Macabre…ish Horror Review: Tailgate

Tailgate, 2015/ 1 hr 23 min

A man (Sam Young) is locked in the trunk of a car, there’s a note that says, “in 3 days, kill him” pinned to the top of it. He has no idea why he’s there, nor does the man (Peter Marshall) who’s driving, who also seems scared. And they do not know each other. Plus there is a dead body in the back seat.

So the man in the trunk negotiates for his freedom but doesn’t succeed. When someone approaches the car because he hear’s yelling from the car, the driver runs him over. Then warns his passenger that he’ll be next if he doesn’t shut up. So the guy in the trunk does the opposite. The driver then puts on a gas mask and fumigates the trunk until his passenger is quiet.

Then a siren wakes him up and he immediately starts antagonizing the driver again and making a ruckus to get the cop’s attention. It does not work.

Once the passenger calms down, he starts asking questions to figure out who he’s dealing with and how many people he’s killed. The driver plans to use their 3 days to figure out how this guy ended up in his car and what to do about that.

The driver gets the guy in the trunk water and food. Meanwhile he keeps trying to figure out how to escape. Including trying to build rapport with the driver as he cleans the remains from his back seat.

The man in the trunk decides the driver must be a contract killer. And while the guy in the trunk hopes all the sirens and choppers around are searching for him. He is informed that there has been no news coverage regarding his disappearance.

Then after a phone call, the driver insists he knows more than he’s admitting too. So the man in the trunk starts firing off everything he remembers before he ended up in the trunk. Continuing on with personal info to make it harder for the driver to kill him or forget him when he’s dead.

Then the driver tells his story and it’s a sad one. It turns out, the man in the trunk is to quite the opposite than presented. The end has quite a twist.

This is Australian thriller, directed by Jai Hogg, is film with few names and really only 2 people in most of the movie. And it managed to be really entertaining and I definitely wasn’t expecting that ending. This movie was very well thought out and well executed.