31 Nights Review: CLINTON ROAD

We begin in a busy night club run by Ice T. Four young friends cram into a booth and chew the fat and plan to go out to where the wife of one of them died and perform a seance. Too long for a prologue but too briefly presented to do more than suggest a lifestyle that will have no bearing on the rest of the story. There is one good moment. Eric Roberts comes to the doorbitch and says he's on the list. The doorbitch doesn't believe him so he flashes his licence and she apologises. She'd thought he was one of them pesky Eric Roberts impersonators again.

Then we're out in the bush on Clinton Road and the psychic falls to the dirt by the fire and does the funky gibbon which freaks everybody out. It freaks one of them out so much that he goes to the car to get his phone (and then just opens the door without the key). He's interrupted by a  ranger/state trooper/guy in a uniform who tells him to skedaddle. After the uniformed one vanishes things start happening like a big ginger incel with a blunt instrument (nyurk nyurk) who lumbers around roaring and hitting folks and a little girl who is not as scary as most under-tens who want to stay up past eight p.m. goes strolling around the woods with a security blanket.

The location of the title is a real place on a real map and subject to a lot of folklore, every item of which is included in a kind of tourist sideshow re-enactment. At some point they're in a building and then they're not and then it ends. 

I am a champion of the notion that cinema should be seen as a blank canvas with each new screening. It's difficult to dispel one's own experience of elements like plot and genre in order to do this but a little effort can add a sense of newness to any film you see. Apart from the bizarre night-club to backwoods trek we make here all we really get is a series of set ups shot with the cleanest looking digital video imaginable. There is no suspense. There is no sense of development. Nothing builds or mounts.

I did some Googling on this title and got far more than I expected. Articles in Variety and other trade mags mention Ice T being in the new supernatural horror Clinton Road. So, someone got a Go Pro and had some dirt on Ice T (and probably just knew Eric Roberts' mobile number) and asked Tommy Wiseau to fund the pre-press. 

It's my own fault. I go into Tubi and find things I haven't seen that I really might want to see. I tend to stay away from most of the genre fare as it's mostly knock-offs. You know that person who dresses with labels like Praba or Pierre Cordin after a holiday in Bangkok? Well if you go to Tubi you can feast on epics like Paranormal Phenomena or The Amityville Terror. This movie isn't a knock off of any specific movie and is unlikely to generate knock-offs. My mistake in choosing it discounted that important consideration. I broke out the old Val Lewton number Isle of the Dead afterwards which crapped all over it and got outta there.

I read the synopsis of Clinton Road and then flipped through the IMDB. The first page of user reviews are all shills who give it 10/10 or 9/10 if they want to throw you off the scent. The next page's ratings all plummet to the under 3/10 end of the spectrum. So, if you liked the cover art of this one, do like the ranger man says: "get off the road and go home! NOW!" Before he disappears.