“Young people gotta live, too…”: Matthew Bright’s ‘Freeway’

*WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS*


Coming home late the other night and searching aimlessly through the hinterland of Sky channels, I tripped across Zone Thriller (companion channel to Zone Horror, on 322) to find that they were showing Matthew Bright’s ‘Freeway’.

For a while a couple of years ago, Matthew Bright was going to be the next great cult filmmaker, following ‘Freeway’ and ‘Confessions of a Trick Baby’, two films based on fairy tales (Little Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel respectively) – but then something happened. He made a film called ‘Tiptoes’, about a woman falling in love with her new husband’s dwarf brother (played by Gary Oldman on his knees) (no, I’m not kidding) and the Ted Bundy biopic ‘Bundy’ which was slated for its mixing of horrible rape and murder with throwaway comedy. Both of them were not seen by anyone. Since then, nothing. It was like all of a sudden everybody decided he was just too full of wrong.

The thing is, Bright had always been full of Wrong – both ‘Freeway’ and ‘Trick Baby’are twisted, fucked-up, perverted versions of archetypal myths, full of sex and violence. Like the bastard child of John Waters and Russ Meyer, Bright fills his films with vividly drawn characters and over-the-top dialogue. Like when the serial rapist-killer masquerading as a counsellor is quizzing Little Red Vanessa the hitchhiker about her childhood abuse:-

“Say it out loud Vanessa!”
“It felt like I’d been transformed into a human urinal…”

What in retrospect gives the film more of a frisson is the casting. Playing Vanessa, the trashy trailer park girl on the run to her grandmother’s house is (now Oscar-nominated) Reese Witherspoon, while the Big Bad Wolf ‘Bob Wolverton’ is played by America’s newest greatest hero (and extreme torture-junkie) Jack Bauer himself, Kiefer Sutherland. Hearing Kiefer bark lines like “Get your fucking pants down, you fucking cunt!” to a teenage girl he’s planning to rape and murder is weird enough, but seeing him with a fucked-up jaw held together by sticks and wires after he’s been shot in the mouth by Witherspoon, his mouth drooling and distorted, speaking through a voicebox in his throat while he clings onto his prim wife (Brooke Shields, in another example of potentially stunt casting that actual helps the film) makes you realise how out of the mainstream Keifer used to be before ‘24’ put him back into the centre of the American consciousness.
Witherspoon is great in ‘Freeway’ – foul-mouthed, gun-toting, hard as nails, but still somehow sympathetic – probably because she consistently refuses to take any shit from anyone – parents, rapists, police, prison guards. She’s like the classic anti-social rebel from a Fifties B-movie. Except, instead of being a leather-clad biker, she’s a boobtube-wearing teenage girl. (With the follow-up (sometimes known as ‘Freeway 2’) “Confessions of a Trick Baby”, Bright goes even further, pulling off the enviable trick of making us feel sympathetic for a violent, murderous psychopath.)
Towards the end of the film, we move into a kind of ‘women-in-prison’picture (which is picked up and expanded in ‘Confessions of a Trick Baby’), with Witherspoon beating the shit out of the prison’s top dog within minutes of getting in there and inevitable lesbian overtones aplenty – “I’ll make out with you, but no fucking…”, before we head into the final showdown between Vanessa and the Wolf, precipitated by Vanessa’s prison escape and the discovery of Kiefer’s shedfull of young girl porn ( an incident which leads to Brooke Shields messily blowing her brains out in her bathroom.)

The film also features supporting cast stalwart Dan Hedaya, Amanda Plummer (as Vanessa’s prostitute mum) and a young Brittany Murphy, but the film really belongs to Witherspoon, who showed real potential here,far beyond the ‘Legally Blonde’ ditziness (or the ‘Walking the Line’ earnestness) that she’s shown since. Honestly, it’d be great to hear her barking lines like “Fuck you chipmunk face!” to a deformed Keifer Sutherland again…

Street Trash: Pricklips and Bum Ooze

*WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS*

“Lower Manhattan. Life is cheap and gang warfare reigns supreme. Two brothers battle to break free from the clutches of the brutal Bronson and his vicious gang of street freaks. Together with a renegade cop, they set about cleaning up their territory…but they encounter a new enemy, a phoneminal new energy force that melts its victims in seconds. If you’ve never seen a melt movie then be prepared.”

