Welcome to Awful Advent: a countdown of 13 Holiday Horror movies for the 13 days before Christmas
For this year’s tenth entry, a bickering family drives down a never-ending road in the first movie this year to live up to the name “Awful,” Dead End!
A family on their annual Christmas trip to their mother’s house take an alternate route. As time passes, they seem to get no closer to their destination, they start arguing with each other, get harried by a woman in white, and begin to be murdered in sudden and inexplicable ways.
This is one of the worst movies I watched this year and I watched every Howling, Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Nightmare on Elm Street movie in October and November. This may be better than Howling VII: New Moon Rising—the definition of “barely a movie”—but I’d actually recommend that for its delirious badness. This is just nothing.
We start with a family of five crowded into an SUV driving down an old country road. Ray Wise, Laura Palmer’s father, is driving so we know everything and everyone will be fine.
Of course not. Everyone’s bickering to begin with. They’re all on the way to visit the mother’s side of the family and dad doesn’t want to go because the food is always bad, the younger son is directing homophobic insults at his sister’s boyfriend, and no one wants to be there, especially us.
This is a trope I noticed emerging in early-2000s horror when I was doing that franchise watch. Through the 80s and 90s, movies opened with an introduction of the deadmeats having fun. The killer becomes a threat not just to them but to their broader joy and ability to live normally. Even the Nightmare movies, which start with someone being harried by Freddy, show the kids’ lives as good things that proceed to fall apart the more Freddy intrudes. The worst of those films tried to make the deadmeats unappealing so that you'd celebrate their inevitable deaths at the hands of Jason or whoever, but the kids are still enjoying themselves, there’s still a good time that’s being threatened.
With the 2000s, post-Se7en and especially post-Saw, the movies stopped having any joy. Nothing is fun, life sucks, and then this unstoppable killer arrives. The mistake filmmakers made was in thinking that making horror “serious” meant everything had to be grim instead of seeing that the horror resides in the ripple effects these disturbances have on the characters’ lives. Sure, the characters are threatened with death, but the real threat is that the lives they’ve been living become impossible to maintain. There has to be something good for them to fight for to give the audience any catharsis at the end of the movie.
In other words, there has to be someplace we, as the audience, want to go back to.
Dead End starts with the characters being miserable and awful to each other and then they start to die. The trailer and synopsis imply that it’s the stress of being trapped on this road and threatened by this mysterious force which causes them to break down and start revealing buried secrets, but they hate each other from the start, no force is bothering them, and their secrets—an affair, being pregnant, and smoking weed—are banal and unimpressive.
The movie builds to a twist that the audience figures out 20-30 minutes in and nothing disabuses you of your notion of how the movie will end. This is something The Lodge did well. The central mystery of what’s actually happening seems to have obvious answers (for people who watch horror movies), but then the movie hangs a lampshade on those assumptions and creates something more compelling and complex.
Here’s what happens in Dead End: dad falls asleep at the wheel and they almost have an accident. They keep driving down a road that continues forever with no crossroads or turn-offs. They notice all their clocks have stopped at the exact same time. Each time they stop the car, someone gets taken away in a long black car and is immediately found down the road horribly burned or mutilated as though by a machine.
Do you get it? Do you get the twist? Have you solved this particular puzzle?
I pulled this movie from a listicle of 25 Christmas Horror Movies posted on Good Housekeeping, which raises two questions: why is Good Housekeeping making lists of horror movies and why am I looking to Good Housekeeping for horror recommendations?
Here’s a third question: how do I have six movies from their list in my own (The Lodge, Dead End, Anna and the Apocalypse, The Day of the Beast, Gremlins, and one yet to be revealed)?
Regardless, this movie sucks. At one point, they pull over and the “teenage” son walks off into the woods, pulls a porno mag from his underwear, hangs it from a tree, and starts masturbating for reasons I cannot begin to fathom—either on a character level or a narrative level. Why would anyone do that? And what does it do for the movie other than split him off from the group, which could have been done by having him take a piss. Plus, he's not separated from the group because he walks right back.
The movie is not just inept, it’s smug. It is doing the most obvious thing and, like the elderly teen wandering into the forest, furiously stroking itself. It’s not fun-bad, just exhaustingly bad. On top of all that, it’s not even Christmassy. They’re going for Christmas dinner but that is incidental. Christmas plays no practical role in the film at all.
Don’t watch it. There’s, literally, nothing to see. They don’t even show the bodies. Skip it.
1/5 boring bickering basic bastards bound for a bad end
Dead End is currently available to avoid on Tubi in the US and on Netflix in Korea
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