Just the Ticket #148: Joy Ride (List Lookback)

Article by Sean Wilkinson,

a.k.a. the Ticketmaster

It's fitting that last week, my TBT Anniversary push featured Timeline with Paul Walker. I was almost so done with the Prehysteria! movies that I was going to take a week off and do a Paul Walker-themed week by reviewing Joy Ride instead. But last-minute pivots have rarely been kind to me, so here we are, avoiding wrong turns, detours, and dalliances from our "carefully planned" route.

Please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your CB handle at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford a truckload of ice to get through the summer, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content. And if you could also bring a bottle of pink champagne? It's my favorite!

Joy Ride (the thriller from 2001 that spawned two direct-to-video sequels of decreasing budget and quality, not the 2024 comedy) was directed by John Dahl (who directed Rounders and sixteen episodes of Dexter) based on a script by JJ Abrahms and Silicon Valley's Clay Tarver.

Lewis Thomas (Paul Walker) is a horny college student who cashes in a used car voucher so he can drive from California to Colorado to pick up his recently single childhood crush, Venna "the blinker‽" Wilcox (Leelee Sobieski, The Wicker Man). Unfortunately, this is a road trip in a horror movie, and we haven't been introduced to the stupid prankster character who ruins everything and deserves to die but somehow survives, so in comes Lewis' criminal screw-up older brother, Fuller (Rescue Dawn's Steve Zahn), and with a newly installed CB radio because cell phones weren't really commonplace yet in the early 2000s and this movie needed an obscure and highly specific gimmick to differentiate itself from every other road trip horror movie ever made, the brothers continue their journey, passing the time by eavesdropping on trucker conversations, including the macabre philosophical musings of Rusty Nail (uncredited voice role for Silence Of the Lambs star Ted Levine, and uncredited physical role for The Limey's Matthew Kimbrough). But things change when an encounter with a racist asshole at a motel leads the brothers to play a prank on Rusty Nail and the asshole, setting up Rusty for a rendezvous with a made-up woman they call Candy Cane.

As a result, the asshole ends up dead and the brothers are stalked and chased by the psychopathic trucker, who claims to only want an apology for their prank (which was Fuller's idea, by the way). They apologize and Rusty Nail lets them go, after which they ditch the radio and continue their journey to pick up Venna (because who wouldn't cross multiple states for Leelee Sobieski, am I right?), with Fuller being such a bigger horndog than Lewis that he develops an instant attraction to Venna's friend, Charlotte (Jessica Bowman, whose acting debut was in Moonbeam Entertainment's Remote, because I can't escape Charles Band this month) and later tries to poach Venna from his brother because Fuller is the real villain here.

Happy ending, right‽ Wrong!

Despite the brothers' efforts to move past the incident and hide it from Venna, it turns out that Rusty Nail isn't done with them after all, especially now that he feels like he's been lied to about Candy Cane not being real.

I like the basic idea of Joy Ride: the classic, cat-and-mouse-by-phone mechanics of something like Black Christmas or Scream, mixed with reimagined chase sequence tropes (what if the killer and victims were vehicles‽). But that said, what follows the "Rusty Nail was still following them" reveal is a bunch of illogistical bullshit. I mean, he followed them all the way to Colorado to kidnap Charlotte, somehow found their discarded CB radio on the side of the road, broke into their car to put it in their trunk, called Lewis' motel room number to threaten him, somehow figured out which direction they would leave town in so he could spraypaint a message for them on the road signs, and found and kidnapped Venna in the middle of a cornfield in the dark. Also, the manufactured tension of three terrified college students being able to outrun a big rig on foot in a cornfield in the dark. I like the cornfield chase. I liked it even before I had to watch at least eleven bad ones for Halloween last year. But that doesn't make it not bullshit.

What else is false tension bullshit is the finale, where the brothers go to yet another motel to rescue Venna from a motel room that Rusty Nail has boobytrapped with a shotgun and what is either packing tape or plastic wrap. Also, they have to race to find the right motel because Rusty Nail called the police so they will kick the door down and kill Venna anyway unless the brothers get there first, which is actually a well-crafted bit of countdown tension, but Lewis insists on spending way too much time tending to his scumbag brother when he should be trying to rescue Venna first. Granted, by this time, Rusty Nail has decided to rear up and drive through the motel, killing everyone, so it doesn't really matter who Lewis saves first, but I still think he should have started with Venna.

In the end, more bullshit as the cops try to stop a rampaging semi with handguns, Charlotte is still alive, and it's revealed that, even though his truck is shown without a trailer here, Rusty Nail had the time and cab space to swap himself out with the body of another trucker before crashing through the motel. When did he go back for the ice trucker's body? Where did he keep it? Why didn't Charlotte say anything?

Whatever the case, the real disappointment is that it took another seven years to do absolutely nothing with Joy Ride's cliffhanger ending, opting instead for a cheap direct-to-video sequel with none of the original characters (except for Rusty Nail, who was recast as Jorgen von Strangle himself, Mark Gibbon, doing an "ordered from Wish" Ted Levine impression). I still think the first Joy Ride is fun. I love the action, the tension, the dark humor, and the narrative flow. The cast is great, Ted Levine is the best voice-only villain presence since Roger Jackson, and the dialogue is underratedly quotable . But the characters, particularly Fuller, are Jeepers Creepers, I Know What You Did Last Summer levels of unlikable, and one has to do a lot of disbelief-suspending and non-thinking to find any credibility to most of the things Rusty Nail is able to do in an early internet, pre-smartphone world. Or is he just that obsessed with the Thomas Brothers?

C+

Please remember to Become A Ticketholder if you haven't already, comment your CB handle at the bottom of this post, help out my ad revenue as you read so I can afford a truckload of ice to get through the summer, and follow me on Tumblr, Reddit, Facebook, and LinkedIn to like what you see and receive the latest news on my content. And if you could also bring a bottle of pink champagne? It's my favorite!

Ticketmaster,

Over and Out.