Twilight Highway

This is clearly a low budget indy, but it is very well acted and atmospheric. I really liked it, especially the sense of intimacy! The performances by Sandy Baron, who appeared on a number of SEINFELD episodes as Jack Klompus, co-director and writer Laurie Tayor-Williams, also a SEINFELD alum (Risa Costanzo), and DV DeVincentis, are all mysterious and naturalistic. Directors Taylor-Williams and Merce Williams, a married couple, are to be commended for making a small character driven European style film in New Jersey or Long Island, some suburb of New York anyway. There is almost a Hopper-esquire feel to the locations.

Yes there is: a plot that won't work. You would think there is no going wrong with a title like this, "Twilight Highway". One of the girls stranded at the run-down Bayview Motel even gets to sing a song by the same title. I'm thinking David Lynch, I'm thinking David Cronenberg, I'm thinking Townes van Zandt. Two young girls with time to kill. Two guys with high hopes and a broken car. An ancient, shady motel owner who lives in the past (fine performance by Sandy Baron, apparently the only member of the cast who ever appeared in anything but this film). The ingredients are all there, but the story fails to engage. "Twilight Highway" tries very hard to be funny, melancholic and mysterious, but it ends up being ridiculous, boring and confusing, culminating in an anti-climax shootout if there ever was one. What a waste. A title like that, someone else might have turned it into solid gold.