NOW ON VOD! What is already unbelievably hot can now kill you in the late director Jeffrey Darling’s dashing young serial killer road picture He Went That Way. Based on a novel about something that really happened, the movie takes place in 1963, with Bobby (Jacob Elordi) racing around in the desert, laughing his head off. Next to him is a dead body with a bullet hole in his head.
We then flash over to a gas station Jim (Zachary Quinto), who is negotiating with Willard (Christopher Guyton) over the price of an auto repair. He needs to get back on the road to get to Chicago in the next couple of days. On the way, he picks up Bobby, who is hitchhiking. Bobby is wild and sort of a hothead, but he snaps to attention when he finds out who else is riding with him and Jim. They are traveling with a genuine TV celebrity, Spankie the Chimpanzee (Phoenix Notary). Jim is an animal trainer and owns Spankie. Bobby tells him he has seen everything that hairy little f****r has ever done and is starstruck. However, that night at the first motel together, Bobby pulls a Derringer pistol on Jim. He takes Jim’s wallet and rings and lets him know that he is in charge now. Jim better do what he says, or Bobby will kill him, which he may just do anyway…
He Went That Way is my third slice of cutie pie with Elordi, and it keeps tasting better. First was his velvet Elvis in Priscilla, then his “too hot for the hot tub” spin in Saltburn. My wife thinks that we are all programmed to react this way to Elordi’s classical good looks. Maybe she’s right, as his cartridge fits perfectly in my Atari. However, his Bobby character adds a lethal element to the mix, as you could overdose by looking into his eyes too much.
“They are traveling with a genuine TV celebrity, Spankie the Chimpanzee…”
It is fascinating how Elordi takes something so deadly and still manages to maintain a shimmering vulnerability. His hunky Charles Starkweather type is so fine that he makes all the Ted Bundys look like Henry’s pal Otis. I never thought I would be ruminating over who the hottest mass murderer is again, not since I saw Natural Born Killers six times in the theaters. But Elordi makes the screen ripple like his abdomen, so there we have it. The homo-eroticism between the leads leaps around like a tiger trapped in a cage, being held in by the cold iron bars of a mid-century ultra-phobic atmosphere. However, when Quinto is tied up or choked a little by Elordi, you know, on another level, they are just loving it. Aren’t we all?
Quinto is a gem here; I couldn’t imagine a better Jim. He is funny and creepy, nailing that whole snappy weird clean-cut early sixties vibe before our hair hit our a***s. Yes, I still think of Spock when I see him, but isn’t that what made Nimoy’s later work so fun to watch? The costume used for Spankie the Chimp is remarkable. It is only noticeable a person in a suit enough to put the audience who will not watch a real chimpanzee these days at ease. Notary’s portrayal of a wild animal caught in a maze of enforced training is a masterwork. You can ape an ape, but few capture captivity like Notary does here.
The screenplay by Evan M. Weiner keeps all the balls in the air and brings all the madness to a satisfactory point. It is remarkable that Weiner fleshes out such a rich cinema experience from a real-life hijacking by a hitchhiker with a gun from Conrad Hillberry’s “Luke Karamazov”. It is a tragedy that this will be Darling’s first and last feature, as he died on a surfboard in 2022. I remember him as the cinematographer in Young Einstein, which was huge when I lived in Australia. He Went That Way looks like a cinematographer’s movie. Every scene, even the ones without Elordi, looks like a million bucks, with that smoky, creamy look of a thousand retro motels. We only got to take one trip with Darling with He Went That Way, but boy, what a long, juicy trip it’s been.
"…Elordi makes the screen ripple like his abdomen..."
