Such a frustrating disappointment

Please don't spend money on this.

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

The acting in this movie is really good.

Sorting out DVDs to list on Ebay for a family friend,I noticed that a double sided disc had a number of finger prints.Wanting to make sure that the disc worked before it was listed,I decided to pay a visit to the rest stop.The plot:Heading for a new life in LA,Nicole and Jesse almost get pushed off road by a truck being driven by a strange man.As they drive on,Nicole gets Jesse to park outside a rest stop in the middle of nowhere.As she goes to the bath room,Nicole is horrified to find the door covered in faded writing,from people who have written warnings over the decades about a strange truck driver trying to kill them.Rushing out,Nicole discovers that Jesse has been kidnapped.Starting her search for Jesse,Nicole soon discovers that in order to locate Jesse,she must go up against the mysterious figure in the yellow truck.View on the film:Spending 90% of the movie on her own,the very pretty Jaimie Alexander gives an excellent performance as Nicole,which leads the viewer to fear a "faceless" object,thanks to Alexander casting a growing sense of fear across Nicole's face.Keeping Nicole away from either being a tough Action chick or a cliché-ridden "final girl",Alexander shows Nicole develop a tough edge,whilst always remaining horrified about the nightmare she finds herself in.Backed by a tense score from Bear McCreary,writer/director John Shiban & cinematographer give the title a tough,gritty appearance,thanks to the rest stop being covered in a murky grey,which is rotting away,along with the "Missing" posters of the mysterious killers victims. Grinding Slasher tension with Torture Horror,Shiban unleashes a brittle atmosphere of dread,by making the murderers truck and the bright red blood from the victims the only sign of colour in Nicole's deadly situation.Keeping the title limited to a handful of characters,the screenplay by Shiban makes sure that Nicole is never given a chance to relax at the rest stop,by making the truck drivers attempts to grab Nicole become increasingly ruthless,as Shiban dips the film into an eerie supernatural Horror coda,as Nicole begins to fear that she may have found her resting place.

OK horror film set at a rest stop. It was sort of like a combination of Breakdown and Duel. It was about a young couple on a road trip, where they were running away, and they stop off at a rest stop with a great deal of missing people posters. The girl goes into the bathroom with cryptic messages in the stalls and comes back to find the boy missing and is terrorized by a homicidal maniac, and it is hinted that he kidnapped and is torturing the guy. Along the way she meets an ultrareligious and ultraweird family, and a cop who tries to help her gets run over by the maniac.This makes the most of its limited settings and a limited cast, and features some amount of torture and gore. Not for the squeamish-definitely. Not horrible but not great. Followed by an OK sequel.** out of ****

"Jesse Hilts" (Joseph George Mendicino) and "Nicole Carrow" (Jaimie Alexander) are two young lovers who decide one day to take off for Hollywood where fortune and fame undoubtedly await. On the drive from Texas they stop off at a rest stop which is off of the beaten path and appears to be almost abandoned. Nicole then goes into the restroom but when she returns she finds that Jesse has disappeared. At first she thinks he is playing a game on her but when a man in a yellow pickup truck drives by and throws his cell phone at her she realizes that he has been abducted. She is now left at the rest stop all by herself with no way to get help and with a potential maniac on the loose. Now rather than reveal any more of this film and risk ruining it for those who haven't seen it I will just say that it had a pretty good premise to work from. Unfortunately, it failed to live up to its potential. The main reason for this is because it seemed to lose focus on several different occasions. In any case, those who enjoy splatter films without rhyme or reason might find this entertaining but quite frankly I found it to be somewhat disappointing and I have rated it accordingly. Below average.

I picked this up for $2 at the local op-shop based on the DVD sticker that said; "Rest Stop is hauntingly realistic... in the style of the original version of The Vanishing." — Maria Newborn. FANGORIA TV The original version of The Vanishing is a 10/10 film, and I gave this film a 3, because I have actually seen worse films, such as "Psyched by the 4D Witch". But "Rest Stop" is God-Awful. WARNING (I'm about to tell you what is in the RV) I don't mind the religious family in the RV, that scene was cool, scoring the film an extra point or two. But the entire film was mostly pointless, based mostly on supernatural themes which makes it 180° to "The Vanishing", which didn't need magic fairies to make it scary. Don't get me wrong, magic fairy movies can be good if done well, I quite liked John Carpenters "In the Mouth of Madness", but probably couldn't watch it again for another 20 years or so.... I used to respect Fangoria magazine, as I read it often in my teens, ie 30 years ago, but Maria Newborn is either insincere or naive. Back to "Rest Stop" which is a film that gets worse the longer you watch it, several times I felt the need to press FF, and I regret not doing so now. Pretty quickly I wanted the boring villain and the boring victim to die quickly. The twists are very predictable and totally unrealistic. Originally I planned to write my 1st review on "Before Midnight", an equally dismal film, but this piece of crud got my goat the most.