Director John Dahl has made more ingenious thrillers than Roadkill, but few with quite its sense of terrible consequences arising from a minor prank. On a road trip, jailbird Fuller (Steve Zahn) persuades his younger, student brother Lewis (Paul Walker) to pretend to be a girl on a CB radio; they set a pushy trucker up with a date with an obnoxious guest at the motel where they stay for the night. The results are far from funny--the guest ends up dead and they find themselves being chased for a while by a large sinister truck. And then, when they have picked up Veena (Leelee Sobieski), the girl with whom Lewis is in love, it all gets worse, much worse. Dahl has picked up on one of the most sinister aspects of hostage situations, which is that quite minor concessions in negotiation can often be more meaningful than they seem. If the film has a weakness it is that the irresponsibility of the two young men is eminently plausible and not especially sympathetic, and the trucker, rather like the faceless driver in Steven Spielberg's Duel, is never more than a monstrous force of nature. Along the way, though, Roadkill delivers an appropriate number of thrills and sudden reversals, which all makes for an exciting journey into terror. On the DVD: Roadkill on disc has commentaries by the director, by the writers and by stars Steve Zahn and Leelee Sobieski; it also has a fascinating wealth of alternate endings including one in which the whole third act of the movie goes in a radically different direction. It has a widescreen anamorphic visual ratio 2.35:1 and vibrant Dolby 5.1 sound that pumps up the tension in some crucial scenes. --Roz Kaveney