Welcome to the Gas Station of Bad Decisions
If you’ve ever wondered what would happen if a slasher movie took place entirely in a gas station and still somehow ran out of fuel halfway through, Open 24 Hours is here to answer that burning (and unfortunately literal) question.
Written and directed by Padraig Reynolds, this 2018 horror flick tries to mix psychological trauma, revenge, and good old-fashioned serial killing into a combustible blend. Instead, it’s like someone spilled diesel all over a script, lit a match, and called it cinema.
It’s not that Open 24 Hours is the worst horror movie ever made—it’s that it’s the cinematic equivalent of being trapped in a fluorescent-lit gas station at 3 a.m. with nothing but stale coffee and regret to keep you company.
The Setup: Girl Meets Psycho, Girl Sets Psycho on Fire
Our heroine, Mary (Vanessa Grasse), is a woman with a past—specifically, a past involving her serial killer boyfriend, James Lincoln Fields, also known as “The Rain Ripper.” You know it’s serious when a murderer gets a nickname that sounds like a rejected Batman villain.
James’s gimmick? He kills people when it rains, because he likes to play “Raindrops” by Dee Clark during his murders. Nothing says “psychopath with a Spotify account” like committing homicide to vintage soul music.
Mary finally snapped and did what any self-respecting horror heroine would do—set the maniac on fire. For this act of justice (and good taste), she lands in prison. Upon release, she lands a night shift job at a 24-hour gas station, because clearly the best environment for a traumatized woman with PTSD and hallucinations is a remote, poorly lit, isolated convenience store.
It’s basically The Shining meets 7-Eleven.
The Gas Station of Eternal Suffering
Mary’s new workplace, the Deer Gas Market, looks less like a real business and more like a movie set that smells faintly of burnt popcorn and expired milk. It’s got flickering lights, aisles of generic snack brands, and an ominous deer head mounted on the wall for “symbolism.”
Her coworker Bobby, the film’s designated Nice Guy™, trains her on her first night. He’s likable in that “you’re definitely going to die horribly before the third act” kind of way. Then there’s the sleazy trucker customer, who exists purely to sexually harass the protagonist and then accidentally get shot later. Equality in horror means everyone gets their turn at stupidity.
From there, Open 24 Hours descends into the cinematic equivalent of a hallucination caused by too many energy drinks.
Mary begins hearing strange phone calls from a woman asking when the station closes (hint: it doesn’t, it’s in the title). She finds her friend’s ID in a toilet, which then fills with blood and disembodied arms. Is it real? Is it a hallucination? Does it matter when the CGI blood looks like ketchup from a haunted hot dog stand?
The Rain Ripper Rises (and Falls Flat)
Remember James, the Rain Ripper? Yeah, he’s back—or maybe he never left. The movie can’t seem to decide whether he’s dead, alive, or just the embodiment of bad sound design. He starts calling Mary from “prison” during thunderstorms, because apparently maximum security facilities in this universe allow serial killers to have landlines and a record collection.
Eventually, he escapes (off-screen, naturally), and the film becomes a weird hybrid of Halloween and a bad dream you might have after microwaving gas station sushi.
He shows up at the station to terrorize Mary, killing her parole officer, her friend, her coworker, and anyone else unlucky enough to wander into this cinematic purgatory. Each death scene feels like a deleted sequence from a student film titled Slashers for Dummies.
James himself is about as scary as a damp umbrella. For a supposed “Rain Ripper,” he spends most of the movie lurking around looking like a man who just got lost on his way to a Nickelback concert.
Hallucinations, Headaches, and Holy Plot Holes
One of the film’s biggest gimmicks is Mary’s unreliable perception. She hallucinates constantly, seeing her dead boyfriend, hearing voices, and occasionally being attacked by toilets. This could’ve been a great concept if it weren’t handled with all the subtlety of a foghorn.
Instead of building tension, the hallucinations just confuse the plot. You’ll spend half the runtime wondering, “Wait, did that actually happen?” only to realize the filmmakers don’t know either.
It’s not psychological horror—it’s narrative gaslighting.
At one point, Mary impales her attacker, only for him to vanish the next second. Another time, she shoots a man who turns out to be innocent, which the film treats like a “tragic accident” instead of a sign that she’s a walking lawsuit waiting to happen.
By the end, the hallucinations are so frequent that even the ghosts look exhausted.
The Cast: Acting on Empty
Vanessa Grasse deserves a medal for endurance. She spends the entire movie drenched in rain, fake blood, and palpable frustration. You can almost see her thinking, “Please, dear God, let this be the last take.”
Her performance swings wildly between compelling and completely bewildered, which, to be fair, is appropriate for a character who doesn’t know if her boyfriend’s ghost is real or just bad lighting.
Brendan Fletcher as Bobby brings genuine charm, but his only purpose is to die tragically, reinforcing the golden rule of horror: never be nice to the protagonist.
And Cole Vigue as James the Rain Ripper? He plays the part with the enthusiasm of someone reading Yelp reviews of his own murders.
The Gore: More Meh Than Murderous
For a movie about a serial killer and his pyromaniac ex-girlfriend, Open 24 Hours is shockingly tame. Sure, there are buckets of blood, but it’s so overlit and fake-looking that it feels more like a paintball match than a massacre.
When James crushes someone’s head with a sledgehammer, it looks like a cartoon prop gag from Looney Tunes: The Slasher Years. When he sets people on fire, it’s cut away so quickly you wonder if the editors were scared of their own rating.
The film’s big gore moments are like the snacks in a gas station—brightly packaged, but ultimately flavorless.
The Ending: Closed Due to Ridiculousness
The climax arrives with all the coherence of a fever dream. Mary impales James on a deer’s antlers, symbolizing… something. Victory? Feminist retribution? Taxidermy gone wild?
He declares his love before dying—again—and she passes out until sunrise. When she wakes up, his body’s gone, because of course it is.
Cut to Mary at a new job in a hair salon, where she sees James’s reflection in the mirror, and the movie ends. It’s supposed to be chilling, but it plays more like the setup for a shampoo commercial directed by a ghost.
The Moral: Don’t Work the Night Shift
Open 24 Hours wants to be a gritty psychological slasher about trauma and survival. What it ends up being is a clumsy mash-up of Carrie, Psycho, and a truck stop bathroom nightmare.
It has atmosphere but no logic, blood but no bite, and a villain whose menace is inversely proportional to his screen time. Even the gas station itself feels bored—like it’s silently begging for a more interesting haunting.
If you’ve ever been stuck at work after hours, staring at the clock and praying for sunrise, you already know exactly what it’s like to watch this movie.
Final Verdict: Out of Order
Open 24 Hours tries to explore trauma, paranoia, and redemption but ends up spilling regular unleaded all over itself. It’s messy, directionless, and occasionally unintentionally funny—like if Final Destination were sponsored by Red Bull.
Final Score: 1.5 out of 5 Haunted Toilets.
The sign says Open 24 Hours, but this film should’ve closed after 15 minutes.
