REVIEWED - MONSTER MAN: THE press notes issued for Monster Man are far more entertaining than the film itself, a feeble and tacky thriller that borrows liberally from Duel, Breakdown and Jeepers Creepers, with a few arch nods to The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.

the producers are openly cynical, cheerfully admitting that they came up with the title Monster Man first and started to raise the finance even before the script was written. Writer-director Michael Davis turned out the script in "a manic fervour. It was done in no time." And it shows.

In the tiresomely familiar storyline, Adam (Eric Jungmann), a naive, virginal college student, is driving to the wedding of the young woman he secretly loves. To his (and our) dismay, he finds he has a stowaway, Harley (Justin Urich), a belching, garrulous student who, despite a physical appearance that is as gross as his humour, imagines he's God's gift to women.

Inevitably, they stop at one of those remote roadside diners that's a de rigueur location for this genre. Harley crassly insults the redneck clientele - who make the woodsmen of Deliverance seem sophisticates by comparison - and incurs the wrath of a particularly hideous hillbilly who hunts them down in a powerful truck with enormous wheels. I was rooting for the trucker.

Meanwhile, back at the press notes, we learn that Jungmann wanted to be an actor ever since he played a pet dog in a school rock musical; that Urich is a "well-rounded actor", which is true in one sense; that Aimee Davies, who plays the obligatory underdressed hitchhiker, was 12 when she told her family she was an actress and that "the rest is history"; and that Eight Days a Week, the previous film directed by Davis, drew on "many of his own teenage experiences, including the time he tried to make it with a grapefruit".