Review of Highway 61 (1991) by Daniel P — 10 Sep 2013

When I was a kid, maybe about 10, I had a strange personal experience when - along with my parents and my five-years-younger sister - I saw this movie at the long-since-closed New Yorker Cinema, in London, Ontario, after my parents won four tickets by calling in to the radio station. What I remember is just an uncomfortable feeling: between the gritty urban opening, in which the heroine rips off a Toronto rock band for drug money then buses to the end of the line Northern Ontario, and our dippy hero's discovery of what's called a Rock Star Death in such remote small towns, (a twenty-something dude dead on the ground one morning, from drugs or booze), the premise was a little over my head... And the ensuing lie that she tells - that the stiff was her brother - to get our hero, a lonely and innocent barber, to drive her to New Orleans, not to mention the sex-in-a-graveyard scene, with a guy who seems to be the devil on their tail the whole time.

Q: So what did I see this viewing that I didn't last time?

A: Everything that requires a sense of irony.

The film is, in many ways, a punk rock satire, and though it is Canadian, it gives Bruce McDonald a chance to riff on America, as particularly shown in the only other part I remembered, the encounter with a man whose three daughters are in a going-nowhere family band, all of them named after states (Louise, for Louisiana; Minnie, for Minnesota; and Missie, for Mississippi).

Religion is McDonald's primary target here, but money and guns also get their share of scorn, and though there are quite a few good laughs, you'll feel uncomfortable enjoying them. In the end what you get is a film that's dark and desperate and that suffers only slightly from a small budget and immature dialogue... not to mention the meet-up with the old friends in New Orleans, where - like the acid trip in Hard Core Logo - the whole thing goes off the rails for a while. Warts and all, though, It's a Canadian classic, and I'm really glad I re-watched it when I was old enough to understand it: one less thing to tell my therapist about, now...