Zzyzx

Make sure you spell Zzyzx right, and don’t confuse it with another movie called Zzyzx Road.  Zzyzx has three main characters stranded on a desert road and you DON’T want to join them.

Two young men, Lou and Ryan (Kenny Johnson, Ryan Fox) are on a roadtrip to Las Vegas. Lou is the dominant one, somewhat a bully to his friend, calling him "Mitch" because it rhymes with...well, you know. Ryan is a humble geek, obsessed with the legend of a cult that once inhabited Zzyzx Road, on which they are travelling. He thinks he can hear broadcasts from the cult, which was active in the 60s, on his radio headphones.

During their ride on the desolate desert road, Lou almost runs a man down by accident. When Ryan gets upset, Lou pushes his buttons and makes a U-turn with the car, implying he really is going to run the man down. Ryan panics, grabs at the steering wheel, and the man is mowed down by accident.  As the young men decide what to do, they see another person coming down the road. In a hurry, they dump the body in their back seat. The new person is Candice (Robyn Cohen), who, through her story, reveals she is stranded in her broken down trailer with her new husband, the man the guys just ran over. The guys join her at the trailer to "wait" for her husband, and Lou plays some mind games with both Candice and Ryan, alongside Ryan's increasing obsession with his cult, and some secrets that Candice has.

There are also some bookends to this main story, about a Mexican family finding some bones in the desert.


The name of the road helps to give the story a flavor of the unknown as well as imply a finality to something, having used a few of the letters at the end of the alphabet with no meaning to the word itself.  This suspenseful horror film, although obviously a small budget movie, had to depend heavily on the dynamics between the three characters as well as the performances of the three actors. The two guys were down pat with their characters. While Lou was annoying, the actor Kenny Johnson did a very good job of slipping in the hints of some military trauma to explain some of his psyche. Ryan Fox embodied a meek victim whose repressed anger finally comes out. Robyn Cohen had to play a dual role, an innocent newlywed and then an opportunistic deceiver later. The suspense level doesn't let up and it provides some twists at the end to keep the questions about Candice coming, although ultimately for her character it was explained away a little too much for my tastes.

I also liked the bits with the Mexican family, whom I believe were amateur actors. The final shot of the daughter picking up the radio headphones, potentially leading to some cult brainwashing her part too, gives the film an eerie ending. You should watch it twice, as near the end of the film it offers some flashbacks and you can see how the actors and the script dealt with them in previous shots.