First off WOW . Sometimes you get unexpectedly, great movies when you least expect. I go thru my on-demand on all my premium cable channels which is included in my subscription and stumbled on this. I tend to be drawn to movies with teens or 20 somethings finding HORROR in off beat, backwards places, but I digress. This movie surprised me in a great way. Sure there was the typical horror stuff which I come to love in every horror movie good and bad but than the twist , oh the wonderful , fantastic twist . Totally out of left-field. I thought the acting was better than a lot of these genre of movies . The cinematography was lacking but that was OK. I guess I should have sensed something unexpected because , with each death or near death something strange happens.I wont tell what it is. See this movie and another like it BLACKWOODS.

This is a low budget movie, very low budget in fact, but as such i definitely have seen much worse. There are elements that works rather well. The score and the actors are the best parts. Also the camera work is quite solid and the make-up department has nothing to be ashamed of with the gore work being one of the films strongest parts.

On the negative side is a thin story that can't fill up the 90 min of running time. The gang of five spend the last 75 minutes of the film at the mysterious gas-station and that is at least 30 minutes to long. As a result the film becomes slow paced, which isn't something that has has to be negative, but the script doesn't compensate by developing the characters. The audience actually doesn't know anything about them when the film is over. In this aspect the film fails completely.

Due to the fairly uninteresting events in front of our eyes with a bunch of strangers running around and shouting each others names randomly, it's no surprise that the suspense factor drops. There are some moments, but to few to keep me fully interested. The stench that the viewer should understand to be something threatening does not work particularly well simply because that out of all things that scares us, 99% is sensed through our eyes.

Nuf said. The ending is clever and answers the questions raised during the movie. I believe the film maker has some talent for this genre and it will be interesting to view his next effort, hopefully with a bigger budget.

I regard Reeker as being a great horror movie - one of the best examples of the genre that I've seen in the current decade, though I've noticed that quite a few people seem to have problems understanding the film's storyline.

Here's my interpretation of the movie: the central premise of the film seems to be that sometimes people are killed in accidents that are so sudden that they don't actually realise what's happened. In these cases, the victims find themselves in a limbo between life and death - a world that looks identical to ours, with the exception that nobody else is there, and also time works differently (no matter how long you spend in this limbo, only a few seconds pass in the real world).

This is what happens to the main characters in the film. The moment occurs when they stop at the side of the road to let Trip out, and Cookie takes the opportunity to dash behind the bushes. Everyone feels what they assume to be an earth tremor. In fact, this is when Henry (Michael Ironside) had a heart attack while driving his RV, and plowed into them.

Once they've arrived in limbo, the Reeker hunts down the individuals who didn't survive the accident, killing them in ways similar to how they actually died in the real world (eg: Nelson getting a shard of glass in his throat after crashing through a window, Cookie receiving internal injuries while going to the toilet). As they now realise they're dead, this allows the victims' souls to pass on, going to the afterlife/heaven/hell/whatever.

Jack (the blind guy) and Gretchen survived the crash, and therefore the Reeker wasn't able to kill them.

As for the glimpses of 'the dying people', these are the victims of the other accidents mentioned by the policeman at the end of the movie - including the family we see in the pre-title sequence. They've already been killed by the Reeker, and are in the process of moving on to the afterlife. In the same way - because the limbo is half-way between the land of the living and the realm of the dead - we also occasionally see visions of Radford (the drug dealer) as he tries to save the lives of the crash victims, back in the real world.

The writing in the Bible and on the walls was presumably made by somebody (or several somebodies, over a long period of time) who had previously been trapped in the limbo, and realised that something was after them. Eventually the Reeker must have gotten them.

Gretchen seems to briefly retain some memories of what happened in limbo (She murmurs "Why didn't you try to help us?" to Radford as he pulls her out of the wreckage),and Jack also remarks that he can dimly remember being able to see Gretchen for a moment, but the final scene indicates that they have forgotten about the Reeker and the Half-Way Motel.