Rubber

Director: Quentin Dupiex (2010)

Starring: A tyre. Stephen Spinella, Wings Hauser

Find it: IMDB

A rubber tyre develops sentience and takes to rolling around the desert, squashing anything that gets in its way. Also, it has psychic powers and can make people's heads explode, like the only bit anyone remembers from Scanners. Rubber is an art-house rebuttal to those who say that films should always make sense and have things happening for a reason. We know that Rubber is such a rebuttal because one of the characters looks straight into the camera, addresses the audience and tells us as such. I did have to watch that sequence several times, with a subtitle track on though, because all I heard was "smug smug smug smug smug. Smug smuggity smug."

Rubber is a film of two halves; an entertaining half about a sentient tyre killing people with its mind bullets, and a smartarse half in which people say things like "it's only a special effect" and "time to go home now. The movie's over." One character digs the script out of his pocket and starts reading it like that. Just because you can have a character constantly breaking the fourth wall and talking about how crappy the movie is, doesn't mean you should.

Like so many movies these days, Rubber is a cute little concept that struggles at feature length. It makes for a far better trailer than it does a film. After the first ten minutes and despite some good head explosions and jokes, Rubber wheely is quite tyresome.