Road to Nowhere (Monte Hellman, 2010) (Patreon)

Neither a disaster nor an auteurist triumph, Road to Nowhere tells us a few things about the changes in B-movie logic since Hellman made his genre masterworks. In the age of cable TV and streaming video, there's only artsploitation, an attempt to titillate the viewer in order to separate them from their precious attention. This is essentially a deconstructed erotic thriller, but not deconstructed in the Derridean sense. More in the culinary use of the term: all the elements are there, but they are laid out clearly for the viewer's inspection. So although the film-within-the-film dabbles in film noir tropes, the frame story sort of unties those strings, all the better to trip over them.

The result is a middling approximation of early 90s Abel Ferrara, especially The Blackout and New Rose Hotel. Unlike Ferrara, Hellman is extremely literal, and the results can be plodding at times. One could imagine the director, and/or writer Steven Gaydos, hypothesizing that if one were to remake Mulholland Dr. but make it a bit more linear, you'd get a movie that is so plainspoken in its fatalism that it might make realism seem strange. It doesn't exactly work, but Hellman does succeed in capitalizing on Shannyn Sossamon's odd combination of seductress and little-girl-lost. If we are to take Road to Nowhere at face value, it suggests that femme fatales walk among us, hiding in the plain sight of ostensible fiction. But Hellman provides enough leeway to allow us to jettison face value in favor of, well, almost anything we want.