Southbound (2015)

Southbound is B movie. You feel it when you see it; something about the visuals that says no budget which is not all together a sign of a bad movie.

In fact Southbound started great, got my interest.  Two people were bloody in the beginning as if running away.  In a few moments they reach a roadside diner which was not what it seemed. Immediately I thought the movie is playing on travel fears; the wide open road that can be open and free until a wrong turn. Good hook, I thought, and the way they were looking over their shoulder made me expect a chase scene until they saw a floating entity – and they acted normally?

So from murder on the run I went to alien invasion?  The graphics was fairly decent if only it looked weird.  The movie was going for the low key approach keeping the graphics only to those floating aliens thus avoiding the exposure of their hand that they really had no money. It was a mysterious start to say the least that’s why I had my hopes up.

That is until it got too mysterious for its own good. I lost track of those aliens in the second and the third sequences which turned out to be separate stories.  And I know these are separate stories because I saw separate titles and directors in the credits.  The story was really just starting over when it did and I thought it was just too mysterious and characters were just being added over.

The cuts look seamless in between stories like closing in one part of town and opening in a different part but as the short story progresses it turns out to be not to be the same town.  Kill or torture methods were different in every story. Only the last story connected with the first as if to say the story was one big loop but I was already lost by then.  What about the disjointed middle I wonder? 

What the filmmakers could have done was present the stories as they are, separated.  In each episode the radio guy heard in the background should give a few words, set up the atmosphere so to speak.  He could only be heard at the beginning and the end of the movie, setting up a more philosophical meaning of Southbound.

South as if to say going down or the Wild West meaning south meant going to Mexico where you can run and wait out your troubles.  The characters in each story were indeed running from something until they were ‘lost’ in the open road running.

I was lost myself watching - the open road, another movie would have been better.