BLOGTOBER 10/25/2022: TAILGATE/BUMPERKLEEF
I have a burning need to talk about this movie because I haven't heard about it nearly enough, and it's a real treat. I expect the relative silence on TAILGATE means that, like me, others may have glanced at the summary and thought that they'd seen this movie before. I mean, how many road rage thrillers does one need, and how different can they be from one another? There may also be an air of familiarity around specifically Dutch movies about road-based peril, since the THE VANISHING takes up so much space in this arena. In any case, I am here to tell you that what may sound generic on paper is uniquely horrifying in practice.
When Hans (Jeroen Spitzenberger) takes his wife and two girls (Liz Vergeer and Roosmarijn van der Hoek) on a trip to visit his parents, it makes for a showcase of minor league bad behavior. The average, white, upper-middle class family totally lack appropriate boundaries, which you understand immediately when one child announces that they'll be late getting on the road because her mother Diana (Anniek Pheifer) is taking a shit. Hans's mother Trudy (Truus te Selle) calls relentlessly to ask pesky questions about every detail of their trip, as Hans passive-aggressively ignores her, refusing to allow anyone to pick up the phone even to give her an ETA. Trudy is a lousy hostess, planning a lot of boring activities and fixing up all sorts of inhospitable food, leading Diana to buy the girls burgers and fries, which they casually throw out the window into moving traffic. The children bicker about whose turn it is with the iPad, as Hans engrosses them in a conversation where they come up with all sorts of insulting things to say about other people's driving. In fact, he is so involved with this heckling that he nearly slams into the van in front of them when it breaks abruptly…
Just the scenes of garden variety bad driving that kick off TAILGATE are frightening enough on their own, but it features a heavy hitting bad guy played by the wonderful Willem de Wolf (who you may recognize from Paul Verhoeven's BLACK BOOK), known here as Ongedierteverdelger Ed, or Exterminator Ed. Ed is obsessed with etiquette and responsible behavior in a Hannibal Lecter-y kind of way, but instead of being a sophisticated psychiatrist, Ed is a pest control specialist, and there lies an important part of what makes TAILGATE so special. Ed's modus operandi for punishing the impolite is his spray rig for an extremely toxic and corrosive chemical that has horrifying effects on the human body. This film is an exercise in how to deeply disturb the audience without featuring much in the way of actual murder. The killing at the beginning of the film is upsetting, but you don't realize exactly how bad it really is until much later in the film, when Ed menaces Hans's family with the tools of his trade.
I can't help delving into spoilers here because I was so taken with TAILGATE's revolting climax, during which Hans, saturated with Ed's poison, is reduced to a hallucinating mass of weeping blisters, and he has to be dragged to safety over a window sill. The ensuing shower scene is on par with JACOB'S LADDER in terms of things that you hope never happen to you in a bathroom. This is the only horror outing from writer-director Lodewijk Crijns, unless I'm missing something, but he really seems to have a knack for it; the film is suspenseful, gruesome, and highly efficient, and I can't recommend it enough if you've got the guts for this sort of thing.
