#munger road

[splatteronmywalls]

[jasonsutekh]

The Wrong Road (A.k.a. Munger Road) (2011)

Four teenagers travel to a supposedly haunted location on the night that a notorious murderer escapes from prison.

 This film only just avoids being another typical amateur horror film with no budget. The only thing that really saves it is that the camera is of mildly decent quality and the direction isn’t at the typical beginner student level. If it had leaned even slightly more towards using the hand-held, found-footage technique as it does in some scenes then it would have been beyond hope.

 The threat in the film is implied to be an escaped convict and the only reason why it’s still implied is because the film keeps the antagonist off-screen for its entirety. It’s clearly an attempt to be subtle and let the audience’s imagination do most of the work but it ends with the effect that the danger doesn’t feel present at all in most scenes and therefore no tension is created. The police were also ridiculous characters because they keep the whole thing a secret so it doesn’t panic people, as though letting the bad guy build up a body count is the way to keep people calm.

 The actors are half decent, mainly the two boys and the blond girl because they act naturalistically but the second girl is one of those characters who is nasty to all the others so consistently that you have to wonder why they include her. We also end up following her for the longest which isn’t the best decision since she’s the most difficult to sympathise with. The other young characters are severely let down as well since their fates are essentially breezed past so that it doesn’t really matter what happens to them.

 There are entire scenes, even at the most atmospheric moments of the film, in which nothing happens. There are some points when the characters are alone in the dark with something stalking them and they all look visibly bored. This does nothing for the pace or overall effect of the film but it doesn’t matter too much because the film doesn’t have an ending to spoil, it just finishes with no proper explanation of who the villain was or what happened to most of the characters.

 2/10 -It’s not THE worst, that’s something else. But...-

[droolphobia]

ITS KINDA fucking weird that theres a horror movie based off of an urban legend that is 11 miles from me.

I live by Munger road and let me tell you it is fucking creepy. Before it was a full out neighborhood, it used to be just one long hilly road with dark forest on each side. There was the occasional house but nothing busy. One house was claimed to be used by ritualistic satanists. IDK abt that but there was a tiny shack that an old man lived in with his two maasive rottweilers. This shack was so small it literally just had one hanging light bulb.

The old man there was your classic evil old guy who scared kids. but when he passed away along with his dogs, he actually became part of the legend. His two dogs literally haunt the place as hellhounds now. When my dad was younger he used to mess around with his friends and count the ghost cars (they had a working system lmao). My dad actually met that old guy and saw his dogs before he died so I always thought that was cool.

[the-schwarzschild-radius]

Photo credit: Jessica Watson

[thebluntcritic]

"Munger Road" (2011)

"Munger Road" is a smart, technically strong film that offers some great tension but falls short of a satisfying ending. The premise is solid and the writing keeps you guessing about what is really going on. The performances are quite good, anchored by Bruce Davison as the wise small town Sheriff. However, there aren't enough answers and there isn't quite enough context to fully flesh out the tale. The open ending is too open and feels like just the first installment. It's a shame because the film squanders what could be a real indie gem with cult potential. 

[afunnystory]

God, this movie was so BORING. It wasn't scary at all, nothing fucking happened. The only good thing I can say about it is the acting was better than I was expecting. Oh and LOL at that bullshit ending.

[missvoltairine-blog]

A: ugh that guy's name is Cory, he's so dead.

A: if mothers want their sons to live they don't name them Cory.

Me: my first boyfriend's name was Cory.

Me: he's actually dead now.

A: wow, that was shockingly prophetic on my part.

[somethingbooo]

Review: Munger Road (USA, 2011)

What, exactly, is a movie supposed to do? 

Recently, writer/director Joss Whedon got himself in a bit of hot water by suggesting that the ending to The Empire Strikes Back was bad. Of course, he was very quick to walk back the implication that he thought the movie itself was bad; rather, he was trying to say that the film betrayed the basic concept of what a movie should be, by leaving the story without a resolution. It's worth quoting him in full, so we know exactly what we're talking about:

“Well, it’s not an ending,” Whedon explained about the 1980 film, which had a cliffhanger leading into the next entry of the series, Return of the Jedi. “It’s a 'Come Back Next Week', or in three years. And that upsets me. I go to movies expecting to have a whole experience. If I want a movie that doesn’t end I’ll go to a French movie. That’s a betrayal of trust to me. A movie has to be complete within itself, it can’t just build off the first one or play variations.”

