Freeway.

Where do you start blogging a film like Freeway (1996) Matthew Bright's first outing as writer and director? Perhaps by telling you it’s a sordid over the top tale of woe based on the European folk tale Little Red Riding Hood or better still starting by describing the brilliant early lead performance of Reese Witherspoon as Vanessa Lust, the poor, illiterate underage teenage daughter of a Los Angeles drug addicted prostitute who is sexually abused by her step father and who encounters a serial killer on the way to live with her grandmother in Stockton – a performance that won her a Best Actress Award. Then there were the movie censorship problems due to graphic language and violent content, cut to enable a NC-17 rating when released in the USA.

When both of her parents get arrested, Vanessa steals the car of her family-services caseworker and heads up the Freeway to live with her paternal grandmother who she has never met. When the cars engine blows it force her to accept a ride from charming and sympathetic Bob Wolverton who tells her he is a youth counsellor. During the journey Vanessa finds herself confessing the sordidly sexual details of her childhood but its not long before Vanessa realises the true identity of her driver - just before he attacks her and declares his intention to murder her and have sex with her corpse! He turns out to have been slaughtering young prostitutes in the Los Angeles area.  Thanks to a gun borrowed from her fiancé, Vanessa turns the tables on Bob, shooting him repeatedly and leaving him for dead. Of course it’s not long before the Police catch up with our teenager and she ends up in court. But this is only the beginning of a spiral of depravity for Vanessa.

 

Nice wheels.

It also stars some other well-known actors including Kiefer Sutherland as serial killer Bob Wolverton, Dan Hedaya as Detective Garnet Wallace; the brilliant Honey Bunny from Pulp Fiction (1994) Amanda Plummer as Vanessa’s mum from hell Ramona, with the tragic Brittany Murphy playing Rhonda, Vanessa’s heroin addicted lesbian friend. This 1996 exploitation/grindhouse movie is exceptionally good mainly due to that award winning performance from Reese Witherspoon and did manage to garner some very good reviews and is better than its straight to video sequel Freeway 2 Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999)  

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"