Buckle up for a slasher that’s as fun as it is ferocious, Open 24 Hours (2018) is a rain-drenched nightmare soaked in paranoia and gasoline, unfolding under flickering fluorescent lights at an open-all-night gas station, with a hammer-wielding maniac lurking in the shadows.
Just sprung from the slammer and commited to stay on the right path, Mary (Vanessa Grasse) is determined to meet the conditions of her parole and find work. Her search leads her to a 24-hour gas station, where she fills out a job application. The gig’s no prize; nobody’s clamoring for it, so it comes with little scrutiny, and the owner casually shrugs off her conviction. Just like that, she's offered the job on the spot and hurled into her first shift that very night, unaware of the horrors lurking just beyond the pumps.
Mary’s ticket to prison? Torching her ex-boyfriend James (Cole Vigue), an act of violence born from desperation, the last flaming gasp of a woman trying to claw her way out from under his control. But James wasn’t just any man; he was a nightmare stitched into real life, a notorious serial killer dubbed “The Rain Ripper” for his preference for murdering people during rainstorms, leaving a trail of bodies in his wake.
During this time, Mary earned the nickname “The Watcher,” forced to witness each of James’s brutal murders like a front-row spectator. Still, the court of public opinion painted her as a willing accomplice. Presumably, that’s the real reason she ended up behind bars, because in a world that craves villains and martyrs, there’s little room for the ones who fall somewhere in between. Unless, of course, stopping a serial killer is somehow a crime.
The movie doesn’t waste much time, throwing us into Mary’s first shift at the gas station, with her friend Debbie (Emily Tennant) dropping her off, and just like that, we’re in. It’s a welcome move; we’ve spent just enough time with Mary to care, to hope she makes it through the night. She’s lugging a suitcase emotional wreckage, teetering on the edge of sanity as she battles to hold it together. Haunted by vivid visions of her ex-boyfriend, her mind flickers between memory and madness, never quite sure if what she’s seeing is real.
The vibe and setting of the movie are where the real magic happens, drenched in constant rain and cloaked in shadows. Mary, isolated and alone, deals with strays and drifters who drift in with the storm, each one carrying just enough mystique to make danger feel like it’s always just around the corner.
The Rain Ripper is a standout, no masks, no supernatural gimmicks, just a flesh-and-blood lunatic with a hammer, stalking to the poignant melody of Dee Clark’s 'Raindrops,' which weaves softly and unsettlingly through the movie like a warning. Every time those lines drift in, it plays like a ghostly lullaby, 'So it must be raindrops, so many raindrops, it feels like raindrops, falling from my eye.'
Clad in an iconic raincoat and channeling the swagger of the Fisherman from the ’90s slasher classic 'I Know What You Did Last Summer', he ditches the hook for a hammer and carves out his own legacy, one brutal, bone-crunching swing at a time.
If there’s one real misstep, it’s the movie’s tendency to blur the line between reality and hallucination a little too often. The intent is clear, to pull us deep into Mary’s fractured psyche and make us feel the weight of her trauma, but it occasionally veers into confusion. That said, Open 24 Hours is, overall, an effective, tightly crafted slasher, atmospheric, unsettling, and sharp enough to earn its rightful place in the slasher genre.