Okay, so Road Head starts with a straight kill—a girl giving her man a BJ in their car on a dark road when they, um, come across the killer.
However, our main characters consist of a tough girl and a gay couple! The girl brings along a figment of her imagination…the boyfriend she just broke up with and loathes…so all the expressions of love are between the gay couple!
The odd setup has the trio heading to a lake getaway in their van, only to find the lake has dried up, so they’re basically driving through a desert. Within minutes they are being terrorized by the muscle hunk killer!
As fun and funny as this film is due in part to great comic performances, the most notable letdown is that there are only three main characters running around a flat expanse of nothingness, which doesn’t provide much opportunity for anything unexpected. Quite a bit of dialogue pads significant stretches of the film, an issue that could have easily been eradicated if there had been just two more friends on the trip with them. That would have allowed for nicely paced kills and a body count, which we just don’t get here.
To mix things up after a variety of chase scenes, the friends end up at a sort of junkyard. The hunky killer is part of this movie’s version of a backwoods family—in this case just a bunch of random goofy guys and a drag queen. There’s a shift in tone from standard horror comedy to a totally campy farce for a little while, so you sort of have to be prepared to go with it. The drag queen gets some funny moments but is underutilized in my opinion.
Surprising is the fact that the film doesn’t live up to the promise of its title. There was a golden opportunity to establish a modus operandi for the killer—he beheads people who give and get blowjobs in cars. Yet despite the presentation of that scenario twice, it simply couldn’t be expanded upon because of that whole issue with their being so few characters. There are also some wonky green screen moments that reveal limitations in the budget, but they also add to the indie charm.
Even without the blowjobs, the climax totally rocks. The main girl gets in some I Spit On Your Grave exploitative moments, but it’s one of the gay guys who really steps up his game to become the hero. It’s at this moment that you realize that as funny as much of the script is, it simply isn’t structured in a way that can fully take advantage of what a great gay character he is. However, he definitely takes advantage of the great material he’s given at the end and absolutely shines, making Road Head a crucial addition to the homo horror movies page.
