Control Nathan Rabin 4.0 #82 Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby
Welcome, friends, to the latest entry in Control Nathan Rabin 4.0. It’s the career and site-sustaining column that gives YOU, the kindly, Christ-like, unbelievably sexy Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place patron, an opportunity to choose a movie that I must watch, and then write about, in exchange for a one-time, one hundred dollar pledge to the site’s Patreon account. The price goes down to seventy-five dollars for all subsequent choices.
Or you can be like two kind patrons and use this column to commission a series of pieces about a filmmaker or actor. I’m nearly done with my patron-funded deep dive into the works of Sam Peckinpah, many of which, truth be told, have some pretty fucked up shit in them, and I’ve just begun a project on the movies of the late, great, fervently mourned David Bowie and I’ve written about a number of Madonna movies for Todd in the Shadows and will be covering The Next Best Thing sometime soon.
Alternately, you can have me write about film series, as big-hearted patrons have done for SLC Punk and its extraordinarily irrelevant sequel, Babe and its sequel (still gotta get around to Babe) and most recently Freeway, Matthew Bright’s wildly entertaining 1996 drive-in movie take on Little Red Riding Hood and its justly obscure, ignored 1999 sequel Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby.
I have vague memories of watching and writing about Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby during my early days as a writer for the A.V Club, when my beat more or less was Hip Hop, abysmal motion pictures nobody wanted to review and direct to video movies.
It was in my capacity as a direct-to-video specialist that I first encountered Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby. For an exploitation movie relegated to the direct-to-video ghetto Freeway II had a lot going for it, first and foremost being the sequel to a beloved cult film.
Freeway writer-director Matthew Bright, whose cult pedigree includes co-writing the famously insane musical The Forbidden Zone and writing the surprisingly sensitive, affecting Guncrazy returned as writer and director so that he could ruin the sequel himself rather than delegating that responsibility to someone else.
I went into Bright’s poorly received sequel with hopes that were quickly and cruelly dashed once it became apparent that Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby went direct-to-video for exactly the reasons you would expect: it’s a cheap, ugly wallow in human misery from a filmmaker mired in self-plagiarism and self-parody.
Freeway II would seem, at the very least, to have an ideal badass anti-heroine in the resurgent Natasha Lyonne, particularly since the role has so much in common with her comeback turn in Orange Is the New Black.
In Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby Lyonne plays Crystal Van Meter, AKA White Girl, a sixteen year old juvenile delinquent who specializes in posing as a prostitute and then robbing her faux-clients.
Crystal is sentenced to a minimum security hospital that specializes in eating disorders by a judge played by Twilight Zone: The Movie co-director John Landis in a winking cameo that plays a whole lot darker than it did at the time of its release thanks to the unfortunate existence of Max Landis.
This dispiritingly sequel obsesses on the details of its anti-heroine’s bulimia so extensively and gratuitously that it begins to feel like a movie very specifically made for people who get off sexually on watching young women binge and purge.
An early shot of Crystal throwing up in a toilet while her psychotic, sex-obsessed lesbian cellmate Angela “Cyclona” Garcia (María Celedonio) watches lingers on for so long that it threatens to take up the entire first act of the movie.
Crystal gets her revenge on her jailers after being given an injection to cure her of her bulimia when, in a scene that stands out for all the wrong reasons, she projectile-vomits on a horrified guard for what sure feels like a good ten minutes.
When a follow-up to a legit cult movie from the creator of that cult film and starring a cult badass is far more successful as a sleazy exercise in fetish porn than as a film something has gone terribly awry.
Crystal and her cellmate have a hankering for freedom so they bust out of the hospital, at which point it becomes all too apparent that Cyclona has a real problem involving mass murder.
Cyclona is a serial killer, and not one of those nice, reasonable ones either. For Cyclona, mass murder, and hot, hot, lesbian sex are inextricably intertwined. She gets a sexual thrill out of killing people without remorse or shame but she also gets a sexual thrill out of, you know, sex.
The homicidal odd couple heads to Mexico in search of a mysterious figure Cyclona regards as the only loving, nurturing, kind presence in her entire tragic, brutal existence: a kindly nun named Sister Gomez she is convinced will save her from herself, her demons and the police that are after her.
Where Freeway was a drive-in movie sexploitation take on Little Red Riding Hood, its sequel offers a grind house version of Hansel & Gretel where the innocent, hungry children are a teen prostitute and a prolific serial killer and the witch is an androgynous figure of menace played by a deeply unnerving Vincent Gallo.
As with Freeway, a character that initially presents themself as a good samaritan who has made helping troubled children their life’s work is revealed to be instead a figure of pure, perverted evil instead.
Sister Gomez is less a nun than a witch whose interest in fattening up White Girl is every bit as sinister as it initially seems. The Hansel and Gretel aspect helps explain the movie’s unnerving fixation on binging and purging.
Who were Hansel and Gretel, after all, if not terribly hungry young people whose rapacious hunger got them into all manner of trouble?
Freeway II only begins to establish an identity for itself outside of the long, harsh shadow of its infinitely superior predecessor at the end of a third act that embraces full-on horror once it is revealed that Sister Gomez’s home is no safe haven but rather a circle of hell where children are sexually abused and consumed and various other unpleasantness.
Lyonne is a great dramatic as well as comic actress with incredible presence but Freeway II doesn’t give her anything to do other than sullenly react to Cyclona’s unrelenting and eventually successful sexual advances and unfortunate predilection for killing everyone she encounters other than her.
During this period of her life, Natasha Lyonne’s favorite “Weird Al” Yankovic album was Bad Hair Day
The Russian doll star does not have an opportunity to really act until an unexpectedly tender, even sensitive moment of connection late in the film when the full horrors of Cyclona’s life are revealed and a woman who has never been anything other than a cartoonishly over-the-top villain suddenly seems heartbreakingly human.
At the tail end of a garbage movie that makes a mockery of its predecessor Lyonne has a very real, very powerful emotional breakthrough with a character and actress similarly fucked over by a script interested only in exploitation rather than understanding or empathy.
On a similar note, without the irony or wit of Freeway, the sequel’s clumsy attempts at ironic commentary on racist, sexist, homophobic and transphobic b-movie stereotypes just register as racism, sexism, homophobia and transphobia, with the “reveal” of Sister Gomez’s penis serving as yet another moment of facile, ugly, glib shock.
Freeway felt prescient in its depiction of its villain, Bob Wolverton (Kiefer Sutherland), as a proto-Men’s Rights activist who has deluded himself into thinking that his all-consuming hatred of women is a coherent moral philosophy and not a horrifyingly widespread disease.
This depressingly awful, unbecomingly grim, oddly humorless sequel, on the other hand, feels like it was written by Wolverton himself to illustrate that his worldview is correct and that women, particularly underage, sexually desirable women, really are evil, grasping, violent, sex-crazed creatures who are only interested in men, particularly white men, as victims they can rob, kill and abuse.
Seeing Freeway 2: Confessions of a Trickbaby only days after re-watching the original did the sequel no favors. We assume that sequels will be opportunistic and unnecessary, mercenary and utterly devoid of originality and inspiration. Even by the low standards of direct-to-video sequels, however, this is a joyless slog.
With Freeway, Bright elevated the sleazy b-movie to the level of pop art. Freeway II: Confessions of a Trickbaby, in sharp contrast is just another sleazy b-movie, and not a particularly distinguished one at that.
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