Human Highway

1982 comedy

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Nothing worth noting.

Remember that time when Neil Young decided to make an electronic record in the early-80s and everybody was a little confused by it? This movie, which Young co-directed under the name Bernard Shakey, uses a lot of those songs and is the product of the same sort of mind, one that though that much vocoder on one album was a really good idea. Don't get me wrong--I love that album. I might have even loved this movie if I had watched it when I was in a better mood.

This is incoherently written and assembled by Young, Russ Tamblyn, and Dean Stockwell. There are a couple other credited screenwriters, and I assume that others, including Dennis Hopper who likely came on board after being promised some drugs, were also involved in the improvisational writing process. I mean, you just know that scene where one of the four or five Dennis Hopper characters feeds pancakes to a raccoon was Hopper's idea. The comedy could best be described as a series of absurdist dad jokes, the kind of stuff that's more likely to furrow a brow than make anybody giggle. It's more odd than it is funny.

The movie does have an interesting look. The setting is a diner in close proximity to an apparently leaking nuclear plant, and the landscape has this cartoonish radioactive haze. It's very artificial looking, especially when there are shots when characters are driving or riding bicycles, but it's really kind of cool looking. Devo, who work as garbagemen at the plant, have a reddish glow around them, and Mark Mothersbaugh is wearing a creepy baby mask. It looks weird but in a wonderful way.

Neil Young isn't an actor, but he's not a complete disaster. Of course, I doubt he would have gotten a lot of roles in movies that he didn't make based on this performance. There's something refreshing about how he's embraced this dorkiness, willing to ruin his folk-rock god reputation by doing what he does here in a low-budget science fiction comedy. A very lengthy dream sequence--filmed with avant-garde color bleeds and dated psychedelia--has Young back in folk-rock god status, and he rips through a version of "Hey Hey, My My (Into the Black)" with Devo that nearly burned my face off, Mothersbaugh going nuts in that baby mask as he twiddles and diddles with knobs, the rest of the band chugging along and holding things together. It's a glorious slab of rock and totally makes up for the too-long scene where Neil Young plays a song on wrenches for a wooden Indian.

I just read that Dennis Hopper injured Sally Kirkland while performing knife tricks during the shooting of this. Kirkland sued, and Hopper admitted that he was having trouble with drugs at the time. None of that is the least bit surprising.