Here's a pretty unknown Australian slasher flick that attempts to add the menacing vehicle sub-genre into the mix, which could've equaled a pretty decent watch, but instead it turned out to be just a slow-paced, uneventful, and highly forgettable effort. The movie takes your standard young 20-somethings sexin' and boozin' around a small camp area, except they've replaced the woods or campsite with the open Australian desert.

The killer in the movie is mostly seen via his black truck peering at the group from a distance, but a man within the truck occasionally gets out to finish off one of the unsuspecting victims. The movie tries to add a little poor mystery element by never showing the killer's face, but once you realize who the killer is at the end it seems completely pointless. The filmmakers also attempt to force us to question whether the truck is a figment of their imagination or not, hence the title "Mirage," but once again that element is also poorly executed.

The film is slow paced, with the deaths not really occurring until half-way through and the kills themselves aren't anything special, which is likely due to its limited budget. We get some post-gore effects and some blood splattered here and there, but that's about it, except for a throat-slicing scene. The heroine is the only decent character in the bunch, while the rest are just there to fill in the running time. As I said above, the killer (once revealed) is pretty ridiculous, because not only is he just some random dude, but once he opens his mouth you realize that he's just some annoying doofus; what's left to fear here?

On a positive note, there was one kill that I liked (or almost liked) involving a man getting buried up to his neck and while the camera is focused on his face, in the background we see the blurry figure of the truck drive off, make a u-turn, and head straight back for his head. Of course they had to ruin what could have been a great kill by the truck avoiding the man's head and dropping a grenade next to him instead; WTF? Where'd the grenade come from? There's not much more to say about this forgettable flick -- it's slow paced and to top things off, delivers a horrible ending.

A slow-paced and forgettable Australian slasher that (aside from the setting) offers nothing new to the genre. Skip this.