This is precisely the kind of comment that film nerds such as myself absolutely LOVE to tee off on. It opens up a whole host of questions: does a movie have any responsibilities to the viewer? Are there certain requirements that must be in place for one to say, "this is a movie"? Is the very nature of cinema something that requires a "complete within itself" artwork, as Whedon insists? And is there any possible way he's not being jokey by crapping on French film like that? (The answer to the last question is "No," if you're curious.) These type of meat-and-potatoes questions about the nature of film are certainly fascinating, but let's table the whole "what is the nature of cinema blah blah blah" question for now. After all, this is ostensibly a movie review. But this very basic question is raised almost immediately by the ending of Munger Road. So we have to address it, at least in part.

Munger Road is a bifurcated story that slowly comes together in the final act. For the first two-thirds of the film, we have two stories. The main narrative concerns four high school seniors, two girls and their respective boyfriends, who decide to spend their Friday night exploring the local town myth: namely, that the lonely stretch of road two miles outside of town is haunted by ghosts. (If we're being particular, and I think we may need to be for the rest of this review to be clear, this infamous Munger Road intersects with train tracks, supposedly the site of a horrific school bus accident years earlier; rumor has it that if you drive your car onto the tracks, leave it in neutral, and wait, the ghosts of the dead children will try to spare you their fate by pushing your car off of the road.) Our four erstwhile protagonists head off with a video camera and an adolescent sense of fun, to document their attempt to experience something supernatural. Simultaneously, their small-town police chief (wonderfully underplayed by veteran character actor Bruce Davison) gets a report that the man who murdered six children in their town years ago has escaped from prison. Clearly, we're meant to sit back and wait for these stories to intersect - and they do, with deeply ambiguous results. 

Here's the obvious assumption: the kids will run into the killer, and he will dispatch them, while they suspect something paranormal is taking place. No? A fairly cut-and-dried assumption. And for the entire second act, this is what the audience is led to believe, as well. The kids get stuck out by the train tracks. One of the boys, reviewing the camera footage, sees a man standing behind the car during one of their oblivious conversations. (Oh, and fyi, does he tell anyone? No. No, he doesn't. These kids have some classic cases of dumb-dumb disease going on, not that there's anything inherently wrong with that.) One of the boys goes to get help, and soon the others receive a text from him showing a picture taken from ten feet behind their stalled car. Needless to say, everything pretty much goes downhill from there. The cops slowly realize where the killer probably ran off to - a cabin he owned off of, you guessed it, Munger Road - and the race is on to save the kids before the killer can wipe them out.  

Which brings us back to the original question: What do you expect from a film? While I'm enormously sympathetic to Whedon's argument, I'm also firmly in the camp of those who think that anything announced as a trilogy has the right to end whenever it damn well pleases. This isn't to say that the first film in a series is permitted this right: Star Wars needed an ending, because nobody had any clue whether or not there would be any further films. But once we got to Empire, it was already established that this would be the middle film, and the conclusion would come once Return of the Jedi arrived. The same thing happened with Back To The Future Part II, which gave arguably an even more abrupt ending. One could argue that these films earned the right to such a structure by having such phenomenally successful first acts; "This is the story we want to tell," they argue, "and you have to accept that they are incomplete without their counterparts." This is no different from the film serials of the 1940s and '50s, in a sense - Whedon is absolutely right to identify the "Come Back Next Week!" aspect. But this is a form of narrative in its own right, is it not? The right to leave your audience hanging, to tell them "We're not done with you yet." You might not like it - Whedon obviously doesn't - but you can't say it's not the right of the medium to choose its structure, for good or ill. This becomes even more clear when it comes to something like The Lord of the Rings. Do you really have the right to demand that, say, The Two Towers exist purely on its own, without any context derived from the preceding or subsequent narrative? A less charitable person might say "Bullshit on THAT idea." I'll leave that to a less charitable movie blogger who doesn't still hope to shake Joss Whedon's hand someday. (Come on, the man makes excellent art.)

