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Freeway Ii: Confessions Of A Trickbaby: Review

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Writer-director Matthew Bright's follow-up to his audacious FREEWAY (1996), a ghoulish retelling of the tale of Little Red Riding Hood, is a brutal hybrid that combines girls-in-the-slammer exploitation, road-movie adventure and a mind-boggling riff on the theme of Hansel and Gretel. Abused and left to her own devices by her trailer-trash family, bulimic, seethingly mad-at-the-world teenage junkie Crystal Van Meuther (Natasha Lyonne) — "White Girl" to her friends — drifts into dealing, turning tricks and brutally robbing her johns, which eventually gets her arrested and sentenced to 25 years in prison. She's sent to a shady juvenile facility for girls that's supposed to prepare her for long-term incarceration by curing her eating disorder, but there's no treatment to speak of and White Girl simply becomes queen bee of the clinic's substantial population of binge-and-purgers. Overall, Crystal would be just fine if her roommate weren't lesbian psychokiller Cyclona (Maria Celedonio), who was committed for murdering her entire family. Cyclona hallucinates, talks to herself, masturbates compulsively and is tormented by nightmares that leave her screaming in midnight terror. She makes persistent advances toward White Girl, who rebuffs them until Cyclona engineers a daring breakout that puts them on the road to Tijuana. There Cyclona hopes to find Sister Gomez (Vincent Gallo), the only person from her entire tormented childhood of whom she has happy memories. En route, White Girl tries unsuccessfully to keep Cyclona from murdering anyone else, though she's grateful for her homicidal bent when Cyclona kills would-be crackhead rapist Larry (Michael T. Weiss, of TV's The Pretender), who attacks White Girl while the girls are hitching a ride on a boxcar. Once over the border, Cyclona locates Sister Gomez (wolfish indie-film actor and director Vincent Gallo in drag), who takes the girls into her sanctuary, a brightly colored confectionary shop where she serves delicious, home-cooked meals to impoverished, abandoned children. Her homey refuge seems too good to be true, which, of course, it is. Bright appears to have made a conscious effort to up the FREEWAY ante in this film, which was shot on a lower budget than its predecessor but still managed to attract an interesting cast that, in addition to Lyonne (who was also an associate producer) and Gallo, includes David Alan Grier as sleazy lawyer Mr. Butz, John Landis as a judge, Max Perlich as a leg-biting hunchback and Weiss, who may or may not be reprising his role from FREEWAY. leave a comment --Maitland McDonagh
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