That’s the back-of-the-box blurb for ‘Street Trash’, complete with spelling mistake (how hard is it to proof-read 70 words, for Christ’s sake?). Makes it sound like an action-packed horror-thriller, doesn’t it? Rather than the rambling, digressive horror-comedy it actually is…Not that I’m complaining, ‘Street Trash’ – on authentic big-boxed 1980s VHS for that extra frisson of low-budgetude – was a great watch.

Starting with a chase scene straight out of a silent movie (except with more’fucks’ and naked breasts), the film actually sets up the plot pretty quickly. A slob of a liquor store owner finds a 70-year-old crate of booze in a boarded up part of his cellar and decides to sell it cheap to the winos who seem to exclusively populate his shop. Within ten minutes, a couple of them are dead – melting away into puddles in a couple of fairly well-executed FX scenes - the first on a toilet in a derelict building, the second on a fire escape (dripping onto a yuppie who looks strangely like Tony Blair) At the same time, we’re introduced to the main characters, the two brothers who live in the junkyard, one a conscience-free drunk, the other a good-hearted innocent.



Then the film seems to forget about the whole ‘melting-booze’ thing and instead sets up a load of other characters. It’s like sTristram Shandy or something – the film keeps going off on tangents every time a new character is introduced, only finding it’s way back to the main narrative about ten minutes later, before veering off again. (Some reviews I’ve read have suggested that this was just a way to fill up the running-time, and some of it does feel like that, but it’s always watchable, and it does stay pretty much related to the junkyard and its denizens.)

In a way, it could almost be argued that the horror stuff is the stuff that’s tacked on and what the director really wanted to make was a film about a bunch of down-and-outs, all seemingly fucked-up by Vietnam. The lead baddie, Bronson, holds court at night, on his throne amongst the car parts, regaling his troops with tales of ‘war atrocities’, before falling asleep and dreaming of being attacked by Vietcong vampires, in a surprisingly (for the budget) effective and stylish imaginary sequence.

In fact, the film as a whole is pretty well shot, with some great steadicam stuff – the director Jim Muro is a DOP/Camera Op/Steadicam op and has gone on to do stuff on big Hollywood films – and handheld tracking, especially through the junkyard. There’s even a handheld vertical 360 turn during one of the melt sequences (which kick back in, along with the main plot, after about an hour). The design is great too – the film is full of grime, piss,puke, semen, blood and body ooze, every street is rubbish-strewn, every wall seems to have ‘fuck’ graffiti’ed on it and every hobo seems thick with dirt – you can almost smell them coming off the screen. The script – ‘enthusiastically’ performed – is relentlessly foulmouthed (“Go fuck your Dog, Ed!””Very witty, pricklips!”), although also strewn with scenes where characters narrate what they’re doing and thinking for the sake of exposition.

It’s also got its fair share of Wrongness – the comedy (always accompanied by Benny Hill-style knockabout music) centres around scenes like an extremely fat boss trying to rape his secretary and apparently suffering a heart attack in the middle of it, or a man getting his cock cut off, then having to chase it as the others play piggy-in-the-middle with it (the scene ending, incidentally, with a shot of the cockless hobo gripping onto the back of a school bus full of screaming kids as he tries to get his appendage to the hospital in time. Pretty much a dictionary definition of Wrong, right there…) There’s also a terrible fight scene – unconvincing, badly choreographed, badly shot – which is only partly redeemed by the fact that the victor drags the loser head first into a urinal, then sticks his fingers down his throat and vomits on him.

But, it has got one of the best beheadings I’ve ever seen, containing a shot that made me laugh out loud (well, it was funny…). And the end titles contain credits for ‘Perverted Rottweiler’, ‘Exploding Bum’ and ‘Receptive Whore in Van’. (What some actors wouldn’t give for a credit like that…). The end credits also, weirdly, feature a song, in character, by one of the actors – a clichéd Mafia boss who is only really in about three scenes and doesn’t have anything to do with the main plot – which seems to recap his part of the film. Very strange. But not in a bad way.

