Midnight In The Switchgrass Keeps You Involved In Spite Of The Absurdities

Midnight In The  Switchgrass

Director

Randall Emmett

Writers

Alan Horsnail

Cast

Emile Hirsch,Megan Fox,Lukas Haas

Plot

FBI Agent Karl Helter and his partner Rebecca Lombardo are very close to busting a sex-trafficking ring. When they realize their investigation has crossed the path of a brutal serial killer, they team up with a Texas Ranger to put an end to the infamous ‘Truck Stop Killer’.

Rating: ** ½

Midnight In The  Switchgrass Review: I once remember talking about the mind and thought process  of supari killers with Ram Gopal Varma. He told me they treat it as any  regular job. They get up in the morning, brush their teeth. shave, have breakfast with wife and kids and leave  for work.

Some such “normalcy” shrouds  the  murky misogynistic  doings of the serial killer  Peter, played with  chilling casualness  by Lukas Haas(remember him as the 8-year  murder eyewitness  in the Harrison Ford thriller?). Peter  loves his wife, dotes on his daughter,  gets into  his truck at night and  drives off to ‘work’  , work   being luring abducting raping or  confining  teenage girls.

Haas’s  serial-killer act,replete with an underground cave where he chains and subjugates women, is a masterclass  in normalized sociopathy. This is why nabbing him becomes  tough. He seems  so  normal on  the surface.But  in this film  the  killer is  known to us from the beginning. He has  already  snuffed the lives of many young women in Florida where the plot unfolds. The  local police force  has  almost given up.

 This is when Bruce Willis  and  Megan  Fox enter  the scene  as  two nosy  FBI  officers.This  is where  things get sticky, not only for the serial killer but also the  script. Willis suddenly disappears  from the scene. I wondered  if he had  been abducted  by the killer.Just as myseriously Willis returns   to the script as  if , after deciding to quit , he had second thoughts.

Maybe he  fell out with the  director or the cinematographer  for not making him  look as   fetching as his  co-star, Ms Fox who turns on  the charm full-blast. At  the start she plays a dishy decoy  delivering  a drug-dealing pimp(Colson Baker) some hard blows on his  head  and more delicate parts. Later when she is abducted  it is hard to believe  this  spirited woman could be so easily  subjugated.

The glaring   anomalies  apart, the  film deliver some solid  suspenseful episodes,like the one where the  imprisoned  girl makes her escape and  finds her way into a kindly old woman’s house putting both the ladies in  danger. The killer Peter’s inquisitive  little  daughter provides  just the right dose of  antibody  to her father’s toxic conduct.

This  is  not  a serial-killer film to rival  Psycho or Hannibal .But it  has a certain slut-value . The  killings  and the probe  have  a sleazy  shock-value  . And Emile Hirsch as  a troubled  cop trying to track down  a sex-trafficking gang,brings  a welcome dose  of gravity to the  otherwise-puerile  proceedings. But it is Lukas Haas as the serial  killer who steals  the show. I am not sure that’s a  good thing.