Somewhere out there is a hopeful 13-year-old boy who is going to see this film’s provocative title and think they hit the jackpot. They’re going to be disappointed. They’ll stream this film and will not make it past the halfway point. I made it to the end of Road Head, directed by David Del Rio, wishing I had the good sense to turn it off 30 minutes in myself. The film’s title may be arousing but the film itself fails to deliver an exciting story attached to that title. Road Head is marketed as a horror film with a cheeky name. What is truly delivered is a boring film with a boring premise.
Three friends are on a road trip in a loud green van from Los Angeles to the Mojave desert to have a weekend getaway at a lake. The two male partners Alex (Damien Joseph Quinn) and Bryan (Clayton Farris) are smitten yet sympathetic, dragging along their third wheel, Stephanie (Elizabeth Grullon). She is jaded, having recently broken up with her cheating good-for-nothing boyfriend. The pair want a nice getaway. Stephanie just wants to get high and literally get away, quelling the hallucinations she sees of her ex boyfriend.
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Upon discovery of the lake being dried up rendering their weekend plans moot, our disappointed heroes regroup. There is some sassy dialogue, with rather decent acting, that our trio spews back and forth about their predicament. They even snuck in a rather sufficient John Lennon impression. I wasn’t expecting the movie to peak here.
The group begrudgingly begins their return trek. Stephanie is knocked out in the back seat from her drug intake. Alex gets fresh with Bryan, who is driving, in the front seat by going down on him. This is the second (and last) time the implied sexual act of the film’s title happens. The fellatio is cut short after Bryan slams on the brakes, causing him and Alex severe pain. I’ll let your imagination fill in the blanks. The reason Bryan stopped? Two severed heads lay in their path on the road. The owners of said heads belong to the cannon fodder couple we briefly meet before the opening credits. They also were participating in the same sexy hijinks when they were stopped by a stranger standing in the road who promptly beheaded them both. This same stranger reappears abruptly behind our trio, brandishing a sword, and a wardrobe straight from Camelot. He kills Bryan (in the worst decapitation scene ever made) and chases Alex and Stephanie across the desert.
There is more to the plot. When I say “more,” I mean there are things on screen that happen. But none of these actions are interesting or exciting. The stranger, we eventually discover, belongs to a cult. This group is a small sect of uninteresting and lazily written stereotypes. They are holed up in a junkyard amongst the dunes. We only meet them after the stranger-in-knights-armor kidnaps Stephanie and takes her to this camp of one-dimensional weirdos.
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In the attempt to be candid and transparent, I must admit I didn’t understand the point of this story. Without spoiling anything, there isn’t a happy ending. There isn’t any growth or arc among the leads either, though. The only thing that comes close to a denouement is Stephanie letting go of her hallucinatory visions of her ex-boyfriend which crop up to mock her throughout the movie. But even then, that resolve is… how shall I say… cut short? A smart film would’ve had the actual boyfriend somewhere in the story to allow valid resolution. A smarter film wouldn’t have included him at all.
Road Head offers some snarky and droll lines of dialogue I appreciated, but that is the only praise I can scrape up to give it. The majority of the lines are screaming incoherencies, the effects are unabashedly ghastly, and worst of all it was painfully boring. There was no excitement. No fun to be had. It lacked any atmosphere of tension. I never had the opportunity to get scared because of the awful paint-by-number dance steps the writing telegraphed. I didn’t care about the characters, their problems or their solutions. The only surface level thread worth pulling out of this was that oral sex while driving is dangerous. I’m hopeful this movie wasn’t intending to be a morality tale in that context, but alas.
There are other themes of sexuality, power and identity implied, but Road Head never takes the courage or time to explore them. Analogously speaking, if you’re seeking a film that is fun, a little scary, but definitely exciting, don’t pull over for Road Head. Just keep driving.
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