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.

Battle Beyond the Stars (1980)

Evil space overlord Sador (John Saxon) and his gang of mutants pop in at a tiny, pacifist farming community on an otherwise empty planet to announce the place, or rather its harvest, now belongs to him. He’ll get back once harvesting time has come; to prove his commitment to being evil, he lasers down some random farmer with his ship. After some discussion, the community decides to attempt and hire some mercenaries to protect them.

Spirited young Shad (Richard Thomas) sets out in the old ship of Zed (Jeff Corey) the only of his people who ever went out on space adventures to find help. During his own space adventures Shad manages to get together a team of seven (plus some additions that don’t count for my calculation) – shall we call them magnificent seven? There’s space trucker Space Cowboy (George Peppard), computer expert and professional love interest Nanelia (Darlanne Fluegel), space Valkyrie and wearer of very little clothing St. Exmin (Sybil Danning), hive-minded psi clones Nestor (Earl Boen, John Gowans and others), reptilian space whaler, opportunist slaver and Sador-hater Cayman (Morgan Woodward), and last but not least professional (space) killer Gelt (Robert Vaughan, pretty much reprising his role from The Magnificent Seven). Together, they just might beat Sador. Perhaps, there’ll even be some of them left to tell the tale afterwards.

Revisiting childhood favourites can become a bit of a drag, but I can happily report that the Corman-produced Battle Beyond the Stars is even more fun than I remembered it to be. As a grown-up (so-called), I can now understand quite a few more of the jokes and imaginative asides of John Sayles’s wonderful script which only improves the sense of fun, wonder and adventure of the film.

On paper, an attempt to get at some of that sweet, sweet, Star Wars money while also ripping off the structure and plot of Seven Samurai/The Magnificent Seven might sound like a dreary exercise. In practice, however, the film perfectly hits the tone, the bizarre imagination and the general craziness of classic space opera, working from a script that is perfectly conscious of the utter silliness of the whole proceedings but it also wallowing in it with great delight. Sayles’s script isn’t just funny but also packs in so many ideas ripped right from the SF pulps of the space opera persuasion it at times, particularly in the film’s first hour, feels as if he got paid by the idea, turning the film’s outer space into exactly the kind of weird and wacky wonderland it should be in this sort of film.

The rest of the people involved under director Jimmy T. Murakami certainly got into the same spirit. The space ship miniatures (art design in part by a young James Cameron) and other effects designs certainly suggest that Corman told his people to get as close to the Star Wars (and sometimes Westworld and so on) style as possible without getting sued, but the designs are also genuinely wonderful, putting all the strange beauty of 70s SF paperback covers right on screen, and that in often surprisingly – given the budget - accomplished effect sequences. The matte paintings are incredibly gorgeous, the costume design looks as if the clothes from all old SF movies and shows had gotten together and made babies, and the creature design is high pulp. There’s a good reason beyond his legendary stinginess why Corman would go on to use effects shots from the film in quite a few other productions during the next ten years or so.

Add to this box of the delights the inspired cast (John Boy Walton as Luke Skywalker! Sybil Danning’s breasts as Sybil Danning’s breasts! Robert Vaughan, the killer in space! And so on!), giving just the right kinds of performances – with John Saxon then eating them, the scenery, and probably our mothers, all up – and Sayles’s incredibly fun script, and you have yourself a film with all the feverish ideas of classic pulps, more subversive intelligence than the pulps ever dreamed of having, and just a whole load of beauty to satisfy everybody’s inner child, while keeping the outer grown-up at peace.