HIGHWAY 61
A film review by Joseph Brenner
Copyright 1992 Joseph Brenner
HIGHWAY 61 is an attempt at being charming in a cult film sort of way that never really comes off. The story is very similar to, say, SOMETHING WILD, and easily a dozen other films: a geeky but nice guy meets a wild woman hot babe who gets him involved with some weird happenings, and eventually they fall in love. I'd rate it around -1 on the -4 to +4 scale.
In this case, our hero the geek is a barber in Canada who has pretensions of being a trumpet player (he's awful). He discovers a body lying in his back yard. Our hero the wild woman (well, really the woman in this kind of story is more of an archetypal image than a hero), is a heavy metal roadie who decides to claim the body, so she can use it to smuggle some stolen cocaine into the US. She manages to con our hero into giving her a lift, so they strap the coffin on top of his Ford Galaxie, and off they go down Route 61.
First demerit: none of this makes any sense. More importantly, the nonsense isn't particularly engaging in any way, it's just there.
The third character is the most interesting one, a guy who thinks he's Satan, who goes around talking people into selling him their souls. The joke is that they almost always do it for something really trivial, because they don't take him seriously. As you might expect, there's some ambiguity about whether or not he's really Satan, but mostly he just seems to be a nut. He wants the body our heroes are schlepping around.
There are also some dissolute ex-rock stars that are friends of the wild woman, who engage in some degenerate activity that might be mildly amusing.
The "surprising" conclusion to this movie makes even less sense than the beginning, and it's even more unsatisfying. It's supposed to be ironic and show some sort of change of character on the part of the female character, but it comes out of nowhere, and it doesn't really mean anything.
So, there's an occasional funny line in this movie, and some minor sound and fury near the end that might draw you in, but it all seems too silly to matter, and it just doesn't go anywhere.
Incidentally, there is a little Bob Dylan on the sound track, but it's not the title cut, and it's probably just as well.
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