Southbound is five interlocking tales of terror and remorse follow the fates of weary travelers: two men on the run from their past, a band on their way to the next gig, a man struggling to get home, a brother in search of his long-lost sister and a family on vacation, who find themselves on the highway to hell.
There's something beautifully sandy and gritty about the majority of Southland's stories. America's highways are a never ending dustbowl of horror, interspersed with sad motels and grim gas stations and the atmosphere is enjoyably unsettling.
This entertaining-enough quartet of loosely interwoven terror tales falls right into the middle ground of horror omnibuses, with no outright duds but no truly memorable (or scary) segments either.
Abstract and eerily incomplete, Southbound unfolds in a place where Marienbad heads south to the Twilight Zone and Dead End, and where moral failings collide with macabre consequences.
Southbound, is terse, significant work, efficiently felling frights and dread in a manner that may even resound with general audiences as well as genre aficionados.