‘Street Trash’ – at least in my VHS version - is only about 80-odd minutes long, but it does get a lot in, and it’s always at least entertaining. I mean, I haven’t even mentioned the death-by-windscreen, human femur knife or the necrophilia.
Or the impossibly hard-boiled, muscle t-shirted detective (Sample dialogue when looking at a police report of a body - Detective:“Who found her?”, Desk Sergeant: “It’s on the chart.” Detective: (shrugs) Hey, come on, I read like old people fuck.”). Of course, the sound mix is muddy as hell (not helped by the fact that some of the actors have only a passing acquaintance with intelligible diction), the ‘melt’ stuff isn’t exactly explained or resolved and there’s sometimes an uneasiness of tone between the comedy and the wrongness, but, if filthy booze-soaked bums melting into equally flithy toilets is your cup of tea (so to speak), then it’s definitely worth a look. Of course, that’s maybe an acquired taste.

Beer, skittles, meat, bones, melting bums

We finally got approval from Paul Welsh today for the ‘Deliver Me’ cut, which means that we can start moving forward with the dub and the grade. Unfortunately, we’ve lost quite a few days out of the time that we’d orginally planned for Grant (our sound recordist/designer) to do the sound mix, so we’re going to have to try and reschedule those and find a new date for the dub, potentially pushing it back to the end of February. I should be feeling happy that it’s all moving forward again, but with all the stuff to do on ‘Mum and Dad’ coming up over the next couple of weeks, plus a Cinema Extreme workshop, losing time to work on ‘Deliver Me’ recently due to waiting for feedback, has left me feeling detached from the project. It’s been hanging around for so long now that trying to keep my enthusiasm and focus on it during periods like this – when it feels like it’s nobody else’s priority – has become increasingly difficult.

(Obviously, moaning about the fact that I’m getting the opportunity to make films (and, in the case of “Mum and Dad”, brutal and perverse horror films at that) is not the most endearing quality in the world, so I’m going to try and keep that to a minimum here, but I did think it worth mentioning that the world of Uncinema is not all beer and skittles. Or dildos and Pringles tubes, for that matter.)

Looking back at the edit, I think there are a lot of good things to be said about it, however much I’m finding it hard to even look at at the moment.
1) The performances are all great, really digging the meat and bones out of the script (and also adding some to it);
2) I got to shoot, and cut in, The Infamous ‘INT: Vagina’ Shot;
3) The flexibility of digital cutting means that I have had the opportunity to create shots in the edit which we didn’t originally shoot – one close-up in particular, which I had to steal from another scene, then play in reverse (one of about 4 backwards shots in the film, none of which, hopefully, are noticeable as such)…
4) … as well as a shot which is blown up to six times it’s orginal size, then cropped and tinted to become something else entirely and solved a problem which I had thought about before the shoot, then forgotten, then had an aching moment of cold dread about during the edit, before having a moment of left-field inspiration. (Or desperate clutching-at-straws luck. Whichever.)
5) The film really seems to work at its length – it’s currently running at 17 and a half minutes, but doesn’t feel like it – it feels like there’s a sustained tension all the way through. Of course, we haven’t watched it with an audience yet, and that’s the real test, but I don’t think that’s going to be happening any time soon…
6) Aaaand it’s back to the moaning already…


On a positive note, while scouring the charity shops in Sherwood yesterday I came across a big box VHS of a film called ‘Street Trash’, which Cooke has often told me about (and which I once saw at a car boot costing £4, when I only had £3 on me, and there was no haggling to be had). It’s an 80s low-budget horror, promoted as ‘the ultimate melt movie’ and one of the first reviews I came across online contains the words ‘completely indefensible’, ‘exploitation gorefest’, ‘insane cannibal Viet Nam vet’and‘incredible melting bums’. So, I don’t think I can go wrong with it, really. Or at least, not wrong in a bad way...