Matthew KimbroughJoy Ride

First and best of the series.Blue ray delivery is really good and was a thrilling experience. Paul Walker in his early years did a great job along with rest of the cast.

John Dahl is one extremely underrated director. Along with his excellent Red Rock West and Kill Me Again I present the relentless thriller Joy Ride. Its an outstanding thriller the will have you on the edge of your seat the entire time. Steve Zahn is outstanding in a brilliant comic performance but also in a great dramatic turn as well along with the late Paul Walker who should be very proud of this awesome movie along with his excellent Running Scared (which is also extremely underrated). They are great together as brothers terrorized by a psychotic trucker after a prank. This is an expertly made thriller that deserves a much bigger audience. Definitely a must own!

There are those movies that you just have to see every year or so and this is one for me. You know the story I'm sure. It's starts with some fun humor then takes a bad turn. This genre is overbloated nowadays but this one never got so out of hand that it was absured. Kind of paved the way for ripoffs also. The cast is great, Zahn and Walker seem to really get along well, all American type guys without the cockiness of some other actors in the biz. They're the buddies who'd probably help you move if you asked.

There's something to be said of the buddy road movie genre. When they're done well they can be pure, cinematic magic. Think of films like Thelma and Louise, Terrence Malick's Badlands, National Lampoon's Vacation, Vanishing Point, and even Trains, Planes, and Automobiles. What they all share in common is precise casting, clever script development, and enough substantial character development to make you really give a damn about who these people are. In Joy Ride, the two very attractive male leads (Paul Walker and Steve Zahn) play brothers who are terrorized on the road by a maniacal psychopath--with the clever CB handle of "Rusty Nail". And why are they terrorized? Because Zahn talks the more subdued Walker into playing a trick on Rusty Nail by impersonating a woman over the CB. So the prank turns into pure, and terrifying mayhem when Rusty Nail, whom is never shown discovers he's been played. What works very well in this film is the very believable interaction between the two brothers. Zahn plays the immature but likeable counterpart to Walker's more sartorial character. Zahn is the Joker to Walker's Jack--both prone to outlandish behavior because it's just a part of their brotherly bond. The evil in the film is more of the manufactured variety since the viewer never "sees" Rusty Nail. We only hear his deep, dark voice talking over the airwaves. Even when the film cuts to the big rig that he's driving we never see him through the windows. So the viewer is left imagining what this guy looks like. Is he hideously deformed? Does he look like Frankenstein on steroids? Or is he simply a twisted, human being? It all depends on your perspective of the genre. Joy Ride represents a type of terror that is firmly rooted in the real world--the world of homicidal road rage incidents, random mass murder, and dysfunctional people doing mayhem that ends up on the 6 o'clock news. That's the magic of this film, and the notion that the real world makes better film fodder than any made-up movie monster.

Joy Ride is a 2001 horror thriller I remember the network FX liked to air quite a bit for a period. Somehow, I almost always ended up watching it so I finally bit the bullet and bought the movie myself.Joyride follows two brothers (one being played by Steve Zahn who has been starring as the father in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies recently), neither having spoken or seen the other for five years, as they travel across the country to meet up with one's female friend. Along the way, the brothers get to messing with their car's CB radio and play a prank on a trucker named Rusty Nails, leading him to believe he's chatting with a woman with the handle "Candy Cane" who wants to meet him at a local motel. Things quickly go downhill from there as the trucker (somehow) learns exactly who they are and what car their in based solely on the fact the brothers admit it was a prank to him.Similar to Duel, Rusty stalks the brothers and their friend throughout the movie trying to exact his revenge.I think Joyride, though more or less straightforward and simple, is one of the more underrated horror movies that came out around this period. It wasn't another typical "teenager slasher" movie or the like that was seemingly extraordinarily popular during this time.One issue I had was the subplot of Venna's friend and roommate, Charlotte (who was played by Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman alumni Jessica Bowman). The character appears in the movie for a total of maybe three minutes and two scenes and the movie wouldn't have missed much without her as a plotpoint as far as I'm concerned.Otherwise Joyride is an entertaining movie, especially if you're in a mood just for a simple movie.

Overall, this was a good movie. Not great, but definitely worth the money to see it.It starts off rather slow. A couple of guys, bored during a long car ride, play a prank on a trucker. It goes through the usual, something bad happens, cops are called, trucker and guys get into an altercation which seems to make things even, and the two sides go their separate ways.But in the second half, it gets more interesting. Once the guys pick up the girl, the trucker has a renewed interest (if he even lost interest, considering he's still watching them). There is some good action while the trucker plays through his revenge, I thoroughly enjoyed the process he goes through. The final scene was very dramatic and not what I expected. However, the very end of the film was very transparent and expected.