good back-story, and good acting

I was totally surprised at how great this film.You could feel your paranoia rise as the film went on and as you gradually learned the details of the real situation.

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

The movie really just wants to entertain people.

I liked Toad Road. It's probably one of those films people are really divided on, but I think for a film that isn't perfect, it still does a pretty good job.The whole film has a very documentary style feel. For people who've never experienced drugs or the people who have while managing to never really slip into the whole lifestyle, the characters in Toad Road may seem unrealistic, maybe even foolish. Yes, they're definitely a bunch of druggies, fairly ridiculous crowd, but for those like myself, luckily I turned my life around – that's a whole other tale unto itself, who've been into that lifestyle, these characters are all too painfully real.The acting is fairly good. One of my favourite bits concerning the acting was Jones' voice-over as Sara. It played over various portions of the film. Most effectively, Banker used the voice-over narration to really drive home the points where James is really going insane, straight off the deep end, near the film's finale. She narrates his spiral downward, as he essentially is recalling her tell him about what happens as you pass through each gate on the way to Hell. Some really chilling moments, which I enjoyed a lot. Spooky stuff.Though there are some good moments, and certainly scenes which add to characters of both James and Sara, the pacing starts to really drag in several spots.The finale of the film is a bit hindered by the fact there's no real huge climax. It almost feels as if there should've been more additional scenes involving the aftershock of Sara's disappearance – it seems like the police went really soft on James. Although we see a few scenes where James is being interrogated, I feel like those were the scenes which ultimately lacked sincerity. We get a lot of reality, documentary style moments in the early half of Toad Road, but once it starts to shift into a more mystery/thriller genre for the last half, it lacks the composition of a real drama. The switch from the reality-based portion of the beginning to a forced dramatic and thrilling angle didn't work. I didn't particularly think the cop interrogating James was really great either. Not terrible, just not great. It didn't feel as if those bits matched up to the rest of the film. Even the closing moments of the finale, those worked very well with the atmosphere and tone built up by the first half of the film. I just think they would've benefited by either giving the cops more screen time and making it feel as reality driven as the earlier scenes, or just cut out those parts. The last quarter of the film comes off a bit sloppy.Though there are some flaws here, I think Toad Road is a pretty decent horror outing. Certainly for an independent horror film. There's a lot of visual flair here, and you can tell Banker has an eye for beauty in horror. That being said, I did have a problem with some pacing issues here, and if they could be ironed out I think this would be an even better film. I still loved it. While there were small bits I felt held it back, overall Toad Road is good, and definitely a lot better than the hordes of low budget horror out there tackling the same zombies and vampires and masked killers as the hundreds which came before them. Even if you're divided after watching, it's hard not to admit the film has a certain charm to it, and a creepy, haunting quality.

So I finally found myself with absolutely nothing to do on a Sunday morning & decided to give this indie a go. I kept putting it on the back burner as I was expecting another appalling hipster piece of trash. Given some poor public reviews, there seemed only two real motivations for watching this film: 1) a connection to York & the Toad Road mythology every young teen on acid pursues in this town & 2) the eerie, macabre foreshadowing of actress Sara Anne Jones' heroin overdose at age 24 shortly after finishing this film. Having said that, it is otherwise not at all a bad effort for writer/director/cinematographer Jason Banker.The cinematography is, in my opinion, a strength to the film's credit. Keep in mind there was no Panavision Panaflex Platinum here. No budget attempts to film rural Pennsylvania have usually produced cheap, unimpressive, under-saturated stock. The outdoor photography here is adequate if not crisp, yet gritty & grainy when needed to convey tone. Also, the shots of Sara Anne Jones could have been pulled from an Urban Outfitter's catalog. The key strength of the film however is in it's editing. The hodgepodge of documentary style footage could have been amassed into a trainwreck, but the film maintains a fluidity from beginning to end fusing scenes together with ambient sound. Haunting but never lingering too long. It held my attention throughout & at no time did I find myself thinking, "is this over yet?" or "I know I have something better to watch," which unfortunately happens with sophomore artistic endeavors.Now for the misconceptions. I would classify this film as an experimental docudrama. It is not a horror film in that Picnic at Hanging Rock is not a horror film. The only horror element is some brief blood toward the end & a supernatural buzz in the air. Also it is more improv than acted. It has been reported that the drugs are real & a lot of the dialog is stream of consciousness. If you take the premise of the descent into hell at face value as a horror premise, you will be disappointed. The legend of toad road as it's relayed here,whether intended or not, plays out as a metaphor for the downward spiral of addiction. Sara starts her descent by innocently experimenting socially & with outwardly noble intentions; that of transcendence or enlightenment. She wants to pursue psychedelics to grasp something profound. She makes it clear she doesn't want to just take acid and "stare at walls." She is in search of elusive answers unaware that the end result will leave her lost in the wilderness, in this case the term "lost in the wilderness" being literal & not biblical. So what happened to Sara? It doesn't matter, she is gone. She opened a door she couldn't close and now she's gone. It's sad to say that without Sara Anne Jones' death I do not think this film would have gotten any attention aside from dialog amongst the film fest & art-house crowd.In closing, I think the film does work, and it does work well, but is perhaps best viewed in memory of Sara Anne Jones, the way, say, Synecdoche, New York can be viewed in memory of Philip Seymour Hoffman.

The film opens to a group of drug addicts having fun with each other while getting high or coming down. That's about the first 45 minutes worth of 75 minutes total.James and Sara go to Toad Road to see what's there. Supposedly there are seven gates, and if one goes through all seven, one gets entrance to hell.At the first gate, one can feel something pulling at you, and wanting you gone, but you cannot see them. At the second gate, one starts to hear things. Just after the third gate, one starts to see things; the voices become visible. Just after the fourth gate, things around you start to die; leaves start to fall and the like. Just after the fifth gate, everything gets cold, but you feel warm and powerful.At this point in the description by Sara, it had started snowing, and a CGI gate was visible. James catches up to Sara. The narration describing the gates continues. Time supposedly changes after passing through the fifth gate.At this point, James is separated from Sara. He looks for her a bit, and calls her name repeatedly. He gives up and takes a long walk home. His keys do not work. After some time he gets in touch with two of his druggie friends. They tell him that he has been gone for months. No one cares that he has been gone that long, but Sara is a different matter since she has roots with people and institutions that care about her.Do we see Sara again? Does James do anything to find her?-----Scores------Cinematography: 0/10 Bipolar, to say the least. On the one hand, some long stretches are hideously bad: fuzzy, poorly lit, poorly framed, overexposed and alternately underexposed, shaky. On the better side, sections of the film have fine focus, good depth of field, nice framing and no camera shake.Sound: 3/10 A real detriment.Acting: 0/10 Non-existent.Screenplay: 2/10 Next to worthless. There is about 90 seconds of plot here, yet the film drags on endlessly for 75 minutes. Filming drug addicts putting out their cigarettes in vomit is of no value whatsoever.

OK ... Lets go out and film our mates getting trashed ... Then throw in some walking in the woods ... Then lets just throw in some sort of blair witch old rubbish about some urban legend ... Then we'll just edit it together in a form that relates to a narrative and hope nobody realises that its absolute nonsense Toad Road or Watch a blank screen I'd go for the second option Life's to short for this sort of rubbish Oh god ... The review is too short ... But if your reading this you are considering watching this waste of time "film" so I'd better blather on till I've got ten lines and save 74 minutes of your life for you so there we are : ) Peace