Monday 14 December 2015

Freeway 2 Confessions of a Trickbaby.


In a review by Brian J Dillard he offered a list of people that are likely to be offended by the 1999 exploitation movie Freeway 2: Confessions of Trickbaby: lawyers, African-Americans, correctional officers, people with eating disorders, wheelchair users, lesbians, Latinos, amputees, poor white people, the elderly, Catholics, transsexuals, the entire population of Tijuana, and anyone who is disturbed by necrophilia, incest, paedophilia, vomit, prostitution, drug use, compulsive masturbation, multiple homicide, Vincent Gallo's acting career, or gigantic prosthetic genitalia. Not a bad description of a film that offensive to nearly everyone but one that probably qualifies for cult status!
 
"Why did you interrupt i was just beginning to enjoy myself"

Described as a satire on America's confessional culture, both the films main characters are exactly the kind of pathologically dysfunctional social misfits who are wheeled out to confess their sins on carnivalesque American TV talk shows. 15-year-old Crystal Van Meter known as White Girl (Natasha Lyonne) has been sentenced to 25 years for various crimes including posing as a prostitute to beat up and rob men, and dealing in drugs. Her first port of call is a minimum-security hospital to seek treatment for bulimia. While there she teams up with Angela Garcia, a psychotic young lesbian known as Cyclona who is starting a life sentence for multiple killings. Both escape and make it across the border to Mexico and ending up in Tijuana where they meet up with the very strange Sister Gomez (Vincent Gallo) who our young killer thinks is her guardian angel.  On the way White Girl realises that her travelling companion, now dressed as a boy, is a serial killer when she murders a family of three and has bloody sex with two of the dead bodies, but it's to late for White Girl to turn back so she has to join her friend on a murderous road trip to gain salvation at the hands of a Catholic Nun with a monstrous prosthetic penis!
 
"Sister Gomez? I don't think so"
A movie that's not afraid to confront taboo subjects and this stylised modern equivalent of the German folk tale does just that. In Hansel and Gretel feeding is a metaphor for sex and power, where the witch lures the young boy and girl into her house with the promise of food intending to fatten them up and eat them herself. When we reach the ‘church’ of Sister Gomes we find a basement full of very young children! According to Chris Campion's notes that accompany the Tartan Video release its Sam Peckinpah's Bring Me The Head Of Alfredo Garcia (1974) that is the movies closest equivalent being a road movie that descends into the heart of darkness. But in my humble opinion I would say that the Alejandro Jodorowshy’s avant-garde film Santa Sangre (1989) and John Waters movies had more relevance to our story. I think that with a lot of exploitation grind house movies the enjoyment, or not, will be in the eye of the beholder.

"Come to Sister Gomez and repent your sins children"




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