I almost wish Devil’s Mile had been bad, because that would be easier to take. But (except for the effects, which were cheap and looked it) instead it was consistently nearly really good, and I don’t even know exactly what I would have done to fix it, which is somehow even worse than all the rest.

So there are these kidnappers, driving to somewhere to deliver their victims to a mysterious figure in the shadows that they might as well have named Mr. Big, because he’s definitely a trope instead of a person. And they get lost on the way, somehow? And they slip from crime drama into teen slasher long enough to be warned away from a road that they take anyway, driving long enough to drift into Tarantino meets J-Horror and/or Lovecraft, which is where the movie uneasily remains until the credits roll.

But the thing is, it’s not clever enough to borrow so much premise from Tarantino, and it’s not haunting enough to borrow so much horror inspiration from Japanese cinema, and it’s not creepy enough to borrow so much mood from Lovecraft. So I mostly just sat there wishing that either the sum of the parts had merged into something amazing instead of congealing into, well, the thing I was watching on TV, or else that at least the characters would die faster.

I would watch something else by this creative team, though, because the concepts were solid, or at least had potential. It’s just that the execution, in nearly every sense of the word you can imagine, was lacking.