Joy Ride 3: Road Kill (2014/Fox Blu-ray w/DVD & Digital HD Ultraviolet)

Picture: B/B- Sound: B+/B Extras: B- Film: D

Rusty Nail is back on the road again looking to punish injustice at every turn - and this time it's with a group of hotheaded street racers on their way to the Road Rally 1000. Joy Ride 3: Road Kill (2014) is a walking cliché of everything that you would expect from a terror on the road movie and has everything from elaborate car chase sequences to blown out tires to torture. The characters are stiffly acted and fit into their movie stereotypes. It's not hard to predict who is going to die next. And Rusty Nail himself is a villain highly sub-par to Tarantino's titular character in Death Proof.

Rusty Nail, the vengeful trucker with a penchant for pain, slams terror into overdrive in this third installment of the Joy Ride franchise. The nightmare begins in the film with a couple of Meth-heads who have a plan to cold call a truck driver in an attempt to beat up him to take his money to buy more meth. Sounds like a flawless plan until Rusty Nail shows up at their hotel room and chains them to the hood of his semi and takes them down the road. While some believe that the roadkill found on the desolate highway is an accident, its evident that Rusty Nail is back to his old tricks in this tired direct to video sequel.

The action sequences get boring - focusing on close ups of Rusty driving his truck and cutting back to the victims in stages of various fright. The car chase sequences themselves are fine but nothing compared to the lackluster Fast and the Furious franchise. Armed with software capable of tracking down license plate numbers and information, Rusty Nail immediately finds the rag tag team of road racers that decide to cut him off on the highway and one by one they are killed and tortured before they reach their final destination. The film is a complete yawn, a seen-it-a-million-times thriller that only has some gore shots and some minor nudity to offer. Do yourself a favor and watch Death Proof again instead, which in many ways is the opposite of this film and does the genre justice in nearly avoiding all of the typical issues this film supplies as tension.

The Blu-ray transfer of the disc is fine boasting a 1080p High Definition transfer and a widescreen aspect ratio of 1.78:1 for the home video market. The sound is a decent, lossless English DTS-HD Master Audio track mastered in 5.1 that revs up the engines on your home entertainment system. Subtitles on the disc are in English, Spanish and French.

The anamorphically enhanced DVD on the disc is fine for the format and presented in standard def with a lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 track also boasting subtitles in English SDH, Spanish, and French. The Ultraviolet copy is great for the format and is excellent to view on your tablet or PC.

Extras on the disc include Road Rage: The Blood, Seat, and Gears of Joy Ride 3, Riding Shotgun with Declan: Director' Die-Aries, Finding Large Marge, an Audio Commentary and More.

All in all, if you are a fan of the franchise or looking for some road rage then this may be a worth checking out. Other than that, the film is typical for the genre and nothing to really write home about.

- James Harland Lockhart V

www.vimeo.com/jamielockhart