I had no idea what to expect. correction - i expected the usual Madsen gore and gratuitous killing but not such a multilevel plot line with tight dialogue and intense suspense. No bikers, no vampires, no T&A fest but simply some old school close quarters mano to mano acting And amazingly done with an ensemble of road weary B actors who actually deliver in every scene - a triumph for small cinema shot on a Diner budget! very powerful, tension filled double hand grip on edge of your seat claustrophobia gnawing at you, the voyeur, peering into this killing jar while a cold sharp scalpel slowly twists and turns into your gut keeping ya from catching your breath.

The film is shot in a diner (the Copal Grill) in a small town called Silver Lake, where the lake has dried up some years back. Jimmie is the manager/owner/cook, Noreen is the waitress on duty during the film, Dixon is the man passing through from a conference to his home in Brooklyn. Lonnie is one of the local cops; Hank sort of lives at the diner. Doe blows in after the group heard the story of a family of four getting murdered in a nearby town. He immediately gets on Noreen's case, and pisses Jimmie off.Lonnie is one of the dullest tools in the shed, and he does not pick up on Doe being a possible problem. Noreen convinces him to talk to the man. He does. Doe leaves, then comes back with a fully loaded multi-shot shotgun. He kills Lonnie and Jimmie immediately for the insults.Noreen, John, Hank, and the two teen-aged kids are stuck in the diner with Doe. For a short while, Doe seems to have everything under control, but then Greene walks into the diner. Greene brings money to pay 'Mr. Smith' for the job completed. Greene tries to walk out, but Doe informs him that he is not Smith. Of course, we've already met Smith; we just have to find out who it is.Greene attempts to bargain with Doe. That does not work. Turns out it was a real estate deal that Greene wanted to complete to avoid vengeance from loan sharks. To cure his problem, Greene hires an enforcer to convince the farmer to sell his land. So the enforcer did the murders of the family that the diner heard about earlier.Do we discover who the enforcer is? Does anyone escape from Doe?-----Scores-----Cinematography: 7/10 Iffy at best, but the lighting in diners does suck.Sound: 9/10 Pretty good; all the actors were well-miked.Acting: 9/10 Good. I liked Madsen, Busey, Benson, Perrineau, and Gage quite well. Trejo's part was small, but he was good for the spot.Screenplay: 8/10 Nicely done.

***SPOILERS*** The news hit's the people in the roadside diner like a shot out of hell!Four people an entire family was murdered just outside of town and their killer may well be headed their way! With the workers and patrons not knowing quite what to expect in pops this greasy looking trucker Doe, like in the song Doe' Ra' Me', played by a moody and a bit unshaved looking Michael Medsen. Doe for some reason fits the description of the on the loose mass murderer and one of the customers in the diner Local deputy sheriff Lonnie, Lew Temple,tries to ask Doe a few questions about where he was earlier that evening.This was a big mistake on Lonnie's part as well as the diner owner and cook Jimmy,Danny Jrejo, who refused to serve, because the kitchen was already closed, a hungry Doe an order of stake & potatoes. They were to became the first victims in the movie of this deranged lunatic. We soon find out that Doe is on a mission. A mission to find out who murdered that family of four earlier that evening and bring him to justice! To brutal and deadly justice! And Doe doesn't care how many innocent lives it will take for him to find the killer! Even if it's everyone in the diner who for the most part, with one possible exception, were nowhere near the murder scene!Effective and utterly shocking thriller with Michale Medsen as Doe at his most brutal and sadistic worst torturing and murdering everyone in the diner until he finds out who the killer is. Doe got tipped off to the killer being in the diner when Mr. Green, Jack Busey, showed up with a suite-case full of cash in payment for the hit job, the family he knocked off, he did for him. The big mistake that Mr. Green made was that he had mistaken Doe for the hit-man that he hired and that soon was to cost him his life. Fully convinced that he's on the right track Doe goes about doing his grizzly and bloody work on everyone in the diner to get whoever murdered those four innocent people to confess and then****Spoiler****instead of murdering him chat with the guy? Doe talks with the now exposed killer about the good old days when the two, Doe in the US Army in Iraq and the killer in the Mafia, killed for county family honor and just for plain entertainment!***SPOILERS*** With enough blood spilled to fully stock a major city hospital blood-bank the end couldn't have come soon enough for the psycho Doe who just for some reason left the one person whom he didn't feel threatened by alive long enough to do him it. But the biggest surprise in the film is not only who the mysterious killer was but how sideswiped or blown way he got by thinking that he was smarter then the person,the lone survivor in the diner, with the gun pointed at him. If he knew how to count or kept up with the shooting action in the movie he'd have known that it's best for him to be able to keep his big mouth shut and not overplay his hand.

Any movie that boasts amongst its actors Michael Madsen, Danny Trejo, and Jake Busey definitely gets some points of merit even before the movie starts rolling. Though those points aren't as much as you might think, because Trejo's part is small and very insignificant, and Busey's role isn't that much better. I also had some other problems with the movie. The photography is pretty bad, with dark and muddy colors throughout. Also, the movie takes a LONG time to get going - more than a third of the movie goes by, to be more exact. Still, I will admit that once the movie gets going, the rest of the movie is fairly compelling - though I had a good idea of how the movie was going to end some time before that ending actually played out. So there aren't exactly any surprises to be found in this movie. However, I will admit that I have seen far worse direct-to-DVD movies.