Highway Of Heartache

Description

Review ***It s tempting to say that if you hate country-western music you ll love Canadian director Greg Wild s perversely satirical Highway of Heartache . From the title song to the hard life of its country-singing heroine Wynonna Sue Turnpike to the blow-dried TV talent scout who discovers her, Highway is a nonstop blur of regional insults and trailer-trash caricatures. But the most perverse thing about Highway (Taste alert!!! Don t even think of going to this movie if you are offended by the sight of dildos, filled colostomy bags and bacterial discharge, or by misogyny, drag queens and religious sacrilege!) is that the songs accompanying Wynonna Sue s eventful journey are pretty good. The lyrics are dead-on hard-knocks parody. I ve Got a Ring On My Finger and a Stiff On My Hands , Wynonna sings, after killing her abusive husband. But Barbara Chamberlin, the Seattle singer who plays Wynonna, wrote herself some finger-snapping music that audiences will want to take with them to next week s two-step dance class. Those audiences themselves may be worth watching. Highway , shot as a live-action cartoon with every scene played against painted cardboard back-drops, seems tailored for the midnight crowd ready to move on to something gamier than The Rocky Horror Picture Show . Its characters have hair higher than Marge Simpson s, they wear polyester Jim and Tammy wardrobes in gumball colors, and they talk as if they were rejects from a burlesque show audition. In the center of it all is the whinny, self-widowed, second-grade dropout Wynonna-Sue, smokin and strummin and singin as she sets out, with a Greek chorus of overweight lesbians in tow, to follow in the footsteps of Patsy Cline. Along the way, she becomes a porn star, a convicted killer and Death Row inmate, a national singing sensation, a shooting victim, a survivor of an airplane crash, a bride betrayed by her husband and her long-lost black daughter, and as they say much, much more. Highway of Heartache is Douglas Sirk as interpreted by John Waters for a party at Andy Warhols. Costumes mandatory. Wild, who earned a degree in commerce before working in musicals and studying film, has more targets in his sights than Pat Buchanan. And people willing to spend a minute thinking about it (now, that would be perverse!) might find an actual message here. About women as victims, about men as hormone-driven monsters, about nicotine addiction. Whatever. All I know is I laughed a lot, and am not proud of it. --NewsdayEasily the weirdest feature yet to come out of Canada. Highway of Heartache is a scrappy cult item that pokes relentless fun at country music, the Christian right, tabloid TV and what debut helmer Gregory Wild calls victimology . The mega-victim here is Wynonna-Sue Turnpike (Barbara Chamberlin), a would-be country star, complete with beehive do and cat s-eye glasses, whose career keeps getting sidetracked by things like steady abuse from her heartless mother, the Ku Klux Klan s kidnapping of her interracial child, and the sundry betrayals of various men folk whom she has a habit of shooting on live TV. Wynonna-Sue whines constantly, even after she marries the man of her dreams, a chat show host called Crawfish (funny Pat Patterson) but everything s fodder for her bottomless bag of hurtin tunes. Anyway, her truest love relationship is with her beautiful little cigarettes . In the well-named Wild s demented hands, there s not a scrap of naturalism or even daylight on display. The sets are wholly artificial, right down to brightly painted shadows and cartoon windows. Tacky animation, choruses of obese drag queens and loose lip-synching add to a carnival atmosphere marrying John Waters taste to a beyond Douglas Sirk plot. Fortunately, the script though often puerile in the extreme is consistently funny, and manages to drive home the helmer s social agenda without collapsing the narrative into utter silliness. Most surprising of all is that the music, penned and performed by Chamberlin herself, is actually catchy enough to stand on its own. The Seattle thesp also is appealing enough to give her grotesque character some needed sympathetic depth. Pic, shot in 16mm is guaranteed to offend general auds, and scatological lingo makes network and regular plex berths impossible but this Highway will head to a happy camp in gay fests, and at midnight screenings, where it s easy to imagine rhinestone-encrusted fans chanting along with Ring on My Finger, Stiff on My Hands . --VarietyAccurately billed as the first Canadian, country-western, drag queen movie musical , writer-director Gregory Wild s shoestring-budgeted Highway of Heartache constitutes a cinematic act of will. It boasts a score of clever, catchy, and well-orchestrated book songs (written by leading lady Barbara Chamberlin); brightly colored cartoon-cutout sets; animation and optical effects; and enough sky-high wigs and pastel jumpsuits to fill a chain of Hollywood Boulevard boutiques. If the movie is visually dizzying, stridently overacted, and beyond tasteless, it s also staggeringly ambitious and the next best thing to irresistible. The saga of trailer-park hausfrau Wynonna-Sue Turnpike (Chamberlin) begins when she shoots her abusive hubby in self defense the opening number is I ve Got a Ring on My Finger and a Stiff on My Hands and flees to Nashville to duplicate the success of her idols Patsy, Tammy and Loretty. Murder, blackmail, illicit romance, superstardom, a murder trial, and the reappearance of a racially mixed daughter (Secrets and Lies, anyone?) follow. And when Wynonna bursts into song, two back-up-singing drag queens (the Big Wigs) miraculously appear to provide vocal support. It s fitting that Highway of Heartache is making its video debut in the 25th anniversary year of Pink Flamingos. Of the post-John Waters film-making generation, Gregory Wild will be up there with the biggies. --The Advocate