The Horror Connection
Highway to Hell
1991
director: Ate de Jong
starring Patrick Bergin, Adam Storke, Chad Lowe
Highway to Hell seems to falter at every turn in its attempt to
mix the comic elements with those of action and horror. None of
this manages to come together in a way that pays off. The script ‘
was written by a young Brian Helgeland, whose main credit at the
time was writing A Nightmare on Elm Street 4 (1988). Anyone who
believed he had a future as a distinguished scriptwriter and an Oscar winner had to be psychic. Helgeland’s script is neither smart nor witty and tries to cover its lack of creativity and originality by placing in random elements from better movies that preceded it.Highway to Hell is directed by Ate de Jong, a Dutch filmmaker apparently well respected in his native land. In the US his greatest achievement is the all-but forgotten Beetlejuice rip-off Drop Dead Fred (1991) starring Phoebe Cates. I am unfamiliar with his Dutch movies
, but judging from his two American films, it seems he is not one of the greater visionaries to come out of Europe. De Jong’s vision of hell isn’t very interesting, it looks like a scarcely populated post-apocalyptic world. The lack of imagination may be due to budgetary restraint, but he may have accidentally created one of the more optimistic views of hell as it appears to not have many inhabitants.
David Maloney
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