A wildly inventive and entertaining comic nightmare from former
Roger Corman prodigy
Jonathan Demme (
The Silence of the Lambs), this screwball odyssey is a ride to remember.
Jeff Daniels plays clean-cut New York bond trader Charlie Driggs, who accepts a ride home from a strange but attractive lower-class woman named Lulu (
Melanie Griffith). The sexy
Louise Brooks lookalike doesn't take him home, but shanghais him for a bizarre roadtrip to Virginia that includes kinky bondage sex, destruction of property, and robbery. Things get stranger when Lulu tells Charlie that her real name is Audrey and takes him home to meet her mother, asking him to pose as her husband. The charade continues until her high-school reunion, where the roadtrip (and the entire film) takes a sharp U-turn into psycho-thriller territory. Audrey's dangerously psychotic ex-con husband, Ray Sinclair (
Ray Liotta), shows up. What had been a liberating fling for Charlie turns into a bloody and vicious battle for survival. ~ Robert Firsching, All Movie Guide