Zyzzyx Road (2006)

 

Director: John Penney

Screenplay: John Penney

Cast: Leo Grillo as Grant; Katherine Heigl as Marissa; Tom Sizemore as Joey

Ephemeral Waves

 

Zyzzyx Road‘s name is already a curious one, a title which you would automatically find near the bottom of a list of all cinema alphabetically unless you included films in their original Russian and Indian languages. The tale of this one – produced, written and directed by John Penney - has the additional twist that this low budget film had a cinema release in the United States, and only grossed $30.00. That is a weird touch to this film, made by the screenwriter of Return from the Living Dead III (1993) and other horror genre films beforehand, to any film. The tale goes how, screening for a whole seven days, at Dallas' Highland Park Village Theater, with a single screening each day at noon, only six people went and it earned $30.00 against a budget of $1.2 million¹. Truthfully even this theatrical screening was not really meant to happen, fulfilling a Screen Actors Guild agreement that permitted low-budget films to pay actors a lower rate as long as the film gets a domestic theatrical release¹; as a production produced by lead actor Leo Grillo’s company, the focus for him was instead on non-domestic distribution of the film in other countries like Bulgaria¹, and in truth the story of all this does not really talk about what the film actually is.

In this particular case, you have in the centre three people - Leo Grillo himself, an actor who made his name more in animal rights; Katherine Heigl, working on the film as she was starting in the television series Grey’s Anatomy (2005-), and before she made films like Knocked Up (2007), and Tom Sizemore, who had a lengthy career beforehand but had also unfortunately had a reputation off camera for his legal and drug issues, which came to the fore here as he was arrested before he was meant to be shooting this film, violating his parole with a drug arrest, but still able to continue on the shoot with no delays¹. What it is, with these three people at the film’s centre, was a genre hybrid you could have actually depicted as a theatre production with a few touches changes, all centered around an older married man named Grant (Leo Grillo) and a young woman Marissa (Katherine Heigl) who, whilst she is more curious about Justin Bieber and Britney Spears’ romance at the time, have been having an affair. Driving at night, their affair may compromise his marriage with his wife, leading to his daughter being taken in the divorce, but there is an additional problem that they have to hide the body of Joey (Tom Sizemore) that is in the trunk, going to the titular Zyzzyx road and the road to nowhere.

Joey, unfortunately, is not quite dead, and even then there are a lot of twists which undercut the reality and subjective reality in what is a tale of a supposedly dead body hat needed to be buried in the desert. The plot goes in some obvious twists following what we begin to learn: how Grant is also hallucinating and having headaches; how Joey’s story is a strange figure seemingly wandering around like a spirit, with the absurd aspect he was brained to death with a giant vibrator/back massager to even get to this point; and how Marissa even represents the folly of a man’s midlife crisis without her being the cause of all this anxiety but merely a bystander caught in the crossfire, someone likely eighteen or younger, which is against the law, and in an unfortunate position for Grant unload all his neurosis over. It is a chamber piece in a desert, where the secrets come out, and it is insanely obvious where this is going to go with some idiosyncratic touches. One such touch, worth a slight plot spoiler warning, is how it touches upon full blown supernatural paranoia based on the fear of women between two men, especially as there is no explicit reference to what she actually is by name to them as an apparently no-human figure, emphasizing the paranoia.

The real issue with Zyzzyx Road however is that, from its initial set up to becoming a slasher in its finale, there is not a lot more to the production to flesh out the basics. It is a film which could have elaborated on its content more than it has, where barring some use of post digital effects and some idiosyncratic use of colour saturation to show levels of reality, there is not a lot which sticks out from a skeleton which you could have done more with. That is not to be taken as an insult against its director-writer either, as this was his debut helming a film as well as write one, and it would have been an obstacle to climb to even get the production completed with hope that later films would develop his voice. Unfortunately, the infamous $30 box office gross gave this production its legacy which would have not helped in the initial aftermath of its theatrical screenings. An article published by a website named CHUD, What If They Released a Movie and Nobody Came?, written by Devin Farcaci about the film on 1^st January 2007^1b would have allowed the ball to start rolling in terms of, optimistically, a wider interest but sadly this became a case of a film, when I had first heard of it, was only known for its theatrical screening and nothing about the content within the feature.

It is a film where all of it has interest, including the titular road. Zzyzx is a real place, outside of Las Vegas in the middle of the Mojave Desert, just off of Interstate 15, where a man named Curtis Howe Springer caught wind of the local springs in the area and in the 1940s established a spa where he sold "miracle cures" using the spring's fabled water. With the name coined by him from being “the last word” in health, his place there becoming popular until April 11th 1974 when he was forcibly removed from the land by the Bureau of Land Management, as he did not actually own the land at the formerly named "Soda Springs" but merely claimed the right to mine in the land, which was different from occupying or developing on it². That could have added flavor to this story about deceptive reality, as alongside the fact that, alongside the California State University's Desert Studies Center to study the desert’s ecology and geology, there are remnants of the old days, including abandoned buildings and even advertisements for Springer’s old mineral miracle cures², which is free surrealism for even a low budget film to have used.

Even in terms of its notoriety, in 2011 it would be outmatched by The Worst Movie Ever!. Written, produced, directed by, and starring Glenn Berggoetz, it ended up by accident despite its name getting just $11 during its premiere from one person³. Befitting the legacy of a film starring Santa Claus and Abe Lincoln together for the first time, it was nonetheless not a great scenario for Berggoetz’s film to have ended in as well, and in that case it did due from from struggles in terms of being able to promote the production³. In that case, a few years later, that infamy helped when people began to write about the incident, alongside 70,000 people watching the film’s trailer on YouTube during August 2016 so it came out as a badge of honor³. As a result it leaves Zyzzyx Road in a weird place, where John Penney thankfully directed more, but with an infamy for his debut directorial feature which could have done a little bit more, whilst with virtues I admired, and tied to an aforementioned infamy that does not even factor in whether you can appreciate the film, but the perils of film distribution.

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1) How 'Zyzzyx Road' only grossed $30.00, written by Rob Brunner for Entertainment Weekly, published on February 9th 2007.

1b) What If They Released a Movie and Nobody Came?, written by Devin Farcaci for CHUD.com, posted 1st January 2007.

2) The Story Of Zzyzx, The Eerie Ghost Town Along A Dead-End Road In The Middle Of The California Desert, written by Erin Kelly (and edited by Maggie Donahue) for All That’s Interesting, published on May 9^th 2023 with June 7^th updates.

3) "The Worst Movie Ever!" Lives Up to Its Name with Epically Bad Grosses, written by Matt Singer for IFC, and published August 26th 2011.