Night Drive is set inside the Nyari private game reserve in Mpumalanga, South Africa where gamekeeper Jack Darwin (Greg Melvill-Smith) is angry that his anti-poaching unit is being canned by his boss because of publicity fears. Jack believes that the public has every right to fear as he is convinced gangs of armed men wander the reserves killing anyone they meet to use in sadistic rituals held by the so called 'Hyena Man' & his men, Jack's boss is having none of it & says that he has to supervise a group of tourists on a night drive, a safari drive through the game reserve but at night. Jack is unhappy but has zero choice so along with his man Akani (Yule Masiteng) they prepare for the night drive. Suddenly Jack's son Sean (Christopher Beasley) turns up & joins them & the tourists in order to scatter hate mother's ashes, while enjoying the South African landscape tourist Karen (Corine Du Toit) stumbles upon a mutilated corpse left by the Heyena Man gang. Soon they are being stalked, attacked & killed by the gang...
This South African production was written & directed by Justin Head & is pretty bad, in fact it's just about as bad as any American low budget horror. The script is a mess, what could have been a great horror thriller that explored the cultural heritage of South Africa & used it's myth's & legends to add considerable background to the story all the script offers is some vague rubbish about Voodoo & a few almost pitch black rituals involving slicing people up with machetes. The character's are all stock horror film clichés, the cop with a dark past which he feels great guilt for, the father who has a uneasy relationship with his son until they need to pull together, a really annoying white guy who makes really bad decisions & seems to try his hardest to make people hate him, the romantic love interest who the hero falls in love with & a few other faceless people who are there merely to add to the body count. Night Drive lasts for over 100 minutes, there is no way that Night Drive needed to be that long & it really drags in places, then there's the lack of ambition shown here as the terrain & locations are never used to any sort of effect, a large part of the film is set around one small log fire in the middle of nowhere, the bad guy's have little motivation which could be for either supernatural or financial reasons & it's throughly predictable. Little in the way of horror, there's nothing particularly thrilling about it & I would have a very hard time recommending it to anyone, even the most die hard of low budget horror fans.
With only seven user comments & only three external reviews so far on the IMDb as I write this I assume that Night Drive is pretty obscure, it's certainly never been released on DVD here in the UK although it has played on cable television which is how I saw it & I presume this hasn't seen the light of day in the US either & with good reason as it's a tough sell. Forget about the South African locations as they are all but wasted, most of the film looks to have been shot in the same part of some forest somewhere, none of the local culture or colour or wildlife seems to have been used apart from a few random shots of Hyenas. The gore is forgettable, there's some blood splatter, a guy gets impaled on a machete, a woman is seen with her arm hacked off, there's a mutilated corpse & a few gory gunshot wounds but little else & I can only think of one on screen kill. The final third of Night Drive descends into a shoot em up with lots of people firing guns at each other in some very dull scenes. Night Drive is also very dark at times, if the makers filmed outside at night for real it looks like they didn't bring their own lighting.
Probably shot on a low budget Night Drive looks like most cheap horror films, it's reasonably well made but forgettable & again the locations are wasted. Filmed in South Africa. The acting is alright, again typical low budget horror film stuff.
Night Drive is a really boring & tame horror thriller that could have been really good, the lack of use of the locations & the cultural background of the country feels like a missed opportunity & apart from it's setting there's nothing here that stands out from all the low budget horror rubbish that litter video shop shelves.
