If David Lynch’s Twin Peaks took a wrong turn into a dusty Texas nightmare of Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, you might end up close to Kill Trip—where the locals are strange, the roads are empty, and nothing good happens after sundown.
Writer-director Kristian McKay takes the familiar road-trip-from-hell setup and sends us careening down a surreal path that gets a little bumpy at times, but weird enough that I kept wondering where the hell it was going.
A group of friends headed toward an Austin music festival, expecting a weekend full of bad decisions, when their car breaks down. They hitch a ride with a soft-spoken young van driver who’s willing to show them around to the local haunts; however, the party atmosphere evolves into something considerably nastier, revealing whispers of a serial killer with a growing number of unsolved murders. Flames ignite, people, of course, begin disappearing, explanations don’t add up, and the Texas landscape becomes less of an open road and more of an enormous trap.
Rather than immediately announcing itself as a straightforward body-count slasher, Kill Trip lets suspicion infect the road trip. It lets us drift through a peculiar collection of personalities as the travelers try to determine exactly what they’ve stumbled into.
Jess (Brittany Mcvicker) and Chloe (Maya Hendricks) share a tense moment in a convenience store in Kill Trip.
“…friends headed toward an Austin music festival when their car breaks down.”
An eclectic cast, played with conviction, includes apprehensive Hank (Stelio Savante), spunky Jess (Brittany McVicker), conman Levi (Corin Nemec), and Midnight Misty (Samaire Armstrong), the smooth-talking radio DJ who narrates the later scenes.
While I like the excitement of not being spoon-fed, the film takes a slow-burn approach where the plot meanders at times and exposition is often replaced with showing it. The movie could use more confidence in those moments. Give me more unanswered weirdness. More uncomfortable silences. More Texas freaks. But don’t get me wrong, I still enjoyed this dusty nightmare overall.
As a massive horror fan, I found moments hinting at supernatural elements that I wish were more developed—but I got my money’s worth with the gore effects and inspired sound design. That’s where my Twin Peaks brain kicked in. Not because McKay tries to duplicate David Lynch—but because Kill Trip finds that delicious frequency where somebody behaves slightly too strangely, and suddenly an ordinary person feels more threatening than a masked killer. It’s horror built around social wrongness.
Kill Trip never reaches the hypnotic dream logic of Twin Peaks or the ferocious grit of Near Dark that it aspires to, but you can feel the compatible DNA lurking beneath its skin. It’s grimy Texas road horror with an eccentric streak—and when it allows itself, the trip becomes worth taking.
"…grimy Texas road horror with an eccentric streak"
