Octane [2003]

Somewhere in Stephen Volk's script for Marcus Adams' timid and predictable road movie is the kernel of a good idea struggling to get out - sadly it's so good that it's been done to death many times before and usually a lot better. It filches ideas from The Hitcher [1986], Crash [1996], Near Dark [1987] and any other horror / road movie hybrid of the last two decades and stitches them together in a tedious and at times barely comprehensible mess.

It begins well enough, but it soon becomes clear that the good things about Volk's script [a revisionist take on vampirism, the strange lifestyle of the nocturnal inhabitants of the roadside diners] are going to be glossed over in favour of glib imagery and cliched characterisation. Nothing much happens for the first half hour as we are forced to listen to teenager Nat's constant whining - one almost cheers when she gets lured away by the blood cult but hopes that her mother might be as sick of her petulant ways and that she might opt to abandon her are soon dashed.

The second half of the film is a confusing mess as the main characters, including the mysterious "Recovery Man" - who isn't important enough to warrant a name but comes in useful for the info-dumps near the end that try to tie up the loose ends - converge on a research facility miles from anywhere. What they're all doing there isn't clear, nor is it clear why the cult's enigmatic leader, The Father [played by an embarrassed looking Jonathan Rhys-Myers], has to have pretend sex with Nat in a wind tunnel before slitting his tongue with a razor blade...

Nor is it really made clear why a film written and directed by Britons, financed with British money and filmed entirely in Luxembourg should try so hard – and fail so badly – to convince us that it's set in the States. The huge disadvantage of not being shot where it's supposed to be set clearly undermines Adams' efforts and there's never any real sense of place in Octane – the roads are all dull stretches of unremarkable tarmac filmed entirely at night and the location budget was so low that the two supposedly separate roadside diners that Senga visits are all too obviously shot in the same place.

Dull and predictable, Octane is a disappointment from writer Volk, whose previous work has included Ken Russell's under-rated Gothic [1986] and the outstanding TV special, Screen One: Ghostwatch [1992]. It feels as though a final draft was called for to iron out some of the film's oddities, though even that might not have been enough to straighten out the strange character motivations, lack of atmosphere and clichéd, badly drawn central characters. Senga's transformation from neurotic, over-protective, pill-popping wreck to super-efficient action heroine in the final scenes is particularly badly handled and Stowe – usually much better than this – seems to be at a complete loss as to how to handle it.

Perhaps its biggest flaw is that it simply tries to do too much in too short a space of time and with too few resources. Volk's script has many threads and diversions and never really stays with any one of them for too long, resulting in a choppy, disjointed film that hasn't a hope of making any sense. What starts as a simple, promising if derivative road movie suddenly starts to take itself terribly seriously when a misguided and unwarranted debate on the right and wrongs of abortion takes centre stage. The notion that the blood cult's leader has been targeting Senga all along for considering aborting Nat comes so late in the day and is so badly bungled that it renders much of what has gone before utterly irrelevant.

The Father is a strange character that seems to sum up all of Octane's many and varied problems. He looks good, has great potential but ultimately is revealed to be shallow and rather dull. His ability to tease out the most disturbing minutiae of Senga's past is the film's most interesting element yet it's under-explored and ultimately thrown away and forgotten about in the rush to get to the next barely related scene.

And then, just when you think it can't get any worse, Adams and Volk can't resist that most tired of genre clichés, the happy ending with the sting in the tail. They really needn't have bothered as it's unlikely that anyone would ever want a sequel to Octane, though that's clearly what's being set up at the end.

To its credit, the film looks good thanks to Adams and his cinematographer Robin Vidgeon, and the score – composed by Simon Boswell and performed by dance legends Orbital – is excellent, by far and away the best think about the film. Adams manages to wring a few spooky moments from the script, especially the haunting images of the wreckage littering the road after the cult has been at its grisly work, and gets a nice air of creepiness from the paramedics who aren't what they seem to be.

After a run of largely successful – or at least interesting – British horrors during the opening years of the 21st century, it was encouraging that production companies like Random Harvest could find the confidence in the genre to set up specialist production units like Four Horsemen. It's just a pity that Octane didn't deliver as much as it promised. It's even more disappointing in that it marked a return to that great bug-bear of the British horror film since the 1970s, the inability to develop what looks like a potentially viable idea and do anything with it.
KEVIN LYONS

Last Updated: 6 March, 2007