Freeway (1988)

A year or so ago, the husband of nurse Sarah “Sunny” Harper (Darlanne Fluegel) was shot dead while driving the LA freeway system. The killer has never been found, and the police don’t give any impression of caring about her pain, or simply trying to do their jobs and find justice for a murdered man.

In the last couple of weeks, there have been a increasing amount of people dying like Sunny’s husband did, without any visible provocation for the deeds and no connection to the victims beyond them traveling the LA streets by night. The police don’t believe in Sunny’s theory about a spree killer. Not until, that is, a guy (Billy Drago) ranting biblical passages starts phoning in to the talk radio show of psychiatrist Dr David Lazarus (Richard Belzer), old school live-streaming his killings via car phone. It’s not that the cops do much about this, mind you, so it’s left to Sunny and ex-cop bounty hunter with a tragic past Frank Quinn (James Russo) to do perform an actual investigation.

It is a bit of a movie cliché that New York movies from the 70s and 80s have the best urban grime, but in reality, every major metropolis the world over can look like a hell-hole (very literally to the serial killer in this particular film). Francis Delia’s Freeway does its best to make Los Angeles look appropriately bad, though the film does tend to a rather more artificial kind of grime than a James Glickenhaus New York joint, turning the film rather neo noir-ish in its look and feel.

That’s not a complaint, mind you, and if you believe in cities having specific characters, it makes sense an LA movie would have botox-ed grime, so it will feel appropriate to what many of us not living there believe Los Angeles feels like. As does the film’s focus on Greater Los Angeles’s freeway system as the only proper place for a local serial killer to obsess over as a sign of biblical apocalypse and and take as a place to haunt.

The film’s first third, before the plot really gets going, is particularly strong in its evocation of its idea of Los Angeles as a place of biblical corruption, where nothing is not dark and dirty yet neon-lit, and days seem more unreal than nights. Every man Sunny encounters at this stage of the film seems to be some sort of creep or asshole, be it the cops who don’t give a toss about her pain or the murders they are supposed to solve, a short Clint Howard appearance as ridiculous gas station creep, and so on and so forth. Even Quinn’s first appearances seems to fit into this template, until it turns out he is just as damaged by violence as she is. Really, it’s barely any wonder the killer sees the place as the “Whore of Babylon” or some such.

Ironically, enough, given a rising body count and the ever increasing calibre of the weapons the killer uses (he gets up to a bazooka in the end, because this is still the 80s), and the things Sunny and Quinn uncover about his background as a troubled priest, the film does get somewhat lighter in tone the longer it goes on, the film’s world turning out to be a place where people – though not police – can still cooperate to do some good. Even the highly dubious (the film includes the media world of 1988 with a generally sceptical eye) – and awesomely named – Lazarus does some good, here, and the film does end on a hopeful note I wouldn’t have expected of it going in. Even better, it actually works for this note instead of treating its happy end as a matter of course.

The film’s main strength is obviously its creation of a sense of place, turning Los Angeles – following the old cliché – into one of the main characters, so much so that you can see the narrative as being about a struggle over the soul of the city. If you want to give that sort of depth to a film about a serial killer who likes to (awesomely, because Drago is always great with this kind of performance) shout at streets as if they were living things.


Having never met any disbelief in the arts I didn’t want to suspend, I’m obviously on board with that reading of the movie, particularly when a movie is as moody and interesting as Freeway turns out to be.

Evilspeak (1981)

Warning: the final paragraph is full of spoilers for the film’s ending, which is just too transcendental not to talk about

Stanley Coopersmith (Clint Howard) has lost badly at the roulette of chances in life. He’s a student at a military academy where he’s at best treated as the poor relation by the teachers, if he’s not outright bullied by them, and is brutally bullied and abused by the other students. Stanley does, after all, look kinda funny, is socially awkward, poor, is an orphan and therefor  has now grown-ups to back him up at least emotionally, and is really bad at keeping his head down far enough not to be noticed (which would basically be underground anyway). So there are many reasons he’s the perfect victim especially for main school bully Bubba (Don Stark) – whom I can’t help but imagine having become the complete bully he is to distract from his eminently hilarious name. Stanley’s only friend is the apparently only black student of the place, and you can imagine how much that’s helping either of them on the crappy social ladder of the hellhole that’s supposed to make expert killersheroic patriots out of them.

