To give you the proper context for this review, I need to tell you some of my background. My mom is from Canada, my dad is from Minnesota, and I grew up in Mississippi, three states that are featured prominently in this flick--one of the scenes was actually filmed right by an ex-girlfriend's house in Port Gibson. Yes, Canada is a state. So basically, I was psyched to find a movie whose primary subject was a stretch of road with which I was very familiar.

Now, I know what you're thinking: that the road-movie-in-search-of-America thing has been done so many times that the genre might as well be put out of its misery, buried in a shallow hole, and paved over by the asphalt that it holds so dear. We here at TapeHead, in general, agree but in this case, director Bruce McDonald has crafted such a tight, quirky flick that we must give it props. (Incedentally, McDonald's latest film, Hard Core Logo, has been picked up for distribution by Quentin Tarantino's Rolling Thunder Pictures.)

Highway 61, the road, is a small, two-lane, backwater road that starts near Thunder Bay, Ontario and meanders its way down the US until it ends up in New Orleans. As a highway, there's not a lot going for it, except for the fact that as you travel along it, you pass through most of the places that birthed American music. Which brings us to the point of the film, and what makes it cool. Even though the plot is nominally about a corpse, a heavy metal roadie, a Canadian barber, Satan, and a bag of cocaine, the movie really about the music that they all encounter along the way from Thunder Bay to New Orleans.

"But wasn't this all done in the Blues Brothers?" you ask. "Isn't the whole musical road trip thing as dead as the Muppets and one quarter of the Beatles?" Well, yes, but the big differences here are that the music here isn't some reverential object and that the characters aren't performers. The characters are wanna-bes--Pokey the barber (Dom McKellar of Atom Egoyan's exercise in visual masturbation, Exotica) can't play at all and Jackie the roadie (Valerie Buhagiar), doesn't want to. And the music--in other films, whenever the music pipes up, the conflicts resolve. Here, music complicates the conflicts and every scene involving music--even tangentially--introduces in a more or less logical way a screwed up character or plot twist. Thus we get most of the movie's greatest moments--a wacked out single father with three saccharine cute singing daughters, Jello Biafra as a customs agent, a chicken hunting scene to the music of Tom Jones (with another punk rock legend, Art Bergmann), and the greatest sex-in-the-graveyard- during-a-church- bingo-game-while-a-gospel-chior-is-singing montage ever recorded on film.

While the film does have some flaws--it's a little slow paced at the beginning and the whole Satan thing is never really resolved satisfactorily--the bottom line is that it took a Canadian director to actually make a good Amercan road movie. Road movies aren't any good unless they present a subjective and skewed view of what they see, and--Hunter S. Thompson aside--not many road flicks lately have done that lately. Come to think of it, not many flicks of any kind have done that lately.