‘The Rideshare Killer’ Review
Stars: Tuesday Knight, Victoria De Mare, Croix Provence, Jeffry Druce, Oliver Robins, James Balsamo, Shuja Paul, Anouk Samuel, Gavin Peretti, Eric Roberts | Written and Directed by Ashley Scott Meyers
How many ride-sharing, serial killing, psychos are we going to get in horror movies? We seem to be getting a new rideshare horror movie at least once every-other month! It seems the “killer in the woods” trope of the genre is officially being replaced by guys (or girls) driving around in rideshare vehicles killing folks willy-nilly. To be fair though, “don’t get into cars with strangers” has been something of a cultural touchstone since the invention of the motor vehicle, though in my day that ‘threat’ was usually aimed at kids and strangers with candy tempting children into vans!
Given that we’ve had a lot of these kinds of films recently, as a filmmaker it’s starting to take something special to get audiences to watch your movie. After all, once you’ve seen one film about a rideshare killer you’ve seen them all. So what made The Rideshare Killer stand out to me? It’s cast. Well, ONE person in the cast… A certain actress who made a huge impact on me as a teen growing up watching 80s horror. Tuesday Knight! Knight is not the only former 80s star in The Rideshare Killer. Oliver Robins, who played Robbie in Poltergeist, also appears as a rideshare driver; plus (as with a lot of direct to market movies) we get Eric Roberts making an appearance as a Police Lieutenant investigating the case.
[Sidebar: as a teenager I had a serious bicycle accident and used the compensation to holiday in Los Angeles. Whilst visiting Century City, a mall on the old Twentieth Century Fox backlot, I saw a number of celebrities including Whoopi Goldberg. However, I absolutely lost my sh*t when I saw Knight run into a store… That’s how much of a fan I was of her!]
In The Rideshare Killer, Tuesday Knight plays the CEO of a new ridesharing app, Rock n Ride, who must stop a serial killer who’s using her company’s app to lure victims into his car… and their own. For yes, he’s not just killing passengers but also rideshare drivers in order to steal their rides! However it looks like the killer has more motives than just killing, it looks like he’s out to destroy the company, kill her entire team AND take down the rideshare industry as we know it.
Ashley Scott Meyers, the writer of Ninja Apocalypse and Snake Outta Compton, writes and directs this film which was the subject of a Kickstarter campaign that ended earlier this year, where Meyers dubbed the production a “mystery thriller feature film that pays homage to the great Italian Giallo films from the ’60s and ’70s but with a modern twist” and “Scream meets The Social Network”, which are two rather contrasting descriptions of the film and don’t even touch on parts of the film, given that – besides featuring a serial killing cabbie – The Rideshare Killer also deals with the idea of women in the workplace AND the safety of women in rideshares, in both cases touching on sexism and sexual harassment.
Like all good, and not so good, mysteries, The Rideshare Killer presents the audience with a myriad of suspects and red herrings. From former flames, current love interests, competitors, employees and investors, there are a TON of possible psychos to choose from in Meyer’s film. Though to be fair to writer/director Ashley Scott Meyers, most of those suspects are eliminated – literally – as his film goes full-on crazy at the hour mark, essentially descending into a montage of murder!
A montage that is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to The Rideshare Killer‘s visuals. Visuals that, as Meyer stated in the Kickstarter campaign, look heavily influenced by giallo; and by heavily influenced I mean look like they were staged to almost match frames from some of Italy’s biggest horror movies. There also seems to be a Wes Craven influence in the way our killer is presented towards the end of the movie – bathed in blue hues and dutch angles that look just like the way Craven shot some of the scenes in the original Nightmare on Elm Street. It’s obvious Meyers has studied other genre films in preparation for The Rideshare Killer – it’s just a shame that some other aspects of the film fall flat – namely the characters.
Between the script and the actors, a lot of characters in The Rideshare Killer feel “fake” – an odd thing to say about a film but there’s a level of insincerity to some of the performances and the dialogue that takes you out of the film entirely. And, unfortunately, at one crucial point in the film, at the crescendo of the story, it honestly becomes laughable. As is the epilogue which, let’s be fair, says women can never be serial killers… and if Friday the 13th taught us anything, they can!
