"Growing up in the West with all those big landscapes, that's a world I know really well. I was drawn in by that, the isolation of it. You're talking about the one place in America where you can still run your car off the road and people won't even find you if you crash in the right spot."
-- Director John Dahl on Joy Ride
John Dahl recently received the annual award of Modern Noir Master from the Film Noir Foundation. His two best noir films are The Last Seduction (1994) and Red Rock West (1993) but all his movie and television work has significant noir elements. Joy Ride is the kind of mixed genre film, a noir road trip with horror elements, that once was common during the studio era, incorporating a cb radio (not seen much in movies since Sam Peckinpah's Convoy in 1978) as an important plot element. Three young people -- played effectively by Steve Zahn, Paul Walker, Leelee Sobieski-- are traveling across the West by car when they decide to pull a prank on a truck driver with the handle Rusty Nail, with one of the men imitating a girl who offers to meet Rusty Nail at a motel. This unfunny joke not surprisingly leads to violence, as Rusty Nail pursues the trio through a cornfield with an eighteen wheeler monster belching smoke while tracking them with spotlights.
Unfortunately John Dahl has not directed a film since 2007; the kind of mid-budget genre film he does so well is not currently much in fashion. He is, however, thriving in televsion. I recently watched the first episode of American Rust, which Dahl directed with a noir sensibility, though unfortunately the series was cancelled after one season.
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