Director: Matthew Bright
This bizarre hidden gem has all of the odds stacked against it.
It’s an uncalled-for sequel to an offbeat cult film.
It’s got a different cast from the original, with its most established name at the time being David Alan Grier (who’s very funny as a lascivious lawyer).
It was released straight to video.
Like most straight-to-video movies in 1999, you likely didn’t know that this existed until you saw it on a shelf. Holding the VHS or DVD box in your hand, this looked like a cynical waste of time. Probably a bad imitation. Something watered-down. Very possibly a money-laundering front. Or at least the product of a bad deal made by somebody.
Writer/director Matthew Bright, returning from the original film, seems to know this and as if to make up for it he coughs up one of the craziest, sleaziest midnight movie freakouts of the final years of the 20th century. Freeway 2 does NOT want to be obscure. It’s a scream in the night. It’s a film full of left turns, uncomfortable laughs, and characters who most normal people would find repulsive. If Freeway 2 is heading straight toward a dead end, Bright works to crash it at top speed.
The plot has nothing to do with the original movie or its characters. It’s more of a “spiritual sequel” that carries on with the theme of girls from the wrong side of the tracks who have no future as depicted in a story based on a fairy tale. Freeway retold “Little Red Riding Hood” as violent pulp; Freeway 2 goes for “Hansel and Gretel”.
Here’s the deal: Two teenage girls escape from a women’s prison where they’re both serving heavy sentences. One (Natasha Lyonne) is a bulimic prostitute, the other (Maria Celedonio) is a frequently masturbating serial killer who needs to take several pills a day just to be kinda sorta almost halfway normal.
Once they’re out, this becomes a nightmarish road movie. A repulsive new predator or harrowing new brush with the law is around every corner, but these girls’ real worst enemies are their own deeply damaged mental states.
Bright cares A LOT about his two leads, which is what makes this film oddly poignant under all of its insanity. Both actresses are charisma machines, but their characters are complete wrecks. There’s nothing romantic about their pasts. Bright emphasizes how they both come from profoundly fucked-up backgrounds (horrible parents might be the real root of all evil, perpetuating cycles that keep going and going).
I like how Bright keeps testing our loyalty to them. A magnetic, 20-year-old Natasha Lyonne conceals her fragility under a hard-boiled exterior, which is kinda cool, but she’s also a bulimic and I lost count of how many vomit scenes she has (the opening credits even play over her retching in shadow over a prison toilet). Meanwhile, Maria Celedonio is a total Manic Pixie goofball who also slaughters an innocent family and then pleasures herself over the bodies.
What I’m trying to say is that this movie is not for everybody.
Also worth mentioning is Vincent Gallo as… well, actually I don’t want mention who he is here. It plays best as another weird surprise.
I thought about two movies as I watched this.
David Lynch’s Wild at Heart. A previous cinematic road trip through Hell.
Also, Jonathan Demme’s Caged Heat . A previous exploitation excercise that plays the game sometimes and then twists it in strange ways at other times.