A family is driving in the wilderness on Christmas Eve. Weird stuff happens, and just about everyone dies.I had a hard time watching this, but I still kept on returning to it. The script is generally pretty bad, the characters are poorly drawn, the story is derivative of many Twilight Zone-type stories. But somehow, I kept wanting to finish it, at least to make sure I was understanding the story correctly. There was always hope that it might correct itself with a last-minute twist.
First, we start off the story with some exposition. The characters are ridiculous. Everyone is remarkably annoying. The spooky event is that they pick up a strange woman in a white dress, who carries a dead baby. It’s obvious that this is not a normal thing.
The story progresses, with a few characters getting killed off. Strange things happen. Most distinctly, they seem to be stuck on the same road. They see the same landmarks. And somehow, the reaction to this isn’t that they figure out that they’re stuck in a loop. Their reaction is that “someone is playing a trick on us.”
The ending - spoilers of course - is that they actually died in a car accident back at the beginning of the movie. The car they hit has the woman in the white dress and her baby. Yawn.
There isn’t anything interesting about watching a bunch of dumb characters take an hour to figure out what the audience already knows.
The general poor quality of this movie made me think that this actually could be a good movie… if it came out during the early 80s, and if it had a better cast, maybe some better direction.
I have one thing to praise about this, and it's specific to my interests. There's a visual of a guy trapped in a car that's being driven away. He's struggling against the back window. This reminds me of one of the first horror movies I can remember seeing, but I don't know what it was. I remember a car being pushed into water with a woman in a white dress in the back of it. I saw it on VHS during the mid-80s.
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