I’ll just be honest: I’m not rushing to pop in “Freeway” very often or even think about it at all. I saw it back around 1997, then again maybe 2001, and was reminded of it when I passed the second one in the mid aughts some time. Much like “Kids” or “Gummo”, the film looks like it was dragged across gravel and baked a bit under the Arizona sun, perhaps pulled from the burning remains of a warehouse that held too many canisters and wasn’t properly air-conditioned. If I’m honest, I watched this basically because it was the first film in Joe Briggs’ Violent Valentine special on Shudder, the replay. Reese as “little red riding hood”, a near broken teenager from a horrible childhood (mother works the street corner, father looks suspiciously like a notorious serial killer, the stepdad a parolee crack smoking molester mostly coming off a hysterical high), happens to be left for the foster system yet again when her “parents” (if you call them that) are taken off by police back to the slammer. She decides to take off in her foster care officer’s vehicle, and said stolen vehicle kicks the bucket on the side of the road, with Sutherland’s “big bad wolf” (a serial killer working his nearby interstate looking similar to Jeffrey Dahmer) offering her a ride. Well the big bad wolf doesn’t realize who he picked up because red riding hood is a fierce, feisty, foul-mouthed firecracker carrying a gun and not afraid to use it.
The most satisfying part of the film is what the big bad wolf is left as once she uses that gun, leaving him with a hole in the throat that serves as a chimney when he smokes, a “forever smile”, and near death experience. Brooke Shields as his wife gets lost in the shuffle – how couldn’t she when you have Brittany Murphy as a scar-faced paint huffer with never-closed darting eyes telling Reese she really likes girls? – but makes the most of her small role, very put together and dressing nicely, living in a very white multi-story house in the ‘burbs. She can trash Reese, but what is hiding in her hubby’s shed leaves her with one choice…brains splashed on the bathroom walls.
While Joe Bob does his “kink chart” often asking Darcy what she thinks about it (and if she might have “partaken”), he reveals that director Bright is now somewhere in Mexico and that this film was cut heavily to avoid the NC-17. Keifer was manipulated by Oliver Stone into taking the role of the humiliated killer. He said Reese DOES NOT put this film on her resume. It’s really an exaggerated role meant for shock and awe. She pummels a prison gang’s leader, mocks Sutherland in court for his appearance, throttles a detective for insinuating she’s a young white trash whore (using a slur with added adjectives as an insult back!), and goes on the lam once she’s allowed a brief trip out of the prison. Reese definitely has a character put in perilous and offensive situations that has provided the film a reputation as a particular delight if it suits your fancy.
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