But what about first installments, particularly of new stories? One could argue that Tolkien's work existed prior to the films, and therefore should play by a different set of rules in assuming that an adaptation should hew to the same narrative structure, implying separate works that make up a whole. In this reading, The Empire Strikes Back might not be afforded the same generosity. But what about the first film, Star Wars? It's a wholly self-contained story, much like The Matrix, or Iron Man, or any number of hero origin stories that require no further information to feel like fully embodied stories. By this reading, maybe Whedon is wrong, but only in demanding that an extension of a franchise should play by the same rules as its progenitor: first features must provide a wholly contained story, but subsequent editions are allowed the freedom that an ongoing narrative allows. 

Do you see where I'm going with this? Munger Road ends (spoilers from here on out) with a climactic, exciting, and interesting build, where the music swells, the camera slowly zooms in, and suddenly we cut to black and are greeted with the words: "TO BE CONTINUED." My reaction was simple, and the more I think about it, the more sure I am of my response: Are. You. Fucking. Kidding. Me. 

This is a small independent film, low budget, based off nothing but its own moxy and original storyline. Am I supposed to assume that a second installment is a given? (Based on the lack of activity on the official website, which suggests no changes since it appeared two years ago, I'm not terribly hopeful.) The film, in and of itself, is strong, suspenseful, and smart; everything until the final ten minutes is a solid three-star horror film. Everything from the acting, to the script, to the cinematography, is capable and sure-footed, with minimal missteps. In particular, there is a dearth of jump-scares or "gotcha!" moments designed to get your pulse racing. Instead, what we get is a slow-burn, tension-mounting 90-minute arc designed to pull you in and then turn the screws. It reminded me at times of The House of the Devil (a favorable comparison if ever there was one) in that it steadfastly refused any traditional goosebumps or periodic shock releases of emotion, as horror movies generally demand. I was impressed and appreciative of this, right up until the end. Even more so, I should say, at the end, when we get the genuine idea that there really is something supernatural going on. It's an unexpected left turn that the movie earns, with its restrained tone and suggestive camera work. 

AND THEN. Aaaaaaand then. We get the rough equivalent of a Final Girl, sitting in the back of an ambulance, as the suns peeks over the horizon and an office consoles her, and Bruce Davison, holding the MacGuffin camera the kids dropped, says, in a low and unsettling tone: "So....what did you really SEE out there?" And - cut to black. Nothing. This isn't a case of "Oh, we the audience saw it, so it's cool." No. Nothing was explained. We didn't get even a hint of something deeper, the film is so committed to its conceit of not revealing what's at work. But unlike other movies, that rest content in the knowledge they told you everything, and the full explanation isn't needed for narrative closure, here we have the opposite. You don't get to know what happened, the film says, because we haven't gotten to it yet. Stay tuned! To which I politely reply: Bullshit.

Because Munger Road hasn't earned this. It has no sense of continuity, no conveyance that we're in a world larger than just this one film. It simply turns on the lights and says "Whoo, I'm exhausted. Pick this up later?" It's a cheat. And a lazy one, at that. It's not a serial, because to be a serial, you need to have a pre-existing body of work that permits such a claim, especially in cinema (versus Youtube videos, or other more easily ongoing story forms). And thus, the movie burns its bridges. I'll watch a sequel if it ever gets made, but right now, that doesn't seem to be on the horizon. And without such a  companion piece, the film is a failure. Because it's not complete. It's a work of art stopped halfway through. It's a concept album where someone got bored and abandoned it before it was done. And a work of art incomplete is no work of art at all. It's an effort. Ambition without substance. Admirable, but common. I can admire a friend of mine starting a screenplay, but until they finish it, I'm not impressed. Munger Road is full of sound and fury, but it signifies nothing other than its own lack. What a shame.