In the middle of nowhere, a recently divorced female traveler, who is a passenger on a bus that has broken down, gets caught in a bizarre and violent turf war between serial killers.
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Now this is tale of two serial killers who hit a bump in the road , that bump in the road is each other . The camera work was done really well and most of the time it was brilliantly acted , the storyline was really good , I was hooked to the screen and I didn't want to take my eyes of of it , but the down side is that its not a master of horror , horror nowadays is overrated, someone gets stabbed in a film and somewhere down the line someone calls it a horror , horror genre should be films that make you scared , unfortunately I wasn't scared, I think their should be a different kind of genre for these types of movies and that is Gothic thriller , so its all around the Gothic theme it has gore and vampires or whatever but doesn't actually scare you, pick me up is exactly that the plot was amazing and i just loved the bond between the two serial killers, cliché ending though could have been made more exciting , but it made me smile really good film 8/10
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.
Cult director Larry Cohen and mediocre genre scribe David Schow team up for "Pick Me Up," one of the weakest MOH episodes from Season One. The story follows a bunch of travelers whose bus breaks down in an isolated mountainous region. Some opt to go off to the nearest town with a trucker (played by Michael Moriarty, even more obnoxious than usual), some stay at the bus, and one tough-as-nails woman (Fairuza Balk) decides to walk off in the opposite direction on her own. She soon realizes that she's become a killer's prey, but she's unsure of who the killer is. This episode plays with the fear of hitchhiking--of both the hitchhiker and the driver. The story-line starts off decent and it's suspenseful enough, until you actually figure out what's going on. After that, it just descends into absurd nonsense, especially in its last 10 minutes or so. Cohen's trademark sense of black humor doesn't really pop up until the end, and by that point I was ready to throw the towel in. It does have it's high points -- it's fairly violent and the gore effects are well done. And Balk is excellent, as usual, though underused here. So it's gross enough to please horror fans, but it's not particularly original and the twists and turns are stupid, especially considering its otherwise serious tone.
Affable, eccentric twisted trucker Wheeler (a marvelously quirky portrayal by the always excellent Michael Moriarty) and vicious drawling hillbilly homicidal hitchhiker Walker (robustly essayed with lip-smacking fiendish relish by Warren Kole) engage in a ferocious territorial dispute on a remote stretch of backroads highway. Brassy, fiercely self-reliant Stacia (a fabulously fiery'n'feisty performance by Fairuza Balk) gets caught in the middle of this lethal battle of wit and wills between two radically different, yet equally deadly itinerant psychos. Ace B-horror flick director Larry Cohen, working from a wickedly clever and witty script by acclaimed splatterpunk author David J. Schow (pitting two major scary icons of the "danger on the road" fright film sub-genre against each other is an inspired stroke of pure deranged genius), ably sustains a steady snappy pace throughout and effectively creates a creepily unnerving atmosphere that's punctuated by occasional outbursts of startling savage violence and culminates in one doozy of a surprise twist ending. Brian Pearson's crisp, handsome cinematography (the overhead camera shots are especially breathtaking), Jay Chattaway's brooding, ominous, but harmonic country score, a pitch-black sense of morbidly funny macabre humor, and a welcome appearance by Laurene Landon as a friendly lady who gets bumped off by Wheeler add substantially to the overall warped fun of this nicely sick and perverse little treat.