Overview: Little Red Riding Hood for the 1990's: After her mom and step-dad are arrested, 15-year-old Vanessa Lutz decides that instead of once again being put into a foster home, she'd rather go and search for the grandmother she's never met, and live with her. "On the way to grandma's house," (actually a trailer park) Vanessa's car breaks down, and she's picked up from the side of the road by Bob Wolverton, a counselor at a school for troubled boys. Bob slowly earns Vanessa's trust, and eventually convinces her to talk about her sexual abuse at the hands of her stepfather.

DVD Verdict: Better than both "Seven" and "Natural Born Killers", director Matthew Bright's "Freeway" is a looseleaf modern view of Red Riding Hood where Reese Witherspoon plays Red traveling to Grandma's house.

Only she takes this trip after her prostitute mother and junkie stepdad are arrested, she escapes the cluthces of foster care, she says goodbye to her fiancee who is then murdered in a driveby shooting, she hitches a ride with a psycho who turns out to be a mass murderer, she kills a few people, ends up in lockup, escapes, finally makes it to Gradma's house, where some more bloody action takes place.

Oh yes, she has homosexual and heterosexual sex, spends a lot of time saying the "F" word, brutalizes most anyone that gets in her way, and otherwise creates mayhem for everybody. Sounds like your typical Reese Witherspoon role, eh? No, not by a long shot.

But one thing about her role - she is fantastic, out of this world great. She is twice the actress in this role she was playing June Carter Cash, for which she won an Oscar as best actress. On the basis of these roles, Witherspoon must be considered one of the best actresses extant right now.

Please know ahead of time that there is gory, bloody violence throughout this film, nudity and more "F" and "F"ing talk than you heard by Matt Damon when he played that low-class genius at Harvard! Someone told me they said "F" 147 times in that movie. Witherspoon herself must say it that many times here.

But none of this diminishes the astonishing electricity and action that swallows the viewer right from the opening scene, where junkie-hooker mom gets arrested and weirdo-junkie stepdad forces Reese to do the nasty while mom's out earning a living. There is an uncompromising level of reality in these characterization, too, although it's clearly an over the top psycho young Sutherland plays.

In an astonishing bit of casting, squeeky clean prom queen type Brooke Shields is cast as the uptight, upscale wife to lurid pervent and child molester Sutherland, whose character is even more disgusting than Witherspoon's. While everyone wants Sutherland rubbed out, Witherspoon manages to keep viewer sympathy because of for her terrible place in life even throughout her ongoing antisocial activities. Other players, incluidng Dan Hedaya as a cop with sympathies all over the place, contribute a lot to this film.

This is recommended for viewers unafraid to look inside the dark side of our culture where youngsters like the one Witherspoon plays actually exist. There is nothing pretty or orderly about this movie; much of it seems upside down. But it is unrelentingly exciting and is full of action in almost every scene, action you may never have seen in a film before. This is a Widescreen Presentation (1.85:1) enhanced for 16x9 TVs and comes with the Special Features of:

Remastered 16x9 Widescreen
Audio Commentary
Original Theatrical Trailer
English and Spanish Subtitles