The indie The Rambler begins as stylish mood piece. Somewhere in the barren Great Basin, a laconic guy (Dermot Mulroney) is released from prison back to his trailer, his snotty and unfaithful girlfriend and his cretinous friends. When offered a job by his brother in Oregon, he begins a road trip across the West. Although not much is happening as he begins the trek, there’s an inventive soundtrack that reels us in, along with a supporting cast of grotesques right out of Fellini or Leone.
So far, so good. Our hero picks up a mad scientist with a gadget that can supposedly record a person’s dreams on to VHS (VHS is another nice touch). 26 minutes into the film, they meet another guy in a bar, hook him up to the gadget – and his head explodes – Holy Shit – didn’t see that coming!
And then there’s the first of a few extremely disturbing dream sequences, with lots of gore. Although Dermot Mulroney keeps staring impassively through his aviator sunglasses, The Rambler turns next into an homage to David Lynch, and, finally, to Rob Zombie.
At 70 minutes, Mulroney dreams that he is strapped to a bed when a dummy dressed like an old hag plunges through the window above his head and vomits what looks like yellow paint on to his face and into his mouth. It is an extended vomit scene – 58 seconds (I timed it).
The writer/director responsible for this disjointed collection of shock pieces is Calvin Lee Reeder. It’s pretty bad, but the most insulting part of the film is the last three minutes – a montage of the road trip’s horrors, essentially a highlight reel of the movie’s shockers in case you have already erased them from your memory. I am now certainly going to follow Reeder’s career (if he has one), because The Rambler is astonishingly bad.
The Rambler is available on DVD from Netflix and streaming from Amazon, iTunes, Vudu and YouTube.
1 thought on “The Rambler: are you kidding me?”