Shannon Sossamon in "Road to Nowhere"
“ROAD TO NOWHERE” My rating: C
121 minutes | MPAA rating: R
Movies about the making of movies have produced such delights as Francois Truffaut’s “Day for Night” and Richard Rush’s “The Stunt Man.”
Alas, Monte Hellman’s aptly titled “Road to Nowhere” is far from a delight.
This is the first film in 20 years for Hellman, a Roger Corman protege whose 1971 “Two Lane Blacktop” (James Taylor and the Beach Boys’ Dennis Wilson played rootless drag racers) flopped at the box office but subsequently became a cult landmark.
Hellman’s has been an uneven career. Most of his films get only limited distribution, yet he’s held in high esteem by his fellow filmmakers.
“Road to Nowhere” entwines two narratives. First there’s the story of a group of mostly young moviemakers who arrive in North Carolina’s Smoky Mountains to shoot a noirish thriller based on recent events in that locale.
Their on-the-set scenes alternate with footage they’re shooting. It takes a while to figure out what’s “real” and what’s the movie-within-the-movie.
Generally when this sort of setup is employed it’s to draw comparisons between truth and fiction and the ways in which each can bleed over into the other. But I’m darned if I can figure out what Steven Gaydos‘ screenplay is getting at. It seems a random collection of scenes that don’t lead to any sort of resolution and packs zero emotional punch.
The film being shot is based on a scandal involving sex, murder, corruption and rampant thievery involving a local politician and a beautiful young woman named Velma Duran. Both the mover and shaker and Velma vanished along with a fortune in the taxpayers’ money; they are presumed dead (badly decayed bodies were found) but nobody knows for sure.
Shannyn Sossamon plays an unknown actress cast as Velma; Tygh Runyan is the up-and-coming young director who falls for her. Cliff de Young is the “name” actor playing the charming/crooked politico. Waylon Payne is a vaguely sinister local hired to serve as a consultant; Dominique Swain is the regional blogger on whose investigation the screenplay is based.
All this sounds perfectly workable, yet “Road to Nowhere” adds up to, well, nothing.
| Robert W. Butler
Butler's Cinema Scene 
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