Pick Me Up (2006)

Larry Cohen who has enriched the world of Exploitation cinema as the director of films like "Black Caesar" and "Q: The Winged Serpent" and, most memorably as the writer of films like "Maniac Cop" delivers one of the most outrageously entertaining "Masters of Horror" episodes with "Pick Me Up". While this eleventh episode of the first season does not quite reach the originality and ingenuity of the most brilliant entries to the series (such as Takashi Miike's "Imprint"), it does deliver what a "Masters of Horror" episode should: permanent suspense and genuine creepiness, paired with moments of incredibly morbid humor. A young woman named Stacia (played by sexy Fairuza Balk) is part of a bus-load of travelers, which, after breaking down in the middle of nowhere, bizarrely gets stuck between two psychopathic serial killers... I don't want to give too much away, but I can almost guarantee that people who like the show will also like this. The episode is suspenseful and creepy from the first minute, and sometimes spiced up with macabre humor, but never to a degree that would lessen the suspense). Fairuza Balk is sexy as always and fits perfectly in her role. Prolific actor Michael Moriarty and the less prolific Warren Kole are also very good in their roles. Along with the very first episode, "Incident On And Off A Mountain Road", "Pick Me Up" is probably the MoH episode that has the most genuine B-Movie-feeling, which should make it highly enjoyable to my fellow Horror/Exploitation fans. Overall, Larry Cohen is certainly not the most masterly director in the "Masters Of Horror" franchise (masters like Dario Argento, Stuart Gordon, John Carpenter and Takashi Miike as directors of other episodes make this quite impossible), but his episode "Pick Me Up" proves that he is a more than adept maker of genuine solid Horror. "Pick Me Up" is a creepy and deliciously macabre entry to the series which MoH-fans should certainly not miss.

I have to say I would have rated this as one of the best horror shorts of all time if it was not for the last 20 seconds.Fairuza was Great. Micheal was so fun as wheeler. I like how both the killers were not sympathetic characters..it would have been cheap to make one of them an antihero.I have to admit that as a good watch, this is a GREAT movie. Great pacing. The idea of two dueling serial killers is a statistical stretch.But I bought it.The stretch I could not buy was the dumb ending. It was very tales of the crypt. The dumb ending really cheapened the film. An ending like that was cute for the first 100 tales of the crypt gotcha endings, but it is SO Cliché to end a horror movie that way.4 serial killers on the same stretch of highway? whatever

Pick Me Up is from the Masters of Horror collection and is about a hitcher / road kill hugger that takes offense to a bus drivers desire to spice up the traveling by hitting animals trying to cross the road. The hitcher finds the bus and takes his anger out on the driver and those on board. A young girl in the bus just misses being hitcher bait several times until… A trucker also looking for the hitcher to exact some revenge comes into the act and uses the young girl as bait. Great acting makes this well directed film a big success in my mind as the pain of the actors comes through loud and clear. Not for anyone who doesn't like some blood and partial nudity.

I am very disappointed at Fairuza Balk for being in this episode. Although I haven't seen all the episodes of Masters Of Horror yet, this one is the one I've liked the least so far, mainly because I find it empty of serious plot elements, but full of gratuitous violence. The story is very lacking, and although I appreciate the main idea of this series of horror made for TV films, the duration of the episodes seems to be a real problem not just for viewers but also for directors and screenwriters who have to create a "scary" or gory film that lasts around 50 minutes. What they will be tempted to do, and do here, is to build their films on gratuitous and senseless violence. After the first 15 minutes of this one, when both the trucker and the hunter are definitely presented as being moronic killers and sick in the head, what is there to expect? Nothing else happens than an increasing build-up of violence, which not only is not scary, but even bores you to death because it's so uninteresting and there's really nothing at stake worth caring for. Ugly to watch, too, which is almost true for all the episodes. The cinematography seems inexistent, the music is crap. It's just north-American TV at its worst.