Open 24 Hours (2018) - 4/10 (Disliked it)
A young woman (Vanessa Grasse) working the night shift at a gas station is stalked by her serial killer ex-boyfriend. This indie slasher starts out promisingly and does a fairly good job with limited resources and locations (mostly in and around the gas station). Unfortunately, the script has issues, especially with believability. It starts with little things like characters asking questions of and giving answers to strangers that real people would not in the same situations and ends with bigger things like major plot coincidences. At the same time, because the boyfriend doesn't really show up until the final third, the first hour is overly reliant on the girl hallucinating (or seeming to hallucinate) that he's returned. That eventually numbed and confused me to the point that I didn't know what was real or not, which I think was the filmmakers' goal, but the effect was that I stopped caring and started to check out. Fortunately, the final 20 minutes are better because the hallucinations and coincidences go away and it just becomes a straight forward, visceral and gory slasher. That payoff was welcome, but not enough to redeem the film's faults for me. Overall, the film isn't too bad and is a decent option if you feel like a recent slasher, but it's not very good, either. BTW, my first clue that this English-language film that's set in the U.S. with a cast of mostly Canadians is actually a Serbian film: 2/3rds of the names in the end credits end with "ic." I'm not even exaggerating
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). You are absolutely right - not necessarily for the garbage part, but for the money part.
