We join a pair of girls as they get off a flight in the USA inbound from Mexico somewhere. They are boisterous and clearly went to Mexico for lots of fun, one of them, for a last fling before settling down and getting married. The airport closes, just as they head through the baggage claim (so I guess it must be a small airport in the USA), and they're on the pavement wondering how to get to where they need to go.
Along comes a mini-bus with METRO written across the top/front, offering them their last chance to get to the city or spend the night outside the airport. Or walk, I guess! A couple of wise-cracking lads muscle their way in on the scene, clearly intending (one of them says so) to 'get laid' with either of the girls. The bloke driving the 'shuttle' (minibus) is not happy taking the two lads along but eventually relents, in order to keep the girls happy. There's another bloke on the bus who is a nervous wreck, wondering what his wife/family will say if he's late and is encouraging the driver to speed up.
This is where the action starts as all is not quite what it seems. The Shuttle journey gets a bit out of hand, meandering into seedy, dodgy-looking urban neighbourhoods, the driver telling them all that the main road is blocked so this is a shortcut. He reassures them that all is fine and to trust him as he's the driver. Whilst they are travelling through this area, a car drives straight at them, making the bus weave about, eventually bursting a tyre on the kerb.
As it's such a rough-looking area, they pool resources in terms of people-power and get the tyre changed as quickly as they can. However, during this process we have the first grizzly, nasty bit of horror as one of the lads is badly injured. They all leap back on the bus and the driver tells them that the hospital is only 2 miles away and that he'll head for it. They never see the hospital and this is where things start to unravel with twists and turns, people and events not being quite what they seem - and also where I need to say no more on the plot/story!
Laying aside the outcomes at the end of the film, it does indeed turn into a nasty, gory (at times) twisty-turny thriller with much abuse and unpleasantness being hurled at (particularly) the two girls. It all ends up being grizzly and chaotic, with not much left to the imagination. Clues along the way as to what's really going on are laid down, so, as I say, you'll probably get the idea at some point anyway.
The driver is played by Tony Curran (Defiance) convincingly but the limelight is stolen really by the two leads - the girls in question, played by Peyton List (The Tomorrow People, Mad Men) and Cameron Goodman (The Dead Undead) who seem to do a decent-enough job as we trail through. There's some tension here and there in the film, some of it's a bit silly, much of it dark - as the whole film is set over one night - so not only dark in tone! The claustrophobic inside of the mini-bus is often put to good use, closing the story in on the characters and audience, script is a little iffy, but yeah, OK, and pulling all these threads together it was almost believable, certainly thrilling - with the 1 hour 45 minutes passing quickly.
Yes, you can pick holes with some of it, as you can with most films, but overall it's worth a watch. Edward Anderson is the director/writer here, but I'd not heard of him and he doesn't seem to have many credits before or after this. It's not a new film, so you might need to be resourceful about how to watch it. The DVD is out there (even in used outlets) and it pops on/off of streaming/terrestrial channels now and again. Worth the hunt.
