Recent Reviews
Short Film Review: The Road Virus Heads North
By John Marrone
Nov 22, 2005, 19:11

When watching independantly made horror films - a lot of the time, one aspect of the production will reveal amatuerity.  Be it in weak acting, miscast parts, sophmoric scripts, or plots stretched thin.  Dave Brock's adaptation of Stephen King's short story "Road Virus Heads North" is NOT one of those films.  With a strong showing at this year's horror film festival in New York City, "Road Virus Heads North" emerged as one of the more professional entries.  Amongst filmmakers that included film professors and Californians with one foot in Hollywood, Dave Brock stood out with a near-perfect vision transferring legend-authored paper to cellulose.  There is no need for hollywood megastars when you have a keenly casted group of actors and actresses like these - and although the story varies only slightly from the published version found in short story compilations like "999" and "Everything's Eventual", most of the film is an accurate emulation of what plays out in your head while reading it.

Road Virus is death in slow motion.  The main character is doomed from the moment he innocently picks up a painting - what follows is the unraveling of his life on a psychotic and violent level, until ultimately his last heartbeat thumps.  Dennis Dalen plays Richard Kinnell, a horror author with a less than coothful reputation.  His work slightly scoffed at, Kinnell is a straight man, guilty at worst of a morbid and imaginative literary mind.  On a trip back home, he stops at a roadside sale, and comes upon a painting that catches his eye.  King's description tells it best.  "It showed a young man behind the wheel of a muscle car - maybe a Grand Am, maybe a GTX, something with a T-top, anyway - crossing the Tobin Bridge at sunset.  The T-top was off, turning the black car into a half-assed convertible.  The young man's left arm was cocked on the door; his right wrist was draped casually over the wheel.  Behind him, the sky was a bruise-colored mass of yellows and grays, streaked with veins of pink.  The young man had lank blond hair that spilled over his forehead.  He was grinning, and his parted lips revealed teeth which were not teeth at all but fangs."

Kinnel is drawn to it from a morbid sense within that he can barely comprehend, so he purchases the painting.  Along the way back home, he stops by family member Trudy's Kinnell's home to pay a visit.  What he begins to notice is that each time he peers into the artwork, the picture is slightly different.  Had the mouth become wider?  Was his arm placed differently now?  Brock translates the creepyness of the story to film flawlessly, with the help of a dark original score by Stephen Kaminski, and paintings designed and perfectly digitally created by Ocean and Christina Eiler.

Further into the film, these changes become more apparent - and soon the doom begins to heavily set in.  Dennis Dalen's facial expressions, the lines in his face, sell his every concerned thought without having to speak a word.  He tosses the painting into a river on the way home, completely dreading the possibility that he himself has somehow become cursed by it all.  Home, Kinnell gets in the door and has a drink, taking a sigh of relief.  But upon listening to the news, he hears that there has been a brutal series of murders at the same roadside address he visited earlier that day.  And on the wall - the painting!  How could that be...  Within the watercolor, "All sales are final!" is visible, posted on a banister column, amongst a dozen or so strewn bodies, hacked to bits.  Sickness and despair overcomes Kinnell as he repeatedly sees changes in the painting - each scene reminding him of where he's traveled - all familiar, as the Road Virus heads to Trudy's home, and surely, Kinnell has no doubt, to his home after that.

Readers of King will notice slight differentiations.  Bobby Hastings is not so forefronted in this movie, casually mentioned and then reflected upon in the end dream sequence.  And in this short film, Kinnell seems to hear voices as his mind is starting to unknowingly unravel - the people at the roadside sale, the woman at the reststop by the river (who speaks to him instead of avoiding him completely) - all mention his death in conversation, which of course only Kinnell hears.  Apparently even the reaper of death likes to play pranks sometimes.  In the end, Kinnell of course succumbs to the evil that has driven right up to his front door - its just a little different from King's version.

Only 20 or so minutes long, Stephen King's The Road Virus Heads North is a professional quality short that can make your skin crawl.  Dave Brock is an excellent director, and compliments King's style of storytelling.  Made in 2004, Stephen King must have liked the adaptation, as Brock is at this time working on another short story of his called "The Library Policeman", set to come out in 2007.

Final analysis:  The whole technique in which the painting is represented, the subtle changes in  the sceneries, the grin of the man driving the car - it all lends to the type of filmmaking that translates excellently a horror masters pen to the screen, and does it seamlessly enough to give you goosebumps in the process.  Dave Brock's direction of Stephen King's "The Road Virus Heads North" could not have been done better.