| The SF, Horror and Fantasy Film Review |
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HIGHWAY 61
Rating: 
Canada. 1991.
Director – Bruce McDonald, Screenplay – Don McKellar, Story – Bruce McDonald, Don McKellar & Allan Magee, Producers – Bruce McDonald & Colin Brunton, Photography – Miroslav Baszak. Production Company – Shadow Stars.
Cast:
Don McKellar (Pokey Jones), Valerie Buhagiar (Jackie Bangs), Earl Pastko (Mr Skin), Peter Breck (Mr Watson), Johnny Askwith (Claude), Art Bergmann (Otto), Tracy Wright (Margo), Tav Falco (Motorcycle Gang Leader)
Plot: Pokey Jones, a barber in a small Canadian town, finds a dead body in his backyard. Jackie Bangs arrives, claiming the body is her brother’s and persuading Pokey to drive her to New Orleans for the funeral – although in reality she does not know the person and is just using the body to hide a package of cocaine to smuggle across the US border. As they cross the border, the journey down Highway 61 proves an unfolding history of rock’n’roll for Pokey and the two of them gradually become involved. But behind them comes The Devil who has signed a contract for the soul of the deceased and needs the body for completion of the pact.
This Canadian film plays like a road movie, if one can imagine it, as directed by Jim Jarmusch. It was the second screenplay of Canadian actor-writer-director Don McKellar – McKellar had debuted with the script for Roadkill (1989), also for director Bruce McDonald, to which this is a loose sequel of sorts and went onto write acclaimed works like Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould (1993) and the cursed violin cross-historical portmanteau The Red Violin (1998), before making his directing-writing debut with the fine end of the world film Last Night (1998).
Highway 61 has a loose, episodic and amiable plot that covers a lot of ground – within its running time it manages to be a rebel movie of sorts and a romance, a road movie that consciously trips through rock’n’roll mythology, and is also an unusual and appealing fantasy. Being a Canadian film it seems to hold an outsider’s view of the USA – it derives a visual poetry from the desolate emptiness of the American backroad countryside. But what drives the film is its eccentric sense of humour. It comes filled with a series of wonderfully odd cameos and set-pieces – the hunt around a rock star’s mansion with handguns to catch chickens for dinner; McKellar’s attempt to shave the leader of a gay biker gang; Art Bergmann’s appearance as a rock star who has taken too many drugs who in the middle of dinner announces, ”Let’s have sex. You can join in too, Pokey – I’m bisexual”; a cameo from Dead Kennedys’ lead singer Jello Biafra in an hilarious caricature of a US border guard; or some of the wonderfully nonchalant exchanges between McKellar and Valerie Buhagiar – “Do you want to have sex?” “No thanks, I’m alright.”
All the lead characters give appealing performances, particularly Emil Pastko’s suave Devil. Indeed he is the most winning character in the film, especially in some of the scenes like where he wins every single round at a church bingo game; or when he appears to the young Watson girl and tells her future – “You’re not going to be a star – you’re going to be ugly, fat and you’re going to spend your life working as a checkout cashier.” The character Pastko plays is treated ambiguously – it is also possible to interpret him as merely being a deluded lunatic. However his exploits are not that well tied to the plot, particularly in terms of motivation – the film does not make it clear why he has to reclaim the body. Surely the Devil collects sold souls rather than bodies? What does chill one though is when he gives a list of what many of his victims sold their souls for – cans of beer, tickets to rock concerts – and how pathetic a vision of people’s lives it momentarily gives.
Copyright Richard Scheib 1993
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