Despite his better judgement, La Roca agrees to taking the road, seeming to think that there's a chance his own father is buried out there somewhere along the road. Indeed, La Roca discovers a graveyard along the route, and sure enough his father's name is etched into a cross, along with three of the most notorious criminals of the time, all four having died seemingly on the same day. This is all one of our marshals, PT, needs to start a fight with La Roca, who hadn't liked him from the start. Our remaining Russian catches up with the group however, and after being stabbed and left bleeding on the road by Marshal Joe, out of nowhere four grey and decidedly unhealthy-looking men wearing prison work overalls appear and attack Marshal Joe. Rabbit makes me smile by shouting "Shoot them in the head!", which anyone who's watched zombie movies has probably shouted at the screen a few times themselves. Joe doesn't shoot them in the head though (nobody in the whole movie does) and they pound Joe into the road using pick-axe, chain, hammer, and jackhammer until nothing but blood-stained clothes is left on the asphalt. Panicking, the rest of the crew load into their cars and escape, only to find that the road is melting their tires and rendering their vehicles unusable. Trapped in the middle of nowhere with the mysterious undead workmen pursuing them, and an over-zealous local sheriff unwilling to help, La Roca and crew are really going to be tested to not only get Rabbit to court, but to avoid being slaughtered.

An interesting premise draws into what is an enjoyable but also extremely unspectacular movie. The plot is highly flawed unfortunately, featuring a few glaring holes that could have easily been rectified. Thing is, its handy that La Roca has these flashbacks in order to explain what happened to that ill-fated road crew but two things are never explained, first off La Roca has these visions, but there are absolutely no reasons given for why he has them, he just does. No blow to the head, no obvious links with any sort of spiritual force, nothing that could have been handily slotted into the plot with a couple of lines of dialogue. Secondly, there is no reason given for why these undead workmen come out of the road and kill people. This is something else that could have been quickly cleared up with a few lines of standard horror cliché dialogue, or some silly pseudo-philosophising on the restless souls of the undead of some such. All we get is someone saying ‘this road is cursed' and ‘his soul cannot rest!', which doesn't count if you ask me.

Lou Diamond Phillips and Steve Williams provide the most enjoyable performances, with some flashes of buddy movie-esque interplay and dialogue. Lou Diamond Phillips is an actor I just can't figure out. He's a guy who always puts in solid performances, and he does well with his under-developed role in this movie, but I keep seeing him turn up in this straight-to-video b-flicks when he seems perfectly capable of pulling off higher-profile roles if only he was given the chance to. Its also cool seeing Lori Petty again, she's a moderately good actress who has never seemed to live down the disastrous [I]Tank Girl[/I], but she does well as the perky support to Lou.

Unfortunately what I rented this movie for was the promise of the undead doing some killing, and in that respect I was left a little bit empty. The appearances of the mysterious workmen were few and far between, and when they did emerge it was in a thoroughly unimaginative fashion, plodding along to a low budget ‘fade in, fade out' effect before attacking someone and covering them in fake blood. Matters are not helped by the way these scenes are shot, first of all they've taken frames out of most of the shots with the zombies which gives a weird choppy affect, which is rather distracting at times. This is made ten times worse by the use of Action Scene Confuso-Vision where the camera rocks and waves around all over the place to give the impression of a frenetic action-packed sequence, but just makes everything really difficult to see, especially as the cinematography includes a lot of close-ups of the action. I'd hate to say this was badly filmed, but it just makes some of the scenes not only kinda dull, but likely to give you a headache too.

Ultimately it's the non-undead scenes that provide most of the entertainment, which isn't what I was hoping for. On the other hand if you're a big Lou Diamond Phillips fan, he pretty much dominates this movie and makes for a good, convincing hero. Just a shame we couldn't get some good, convincing monsters to go along with that.

COMMENTS
This film doesn't come out 'till around Halloween, but I somehow got my hands on a screener copy. I had high hopes for this film, but was eventually let down with the end result. I thought the premise sounded rather cool, but whoever did the scripting did a very poor job at it, because the plot had many holes in it.

This movie had a lot of potential, but with poor scripting, it just fell apart. It had some interesting action scenes, but nothing spectacular. The marshals are really lousy shots. Anyway, the story behind Route 666 is just silly. In the film they said there was this massacre of four criminals on the road and whoever goes to the road and bleeds on it or something the four undead criminals return to feast on their blood. I think that just sounds silly.

In one scene, star Lou Diamond, gets in an accident and meets up with some indian chief, who had nothing to do with the plot what-so-ever. He only said a few "guiding" words to Lou and sent him on his way. That was just pointless.

The undead criminals looked pretty cool and there were a lot of fimilar faces in this film. It's sad to see so many somewhat famous actors in such a poor film. Oh well.

Would have given the film a lower rating, but it did have some interesting moments and a litle to make things go a little faster. I guess I was expecting too much from it and was just let down.

OVERALL
A film with potential, but had many plot-holes and a silly script. Nothing special, not really recommended.