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| Images courtesy of MVD Visual |
Years before achieving screen infamy
with, at the time, the lowest grossing film in US box office history with his
2006 no-budget pulpy neo-noir Zyzzyx Road, writer-director John Penney
had his hand in a fair amount of notable horror pictures including writing The
Power and Return of the Living Dead III as well as co-writing the
cult favorite The Kindred. With
his last film as a writer-director being the Thai set low-budget horror Hellgate
in 2011 followed by a segment done for Virus of the Dead in 2018, John
Penny and recurring collaborator Brian Yuzna put their heads together to form
genre label Dark Arts Entertainment which recently began reintroducing a number
of their cult offerings in newly restored special editions.
With emphasis on giving cult low
budget horrors a chance to shine on the center stage including the recently
released Terror Firma and Penny himself being one of the co-founders, it
was without question Penny’s company would eventually give his failed 2006
outing another shot with a re-edited 4K UHD director’s cut overseen by Penny
and co-star/co-producer Leo Grillo.
However, despite the pedigree of the cast, a simple premise and a bit of
a Lost Highway ‘devil-on-the-shoulder’ conceit, Zyzzyx Road I’m
sorry to say is still a bad barely-above straight-to-video film that became the
victim of a releasing strategy spearheaded by producer-actor Leo Grillo who
restricted the film’s theatrical booking to one theater in Dallas, Texas at the
time.
In the film, a midwestern Mojave-desert
set and shot neo-noir, we find accountant Grant in Las Vegas on a business trip
cheating on his wife on the side with bubbly tart Marissa (Katherine Heigl). Things are complicated by the arrival of Joey
(Tom Sizemore), her jealous and violent ex-boyfriend. Knocking him out and believing to have killed
him, they drive out into the desert deciding to bury him alongside the titular Zyzzyx
Road. But when Grant digs the grave
and returns to the car, the body is missing from the trunk. Also inexplicably throughout, Grant begins
seeing demonic visions appearing over Marissa’s face and the question becomes
whether or not Joey is dead, Marissa is even human or if any of them are actually
alive in what feels like some kind of Identity purgatory.
Starting out like Matthew Bright’s Freeway
with hints of The Hitcher and the vastly superior Blue Velvet homage
Red Rock West, Zyzzyx Road initially shows promise with an
unlikely Katherine Heigl seducing it up showing off her legs and acting
deliberately dumb and self-serving while Leo Grillo in the time-honored noir
tradition muses to himself about the pickle he has gotten himself into outside
of his married home life. At the time
Heigl was still a hot commodity for Gray’s Anatomy and to her credit she
steps outside of the box she would later place herself in with the court of
public opinion. Tom Sizemore, who was
dealing with substance abuse problems at the time of filming and failed drug
tests which affected production, is more or less his usual self here though he’s
got some really cornball lines to deliver near the end which sort of shears off
his stereotypical boorish unhinged dangerousness.
The best thing about it is the
cinematography by longtime Kevin Smith collaborator David Klein who films the
Mojave desert in two disparate tones, one of desaturated Daniel Pearl looking
dryness and the other an overly saturated fantastical looking rendition of the
same. Eventually going on to shoot Red
State and various episodes of True Blood, David Klein was no
stranger to horror. Where its
inexpensive budgetary means stick out like a sore thumb involves Ryan Beveridge’s
incidental indifferent score which occasionally switches into those distinctly
2000s montages of hyperkinetic editing for no reason. Otherwise, while the 4K restoration is good
in this instance it is not unlike putting lipstick on a pig.
Infamously released to die in one cinema,
earning a ghastly $30 during its single-theater nationwide run before being
sold to DVD in twenty-three countries by the end of the year, the film globally
made somewhere around $368,000 which isn’t terrible but still far below the $1.2
million production budget. In the press
notes for this release and in the director’s introduction precluding the film,
there’s notation about seeing this film ‘as it was always intended’. Personally, at this stage, I’d be embarrassed
to be pushing this hard for what is frankly an increasingly silly misfire
dressed up in neo-noir clothing. Likely
released as a favor to chief Dark Arts Entertainment co-founder John Penney, Zyzzyx
Road is no misunderstood masterpiece ripe for rediscovery by genre
fans. It was the kind of thing you’d stroll
by perusing Blockbuster Video store shelves or years later the Dollar
Stores. Seeing it get the full 4K UHD treatment
over so many other unsung masterworks trapped in ongoing rights-Hells can’t
help but make me feel somewhat ashamed to be a cinephile.
--Andrew Kotwicki