Things certainly start to change for our protagonist when he accidentally stumbles upon a hidden room in the school’s cellar, where he finds the grimoire of Father Esteban (Richard Moll), a devil-worshipper from the place’s past. Stanley is fascinated by the tome, managing to translate its Latin text through the super translation powers of the school computer. Nest step is starting to work on a ritual for acquiring the power of Satan. The thing is, while he’s the local punching bag, Stanley is also a genuinely decent kid without a cruel bone in his body, so a lot of additional horrible stuff will have to happen to him before he snaps. A lot of additional horrible stuff does indeed happen, and it’s not as if the damn grimoire wouldn’t have plans of its own.

Eric Weston’s Evilspeak is a prime argument for the closeness of the outright goofy to the perfectly clever in horror, as well as for the fact that a film might start as a bit of a rip-off of Carrie but can end up a thing all its own. Quite a few of the film’s elements, when seen from the wrong angle, are highly mockable. Take, for example, the whole bit where Stanley uses a very 1981 idea of a computer for his ritual and its preparations. On the one hand, this is not how computers – even demonically possessed computers one presumes – actually worked at the time (though Google would probably kill for the translation algorithm that puts out perfectly idiomatic translations). On the other, it’s also a perfect and clever way to mix the old-fashioned gothic element of the evil magic book with something utterly contemporary as of 1981; that this contemporary elements looks possibly even more quaint than the grimoire to our eyes in 2018 isn’t really anyone’s fault.

One could also argue the characters surrounding Stanley – particularly the grown-ups – are drawn with somewhat too broad strokes. However, when you’re a kid, particularly a bullied and crapped on by destiny one like Stanley, the people inflicting all manners of cruelty and indignity on you do indeed look like caricatures of actual human beings, and since we see most of what happens – apart from a couple of deaths to fill the murder quota and scenes setting them up, really – through the eyes of Stanley, it makes total sense we get to see them as caricatures too.

Weston is particularly good at escalating Stanley’s troubles, not really hiding under the film’s eccentric veneer he’s quite conscious of the mechanics of bullying as well as the things the victim of bullies fears the most. So the things that should help get Stanley through – a puppy, a companionable working-class cook, a girl that doesn’t outright mock him for his existence – will in the end just set him up for even worse troubles, and while that may not be a realistic portrayal of life, it sure as hell is one of the fears a kid like Stanley has.

The film has other strengths too: Weston is highly inventive when it comes to setting up the film’s scares and murders, using religious symbols – often also connected to things Stanley fears interestingly enough – in ways subtle and unsubtle (the death of the priest has to be seen to be believed, for example). Why, one might think someone involved in the film has a somewhat displeased connection to religion in his background. While the editing seems sometimes rough, the film is well-paced, looks good, and is generally atmospheric, with even its most lurid moments breathing a sense of place that helps sell them. There’s a bunch of character actors (other than the already mentioned ones for example R.G. Armstrong and Charles Tyner) working their magic on the exalted characters they are playing, and young Howard is pretty much the perfect guy to play Stanley.


And that’s all before we even come to the film’s finale which takes some elements of Carrie and blows them up into dimensions of inspired grotesquerie, big “what the fuck!?”s swirling in the speech bubbles about viewers’ heads when they witness a series of scenes where a priest’s death by a nail from a bleeding and moving Jesus statue is really only the beginning. For the following sequence will also contain a levitating Clint Howard with electrified hair decapitating people with a broadsword, demon killer pigs (making a return from an earlier scene) and a random zombie ripping a heart out. It’s gotta be seen to believed, and once you’ve seen it, you can’t but love it.