Errol Sack’s (along with writer Steven Shaffer) Trucker feels like a blast from the past, whilst creating a potent horror icon for the future, in this Joyride meets I Know What You Did Last Summer style tale of recklessness, regret, revenge, and redemption that rockets along at killing speed.
The plot may be ripe with tropes, all tried and true, but this picture embraces its influences and carries them off beautifully as we meet our token group of thrill-seeking, life-fast-die-young teens that, you guessed it, after a spot of vehicular lunacy, cause a dreadful accident in which they lose a friend and cost a man his family their lives. But though they drive away, their bad deeds did not go unseen, nor shall they go unpunished.
Skip ahead a year. We find our group chilling as per usual. Everyone’s playing it cool, but the lingering guilt of their wayward activities is eating away at the soul of Vanessa (Katherine Gibson), who convinces her boyfriend to return with her to the site of the crash. Though they are more content to let sleeping dogs lie, the trio hit the road.
Meanwhile, the misty-eyed hill-billy psycho, Old Man Levy (played brilliantly by DEATHSTALKER 2 composer, Chuck Cirino), has been awaiting the return of those rotten kids who believe they evaded murder. He saw what happened that night and has spent the past twelve months preparing a punishment worthy of the crime.
“…fashioning a slaughtering machine that knows and loves the taste of blood.”
After learning of directions to Old Man Levy’s Valkenvania from a dodgy gas station attendant, our group of ridiculously good-looking teens enters the fray and springs the kooky codger’s crafty trap. Searching for signs of life from the buddy they left back at the initial crime scene, the youths uncover something even more dangerous and diabolical.
Turns out, Levy has been fashioning a slaughtering machine that knows and loves the taste of blood. But this is no mere “mindless” killer. Calling on the rest of their friends for aid, soon the entire group handled the accident, now trapped in the crazy Levy’s labyrinth of death. This is where Trucker goes from high speed to ludicrous speed, ratcheting up the insanity to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 territory as the scintillating savagery explodes with delight.
This movie might start in places you’ve seen as far as these scenarios go. Yet to not end up quite where you’d expect, and the quality of the filmmaking, performance, and storytelling for an indie horror is all top-notch, and make no mistake. Trucker leans into the source material it springs from and delivers with clever turns, cool-as-hell kills, and possibility for the monster at the core of the story to go on, terrorizing the highways for years to come. Until we get to part 4, which should be the one in space.
Trucker is a bloody good eighteen-wheeler of flesh-hacking glory running over my brain, which was stupid enough to play on the highway. A fantastically fatal crash waiting for you to happen across it.
"…recklessness, regret, revenge and redemption that rockets along at killing speed."
