Audio Video News

It's Back to the Future meets Groundhog Day in The Twilight Zone when a police psychologist (Kylie Travis) with problems of her own encounters a psychotic good ol' boy (James Belushi) on a deserted Texas highway.

Belushi's character is all rough-cut charm, a laugh a minute—until he gets riled. Then rage rips to the surface in a murderous torrent. The psychologist ends up in close company with the terrible Texan (and his wife) when she's stranded in the middle of nowhere and the happy couple offer her a lift to a car-repair shop some miles down the road. Not long into the drive, the counselor sees this good Samaritan trade his charm for his gun and commit cold-blooded murder.

Fleeing from the car, the terrified woman again finds help, and this time the help is real, if unbelievable: a scientist doing experiments in time recovery. By allowing herself to be zapped, she can replay the last 20 minutes and make everything better. When her second chance only blows up in her face, she manages to get a third shot, then a fourth—and then I lost count. Meanwhile, the bad guy also climbs on chronology's carousel. Then things get really messy.

Belushi's icy meanness is chilling as he comes up with six different ways to kill the same people. Meanwhile, you grow increasingly curious about the next variation on disaster. Though shot in the desert, the film possesses a stage-play intimacy that heightens the impact of recurrent death and destruction. And with fetching subtlety, the spare soundtrack further sets you up for the next twist of violence, which you just know is coming. The vivid application of surround sound is riveting, whether in scenes of carnage or of quiet.

If there's nothing remarkable about the color, its bleached tones do evoke something of a film noir played out under the desert sun. It's a good ride. By the end, I was clinging to my seat. And maybe not breathing all that regularly.