Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

A lot of perfectly good film show their cards early, establish a unique premise and let the audience explore a topic at a leisurely pace, without much in terms of surprise. this film is not one of those films.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Model-turned-actress Darlanne Fluegel ("To Live and Die in L.A.") is top billed in this thriller, which was officially based on a novel by Deanne Barkley, but which was also prompted by real life crimes in L.A. This is a city known for its amazing 600 miles of freeway, and now a crazed killer is cruising these lanes and sometimes shooting other drivers. Fluegel plays "Sunny" Harper, a nurse whose husband was one of the killers' victims. She's now obsessed with doing her own detective work into the matter, and she soon gets helped by a mystery man named Frank Quinn (James Russo, doing his best Mickey Rourke).Veteran movie villain Billy Drago ("The Untouchables", "Delta Force 2") is at his creepy best playing the deranged antagonist of the story. It's never quite as interesting when it doesn't follow him. His character frequently phones a hot shot radio psychiatrist, played by comedian / actor Richard "The Belz" Belzer ('Homicide: Life on the Street'), believing the shrink to be his prophet. Fluegel is of course gorgeous and a passable actress, but she doesn't have a particularly dynamic presence on film. Russo tries his hardest to project "cool", and comes off fairly well. Also co-starring are other familiar faces like Michael Callan ("Cat Ballou") as the head detective on the case, the incomparable Clint Howard ("Evilspeak") as a predictably quirky service station attendant, Steve Franken ("The Party") as a victimized lawyer, and the great Kenneth Tobey ("The Thing from Another World") as a monsignor.Overall, this is an okay movie, with some pulse quickening scenes, but it's nothing special. Co-writer / director Francis Delia, whose work was mostly in music videos and TV, tells this story in entertaining enough fashion - just enough to keep viewers watching. It offers some fun but is largely forgettable.Six out of 10.

To be fair, I expected car chases in this film. There was only really one, but apart from that, 'Freeway' was a great movie which I am glad to own on DVD. The only really big names in the cast are HOMICIDE's Richard Belzer as the radio psychiatrist and B-Movie villain par-excellance Billy Drago as the Revelation-quoting Freeway Killer. But the rest of the cast generally give good performances. I especially liked how Darlanne Fluegel gave her character, Sunny, a bit of guts. She could have been a helpless victim character but she is fully rounded as she seeks out Drago with the help of bounty hunter James Russo.Russo, I'm afraid, comes across as rather wooden, but then again, the character he plays, Frank, isn't very well fleshed out save for a back story Sunny is given by his former commanding officer. The tone of menace is kept up superbly throughout the film and the atmosphere of the lonely LA freeway at night with the killer prowling its' length in his sinister grey sedan is an excellent way of building tension, and the music used to underscore the film is suitably composed. I don't know why there are some people who hate this movie so. Different strokes for different folks, I suppose. But I absolutely enjoyed 'Freeway' and I can strongly recommend it.

SPOILERS THROUGH:It's really kind of funny how you see a movie a long time ago and it sticks in your head. I saw this with a bunch of friends many years ago, and while we didn't like it very much, it held our attention. The main problem this movie has is it's like a million other movies of this type that play late at night and have a similar plot. My friends and I have seen many yet for some reason this stuck in my head and my friends' heads as well.Negatives first. It is rather overlong and one feels the time. The plot's' been done before many a time. Then there is the low budget factor of the movie which didn't actually bother me all that much because I sometimes really dig some low budget b-type movies. But the movie really did seem very much like other late nights of this type, it's difficult to keep from mixing it up with others.The biggest positive about Freeway is that years later, many many years after first having seen it, For some reason my friends and I still occasionally talk about it. So it must have made a bit more of an impact then others of this type. I think as a late night this is maybe worth seeing but I wouldn't pay money to view it. I'm giving it a vote of 5 because unlike scores of other similar movies we remembered this one. My vote's 5.

I had never heard of this film until last night. I saw it yesterday evening on cable. I like to see what some film makers do when they're in a very tight budget, as in this case, but this movie is very far away from Carpenter's fantastic and enjoyable low budget movie "They live".I got caught up but the first 30 minutes or so, I was enjoying the mood, the photography and lighting, camera plans and movements, but that mood starts to fade away, and the argument becomes a bit muddy... Belzer does a pretty good job until the end of the movie, contributing with a decent representation of a somewhat interesting character.James Russo wasn't able to talk anyone into his "bad" attitude, and there are many question marks to put to the weak and sometimes inconsistent argument, namely the relation between Russo and Darlanne Fluegel, which is quite OK and very sexy throughout the movie.After 1 hour, you start wondering what happened to the mood shown at the beginning, and it just gets pretty tedious until the predictable ending, with the blonde angelical nurse/doctor becoming a "devil" in leather driving a red firebird.Gladly, the psycho man in the plot is played by Billy Drago, which is quite entertaining, as usual.Bottom line - see it if you have absolutely nothing better to do, otherwise don't waste your time on it.