Wait, wait, let me get this straight. This movie stars Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland, has a soundtrack from none other than Danny Elfman, and I get to review it for Film Gutter? What in the hell can this one be about to get onto this particular piece of webspace? Well, I very much imagine Freeway would be about the strangest film that either of those two notable actors have appeared in, a movie that screams 90s at every whilst also treading down some pretty disturbing roads. And funnily enough, this one is a road movie of sorts. The story follows 15-year-old Vanessa Lutz, played by Witherspoon, who lives in a rough neighbourhood with her prostitute mother and her stepfather, who takes too much interest in young Vanessa for comfort. When her mother is arrested, Vanessa decides the time has come to get away from it all and head to her grandma’s, so she steals a car and hits the road, only to break down before long. However she is soon ‘rescued’ at the roadside by child therapist Bob Wolverton, who hides a distinctly dark secret that puts Vanessa into the path of danger. After that, every begins to spiral completely out of control and takes you places you might never have expected. That’s some of the plot, and I don’t really want to ruin the whole thing for you – there’s almost too much happens here in an hour and forty minutes to really take in. Suffice to say (and the blurb will tell you this, so it’s no real spoiler) the idea is that it’s a spin on Little Red Riding Hood, with Witherspoon as a vulnerable Little Red trying to get to grandma’s and Sutherland as a predatory big bad wolf. But it does go off in directions the fairy tale never did… I have thought long and hard about what to say in this review, because this movie is just so difficult to interpret. The above sounds absolutely horrible, and in many places it is, with plenty of scenes of violence and more than hints of paedophilia. Our protagonist Lutz goes through the ringer brutally in this movie, and it can be an uneasy watch. But with that said, there’s also a sense that the movie is sometimes going for laughs, or maybe inadvertently trying to push the envelope so far that we slip into unintentional comedy. The end result is a movie that probably would have been be great if it were simpler – given the cast and some of that dark core concept – but simply ends up just feeling a sensationalised clusterf**k. The only thing I can adequately compare it to is Asia Argento’s The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things – it’s got that some off-kilter tone that I still don’t really know how to compute. Am I meant to be laughing, or crying, or a little of both? And are those things you can achieve in one movie? Have you pushed the extremes so far that you’ve somehow managed to lapse into self-parody, leaving me utterly baffled? Like last week’s movie The Evil Within, this one almost deserves to be witnessed despite my own mixed feelings on it. Freeway seems to have built up a bit of a cult following over time, which I can understand given its unique nature, and also spawned a sequel in Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trickbaby. Do I want to check that one out as well for the column? I really don’t know – I might do it at some point out of grim curiosity, just to see if it keeps on down that same path. It is a totally different cast, so I can only assume that what links them together is the name and maybe the style of the two films… RATING: 4.5/10. I have been up and down the grades for this one, though honestly it was never looking at a 9 or 10 even on those befuddled first impressions. This one for me has wilted a bit under the lights while I’ve considered it. It all just made me feel really uneasy – not in the way that some of the more confronting extreme horror might, but in terms of not knowing who this was for and what the director was trying to say to me. I don’t think it was anything positive, mind, and ultimately large parts of this are pretty much – to paraphrase the bard - just sound and fury signifying nothing. As such, I’m going to come in slightly under average at 4.5/10 – this might appeal to some of you, although I’d probably only recommend it if you’re into really odd film curiosities in this vein. TODAY ON THE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR WEBSITETHE GINGER NUTS OF HORROR CHATS WITH JOHN CONNOLLY (AND HIS OLD MATE CHARLIE PARKER) THE HEART AND SOUL OF HORROR MOVIE REVIEW WEBSITES |
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