Road Head

Three friends take a road trip to what’s supposed to be a fun lakeside holiday venue. When they arrive, they discover that the lake has dried up and is now a desert where a man wanders around decapitating people with a big sword. To directly compare this to the experience of watching Road Head would be somewhat unkind, but it’s more than a little disappointing to be promised a fun trashy queer comedy horror and to then end up watching this.

It’s not a bad movie, which is part of the problem. It veers desperately from side to side of the uncanny valley of goodness, with both genuine quality and so-bad-it’s-good entertainment somehow managing to escape its grasp. There are flashes of trash-horror brilliance here and there, but they only serve to highlight how frustrating it is to watch so much of the film meander slowly down a dirt track instead of roaring foot-to-the-floor down the wrong side of the highway.

Alex (Damien Joseph Quinn) and Bryan (Clayton Farris) are a gay couple who have taken their friend Stephanie (Elizabeth Grullon) along on their would-be romantic getaway to help her get over a recent breakup. The trio bounce off each other well enough but there’s an overreliance on manufactured wit that becomes grating after a while. Grullon is like a June day in Scotland - mystifyingly overcast - while the other leads are capable enough but struggle to keep up in terms of screen presence. There’s a little decapitation, a lot of running around a desert, and then a long, tiresome encounter with a band of one- dimensional villains who’ll fade from your memory faster than the name of that guy who was in that thing that one time. Elizabeth Grullon does so much heavy lifting in these scenes that she goes up a weight class, and frankly she deserves better.

To give Road Head its due, it’s surprisingly well shot, albeit conservatively so. Had the focus lavished on production values been brought to bear on the script, we could be looking at a cult classic. As it is, Middle-of-the-Road Head is a disappointing execution of what at one point probably sounded like a great idea.