin of the ghostly killer is revealed, along with his connection to the creepy religious family. If you were dying to know these things, then I can understand why you'd want to see Rest Stop 2, but there really isn't much reason to subject yourself to this movie, when you can just read the synopsis on Wikipedia or the IMDb.One of the saving graces of the original Rest Stop was its atmosphere and judicial use of gore. Unfortunately, the parts without gore tended to be a bit boring. In Rest Stop 2, the gore is pretty much its sole reason for being. As a result, I would recommend this movie only to fans of Rest Stop, gorehounds, and torture porn enthusiasts. Most other people will probably be either bored stupid or too grossed out. It's no masterpiece, but the gore effects are pretty good, for a low budget, direct-to-video sequel. Honestly, I'm a bit tired of horror movies that are nothing but young adults being tortured to death slowly, but I've seen worse ones than this. Some of the scenes were twisted enough to be memorable, but the movie itself really isn't.

I didn't like the first Rest Stop. This one is somewhat of an improvement, at least during the first half. That's when we learn about the origins of the driver, so to speak. Then we are introduced to the main characters, an army guy brother of the guy in part I; his girlfriend and a geek who's had a crush on the girl from part I. They all go searching for the kids from part I. They run into the typical creepy gas station guy, they find the rest stop, not before the driver finds them and gives them a hard time. Eventually he grabs army guy and tortures him. He in turn finds his brother, or so it seems. The girlfriend and the geek start having visions of the girl from part I and the geek will be delivered to the weirdo family which also makes a comeback in this movie.The girlfriend will confront the driver and she will get tortured and later, army guy fights the driver. Several times we see the weirdo family driving around bothering people with their religious talk.The second half of Rest Stop II is just as dismal as all of the first movie. That's when we get supernatural events that make no sense and in the end make this movie senseless and pointless. At least this one seems to have a bigger budgets. So instead of a few people running endlessly around a rest stop, here we get some more locations. The gore and violence are good but rare. The weirdo family isn't scary, interesting or creepy, just annoying. This time around we see plenty of the driver and his face, but still learn little about him that would be consistent. We learn of an Indian myth about lost souls looking for their eyes and yet rarely do we see the driver without eyes. But trying to make sense of this movie is fruitless. And this movie doesn't give us enough to forgive the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever.

One year after his brother and girlfriend disappeared, Tom (Richard Tillman) and his girlfriend Marilyn (Jessie Ward) decide to go to California to find them. Tom's geeky friend Jared (Graham Norris) travels with them.The same guy who killed his brother is still haunting the highway, and finds and tortures the new breed of travelers, and also returning is the RV filled with the walking corpses.This movie reminds me of "Joy Ride 2"...another needless sequel with subpar acting, story, and effects. Nothing that distinguishes itself from being memorable, and something that will easily be forgotten.

I enjoyed the first Rest Stop movie- considering it was a straight to video, low budget horror, I felt it was a tense off-the-beaten track film, with some nice, and unexpected, supernatural elements. Though I'm not claiming it's a horror classic, it was a fun film, and certainly felt like one of the fresher films in this sub-genre of horror, especially when compared to the tired Texas Chainsaw prequel and Hills Have Eyes sequel- both of which were out around the same time.I think the sequel is equally fun- if not more so. Anyone witnessing the porta-potty scene will know there's a real streak of humour in this film. The supernatural aspects are also capitalised upon- allowing for a good twist or two. The sequel fleshes out some of the history of the freakish family, we find out what happened to the characters from the last film- all in all, it does what a good sequel is supposed to! So if you want a fun hour and a half, you could do far worse than watching this.It's silly fun, with some laughs, some gory parts and some tense moments, but then that's the point, I expect. It's a nice feeling when a straight-to-DVD film demonstrates a lot of what is missing in big budget cinematic horror films today- bring on Rest Stop 3!!!