User Reviews

Perhaps I'm a little biased because I live in Belgium myself (and this movie was entirely financed here) but I honestly don't think that "Engine Trouble" is half as awful as all my fellow commentators claim it is. Sure, the story is something you've already seen a thousand times before and, yes, the dialogues are so poorly written they make your ears ache, but then still there are really decent elements to enjoy, like a fair amount of tension and a couple of raw shock effects. Especially the first hour is surprisingly entertaining as the screenplay blends simple suspense with some cheerful horror-clichés. Two beautiful (lesbian?) girls go on a road trip and their rusty car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. One girl mysteriously disappears when she leaves to get help and the other finds herself stalked by a horribly deformed killer. The second half of the film is overlong and mainly boring, also because the plot becomes too déjà-vu and repetitive. It goes without saying that the 'monster' is only an underdeveloped being and it are, in fact, his guardians who are the real maniacs. The low-budget production aspects are fairly well camouflaged by using simple tricks, like deserted filming locations, monotonous camera-work and vaguely shot scenery. The make-up on the killer is very cool, though, and he carries around a gleaming sharp sickle! "Engine Trouble" isn't as gross as it looks, especially not since producer James Desert is mostly known for his downright sick movies like "Rabid Grannies" and "Lucker – the Necrophagous". Gorehounds will mostly likely cheer for the nauseating decapitation sequence, though! The acting performances are overall very bad, but that's hardly an obstacle anymore if you're used to seeing trash-horror flicks like this. "Engine Trouble" is fun to watch and definitely worth a rental whenever you feel like seeing a simplistic slasher.

Now I am not one for slasher flicks and this one lacked that. I get the plot, it's pretty self explanatory. Two woman decide to take what appears to be a road trip through the countryside only to end up with a abused, gas mask wearing, weapon wielding, orange jump suit wearing,tortured soul on a mission to inflict pain onto others because he was abused as a child/man. The movie was more comical than scary and it was hard to actually get scared when I couldn't stop laughing. Oh did I mention that he is a acrobatic killer? Yeah I guess I left that part out but you would've figured it out once you see him do a one handed cartwheel off the front of the car while still holding his weapon in his hand, such a talent. This looks like it was filmed in a poor part of England, very poor. I couldn't take the killers character seriously as he grabs one of the woman by their hair out of the car, brings them up to the roof of the car, slices her head off, you see the head roll down the windshield, where is the blood you ask? Well it came trailing down behind it after a few seconds, really? Overall this film is a result of bad parenting and child abuse, the killer clearly was saddened to be locked up in a dungeon by his douche bag father and finally escaped his grasp only to come back home and get scolded by his father, the film is just awful but if you need a good laugh, please feel free to watch this movie!

The movie opens with a woman looking like she is preparing to go out, but instead hangs herself. After the opening credits, which are done in red so we know it will be a good movie, 2 women decide to go on a holiday. Their car breaks down. This is the first car I have seen overheat because they were trying to start it. Phones have dead batteries (they work later) and they can't read a map. One of them decides to go back to the service station for help while the other remains with the car...because they don't want anybody to steal it? European title is "Engine Trouble" or "Damned Forest." But since "Junior" did so well in 1994, they opted for it in the US.

A mechanic fixes the car with duct tape. Rebecca (Cecilia Bergqvist) drives back to the station but there is no Sandra (Marlene Simons). The sounds from within the gas station suggest that there is the proverbial man-creature locked up. Not much to figure out from here. All you have to do is to connect the creature to the suicide woman, have him get loose, give him a signature murder weapon or default chainsaw, add a gratuitous shower scene and you got yourself a hit slasher film. But NOOOOOO! Apparently in Belgium they have a different idea on how to make a Slasher film, there is no shower scene! Otherwise pretty much what to expect from a slasher.

F-bomb, good sound track, no sex, no nudity, chained up women.

ENGINE TROUBLE is a very low budget Belgian serial killer thriller that plays out like WRONG TURN. The budget is so low that nothing happens for most of the running time, leaving the viewer stuck with a couple of uninteresting female characters whose journey goes awry when their car breaks down. Eventually they're chased by the usual psycho killer. The director might like De Palma but this is your typical indie, with diluted thrills and a real lack of expertise.

