Freeway

Look, Listen and Learn about Little Red Riding Hood, circa 1996. After her prostitute mum and pimp stepfather are arrested, 15-year-old Vanessa Lutz decides that instead of being put into a foster home, she’d rather go and search for her grandmother’s trailer-park. She’s picked up by Bob Wolverton, a counsellor for troubled boys – and, as it turns out, a perversely troubled wolf himself… Freeway replays the Grimm fairy-tale in a quietly bizarre and realistic world of poor white trash, sexual abuse, drug addiction and serial killers: The Big Bad Wolf is a fascist Yuppie murderer aiming to eliminate ‘the garbage people’. As played by Reese Witherspoon, Kiefer Sutherland, Dan Hedaya (as the sympathetic cop) and Brooke Shields (as the killer’s All-American wife), the tale of Vanessa’s escape and revenge is a wonderfully dark and poker-faced satire – a jewel from the straight-to-video woods. (A.H.)