Joy Ride 3: Roadkill Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		2.5
Overall		1.5

Joy Ride 3: Roadkill Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 18, 2014

My brother-in-law, who cut one of the trailers for the original Joy Ride, saw the Blu-ray of Joy Ride 3 lying on my table and started looking at it, at which point he exclaimed, “J.J. Abrams?” as he perused the credits. That’s right, folks—the creative wizard behind everything from Lost: The Complete Collection to Star Trek Into Darkness (as well as some upcoming movie called “Galaxy Battles” or something like that), also co-wrote and co-produced the original horror thriller which has thus far spawned two sequels. As with many of these nascent horror franchises, there’s a law of diminishing returns at work, and Joy Ride 3: Road Kill offers few of the scares of the first as it follows the further adventures of the wonderfully named anti-hero Rusty Nails.

A certain low life ambience is established almost immediately in Joy Ride 3: Road Kill, with some crack smoking lovers cavorting in the sheets between puffs, and while the film perhaps marches up the evolutionary ladder a bit after this opening, it’s in incremental steps at best. The Joy Ride franchise owes more than a bit of gratitude to Steven Spielberg’s made for television movie Duel, for we’re confronted by a somewhat enigmatic seeming semi that is a menacing presence on various back roads. At least in Joy Ride, we’re given glimpses of the truck’s driver, the aforementioned Rusty Nails, but unlike Spielberg’s masterfully calculated increasing feeling of terror and despair, Joy Ride 3: Road Kill simply plays out as a series of gory vignettes where a series of incredibly attractive young folks (on their way to a road rally) getting sliced and diced in various relatively inventive ways. Genre enthusiasts may find enough blood and guts and slightly provocative sexuality here to warrant checking this out; others should probably take a detour to avoid this pretty lackluster effort.

Joy Ride 3: Roadkill Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Joy Ride 3: Road Kill is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. Perhaps surprisingly, given the lo-fi ambience of pretty much everything else in this movie, the video quality is sharp, consistently stable, and extremely well saturated. The many outdoor scenes offer substantial depth of field and even madly speeding tracking shots have little in the way of motion judder or other associated problems. Contrast is strong and Joy Ride 3: Road Kill for all its manifest flaws looks fantastic.

Joy Ride 3: Roadkill Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Joy Ride 3: Road Kill's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 is also surprisingly good, with great panning noises capturing the roars of cars (and trucks) speeding across barren highways, along with typically raucous source cues and cleanly presented dialogue. Fidelity is first rate and dynamic range is very wide.

Joy Ride 3: Roadkill Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Riding Shotgun with Declan: Director's Die-Aries (1080p; 9:22)


• Jewel's Message (1080p; 1:20)


• Road Rage: The Blood, Sweat and Gears of Joy Ride 3 (1080p; 11:52)


• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 5:41)


• Pre-Vis Sequences (1080p; 6:57)


• Finding Large Marge (1080p; 3:54)


• Commentary by Declan O'Brien

Joy Ride 3: Roadkill Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Joy Ride 3: Road Kill is by the numbers fare, but it moves quickly enough and has a couple of okay if derivative set pieces. Fans of the franchise will probably at least tolerate this latest entry, though it looks like the road may be coming to an end for this series unless someone (J.J. Abrams, perhaps?) can figure out a way to reinvent it. Technical merits are first rate, for those interested in the title.