Juvenile Hell: Parts 6 & 7

Two fun-sized reviews in the latest instalment of Dada Debaser's Juvenille Hell series. Admittedly, I'd completely forgotten about continuing them, but having finally watched Matthew Bright's Freeway II: Confessions of Trickbaby (1999) for the first time this month (thank you, Plex!), it's high time I covered both of these twisted adaptations of classic Brothers Grimm fairy tales.

Freeway (Matthew Bright, 1996)

If the nineties was ever a decade of endless possibilites, then believe it or not, a young Reece Witherspoon once became girlboss par excellence as the foul mouthed Vanessa Lutz in the superb nineties gem Freeway (1996).

Co-produced by Oliver Stone, Freeway is comedy crime thriller loosely based on Little Red Riding Hood. Our poorly educated heroine, runs aways from social services after her parents get busted by the cops. This sets her course of action of searching for the grandmother she's never met. After her stolen car breaks down on the freeway, she unknowingly hitches a ride with the notorious I-5 serial killer, played by Kiefer Sutherland; the wolf in this wild tale.

Aside from Witherspoon and Sutherland's strong performances, Matthew Bright's screenplay is a real shining light here. Given it's a contemporary take on Little Red Riding, albeit a bizarre one, you're still never quite sure in what direction the film is headed. Bright's characters look and act like they're the type of guests who would appear on an episode of The Jerry Springer Show. There is of course the breezy pacing, which in turn never leads to a dull moment in the film.

Despite it coming from the nineties, Freeway harkens even further back to less politically correct times and that's probably why this film feels even more anachronistic today than it did originally. This is the true magic of the film.

Hard to believe, but even the "buffons" [sic] that the troll critic Armond White was referring to were correct about Freeway and gave it a glowing review back in the day.

 

Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (Mattew Bright, 1999)

Matthew Bright wrote and directed a straight to video follow-up in the tail end of the nineties. Amazingly, Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby (1999) is an even crazier tale; bordering on a lucid nightmare in some areas.

This time around Bright's sequel takes its cue from another of the Brothers Grimm's stories - Hansel and Gretel, where the proverbial breadcrumb trail is replaced with crack rocks. Our protagonist is Crystal, AKA White Girl, played by Natasha Lyonne. Sentenced to a twenty-five year bid by an overzealous judge played by John Landis for a string of burglaries, our heroine is being treated in a juvenile correctional facility to cure her bulimia. With the lax security there, White Girl and her lesbian, serial killer cellmate Cyclona leg it before they're carted off to the belly of the beast.

This is a sequel that has a lot more in common with Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers (1994) than it does with its predecessor. There's no real connection to Freeway other than a clip from the film appears as a scene on a TV.  Both films do possess common character and plot similarities, however; a lower class and highly independent girl protagonist being the most obvious example. The film itself is a violent odyssey as White Girl and Cyclona escape into Mexico. From there they meet the witch Sister Gomez as played by Vincent Gallo and the film switches into a further gear of insanity.

Various heavy themes are in this film, and depending on your point of view, the levity in their handling can be interpreted as either tone deaf or comically genius. For this blogger, they're very much the latter. For this very reason, I consider the sequel on par to its predecessor.

There were no further films in the Freeway series, but Matthew Bright did continue with his serial killer trend with the unexpectedly funny Ted Bundy (2002), AKA Bundy. It's a film worth discussing about another time on account of it being something the Farrelly brothers might have helmed during the noughties wave of real life serial killer biopics. It's where I first discovered Bright and was left both gobsmacked and weirdly amazed by. Add that film with his aformentioned juvie films, and I'm under the impression he might have been some great American auteur in the making, if he didn't quit the film industry after his two and half hour rom-com, Tiptoes (2002) wasn't butchered by the studio to ninety minutes. Haven't seen it, and I'd rather cross my fingers for Bright's version to resurface one day, but I'm willing to forgo my revulsion for rom-coms and long arsed movies on account of Bright's previous work - and also because Gary Oldman plays a dwarf in it.