Stop me if you've heard this one before: Two young women who embark on a road trip find themselves in considerable jeopardy from a vicious mentally challenged mutant killer and his equally ferocious father after their car breaks down in the middle of nowhere. Director Marc Ickx, who also co-wrote the hackneyed and uninspired script with Liam Bradley, relates the derivative and grindingly predictable meandering narrative at a painfully sluggish pace, hurts the viewer's ears with plenty of rusty tin-eared dialogue (sample line: "Is this the road trip from hell or what?"), and, worst of all, fails to generate any much-needed suspense or creepy atmosphere. The cruddy dubbing, an excruciatingly drawn-out and uneventful first forty minutes, and the fact that the main character of Rebecca comes across as an insufferably shrill, whiny, and thoroughly unappealing bitch certainly doesn't help matters any. The acting virtually without exception is pretty bad, although Bob Dougherty tries hard as the psycho's angry pop and Marcel Romeijn makes for a fairly grotesque subhuman fiend. Things perk up a tad in the second half, with some nice'n'nasty gore and a reasonably cool geekoid wackjob, but that's still not enough to compensate for the general tedium, hopelessly shopworn and threadbare screenplay, and crippling dearth of originality. A real clunker.

Many years ago, I purchased a DVD set at Wal-Mart that had 8 Artisan films on it. Lionsgate had put out a DVD collection of them for the bargain bin after its acquisition of Artisan. I'm just now getting to them. Shame on me! I could have been watching and telling friends about the truly bad film "Junior" or "Engine Trouble." Get your popcorn ready for bad movie night!

This is one of those amazing bad movies in which nearly every aspect of it is incompetent, misguided, weird, technically insufficient, offensive, or cliched all at once. You should go out of your way to see if you're a fan of truly awful movies. Even the poster is incredible in how it makes you think you're about to watch a sequel/ripoff of "My Bloody Valentine."

Let's start with the observation that the main actresses speak with some vaguely Western European accent yet the vehicle they drive has the steering wheel on the left-hand side. The gas station attendant speaks with an American accent. The entire movie seems to have been shot in only 4 locations that are close to each other.

The villain in this wannabe slasher film is a handicapped young man whose father keeps him locked up as some sort of pet. Dad lets Junior out sometimes to harass the patrons of the gas station who are always beautiful young women on their way to an abandoned military outpost? There's no beach or any reason for anyone to go there. Dad also sabotages their vehicles so they can't escape...even though there is a highway near the base.

When Junior attacks the main character, he beats on her car for a good ten minutes for the longest, funniest "jump scare" ever. He also eventually does a back flip off the top of the car. Seeing people drive by on the highway behind the car highlights how laughable this is. Couldn't they have at least filmed at dusk? I suppose that would make the grainy image even harder to see. Many scenes lack any sort of sound effect making your long for another crazy thing to happen.

The dad captures the heroine and chains her up in a wedding dress? What?!? The rest of the film is a weird interchange between the dad and the heroine (pretended to be Junior's dead mother) about how each of them has scarified for Junior's welfare or loves him. Seriously, this lasts at least twenty minutes. It is as if the director used this part of the script to work through personal issues he was having with family instead of talking to a therapist. I don't think you could write something that misguided on purpose.

The film is actually pretty offensive to those with real disabilities. It never bothers to detail what exactly is wrong with Junior. He's just the way he is. His outfit and hook hand are supposed to make him scary. He's about as scary as your try-hard neighbor is on Halloween. For masochists who love bad films, this one is a must-see.

The movie starts off with what sounds to be a very fun "sounding" trip. I was expecting the movie to be about the adventures that were experienced on the trip, but instead the movie was much much more complicated than even that! There is a gas station (of horrors, one could easily say!) where seemingly helpful people are not so helpful after all...and as it so turns out. There are not very many characters in the movie, but those that are in the movie are very well developed. Their actions and motivations make sense, and are realistic within the context of the environment and within the parallel themes that run throughout the movie. Film. Being in a wheelchair myself, I found myself dualistically empathizing with the title character and feeling sort of put-off by his behavior. Some of the things he did (such as bouncing on the roof of the car for 20 minutes) didn't seem very thoughtful. It was this event, after all, that lead up to him being set on fire by proxy via an exploding car. These elements, along with Freudian themes of motherhood and time travel, only complicated my viewing experience. The ending, needless to say, was ironic. Everyone is exposed for being the true person that they are and one is left to wonder what horrors have yet to unfold at the unhelpful gas station. My favorite character was the old lady, especially if I am to submit to the notions bestowed unto her by the old man, if you catch my drift!