Straight on Till Morning opens in 1980, with young Rubin Robinson (James Simenc) at the wheel, driving his heavily pregnant bride Lilly (Katie Peabody) through the desert in a convertible as though they were Mickey and Malllory from Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994). As they stop to change a blown tyre, they discuss the sex of their as yet unborn child. When Lilly says she thinks it will be a girl, Rubin replies, “Then I oughta paint the room pink”; and when Lily asks, “What if it’s a boy?”, Rubin responds, “Well, might have him some issues – a boy with a pink room!” This essentialist notion of gender would have sounded entirely acceptable, indeed conventional, in the early Eighties, but times have since changed, and indeed are already changing. After all, this couple, who have clearly been enjoying sexual relations and have even become parents-to-be before they got married, are in their way driving the engines of progress – and even if perhaps theirs was a shotgun wedding, they are very much in love.
After the carefree couple is first stalled by this breakdown from racing into the promising future that lies ahead of them, and then have their dreams of domestic bliss literally crushed by a horrific accident, Craig Ouellette’s film, co-written with Neil McLaughlin, jumps ahead to 2009. Now we are introduced to Dani Dupree (Kelsey Christian), young enough to be the Robinsons’ daughter, and also on the road as she heads from Maine to LA hoping to spark her career as a rock-and-roll singer/guitarist. Along the way, in small-town Illinois, she picks up diner waitress Kaitlin Sanbourne (Bonnie Jean Tyer) who, fed up with her controlling ex-con husband Darrel Jenkins (Travis Lincoln Cox), is ready to hit the road for new horizons and to explore her queer side with openly gay Dani. These fellow travelers are more like Ridley Scott’s Thelma & Louise (1991), trying to leave patriarchal values in their trail. There is, though, another collision on its way, as they cross paths with the older Rubin (Bill Hengstenberg) and the now wheelchair-bound Lilly (Maria Olsen), who will abduct these young fugitives and impose on them a more god-fearing, heternormative model of family as they seek a trad wife for their monstrous, mask-wearing son Virgil (Michael Gmur).
So this is less a remake of Peter Collinson’s Straight on Till Morning (1972) than an update of Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) to the post-Dobbs era of Christo-fascism, where older, regressive values are being reinstated, where pre-marital sex and homosexuality are once again being treated with stern disapproval, and where a woman’s choice about her own body is being severely curtailed – here with cuffs, chains and chastity belts, not to mention domestic abuse and marital rape. For on their cross-country dash into the future, Dani and Kaitlin have run aground on a weirdly preserved part of the past that will stay their forward momentum – much as Lilly’s mobility has long been constrained – and in entering, very much against their will, the Robinson family’s farmhouse, they are also joining an intense battle-ground in a raging culture war.
Amid all the genre thrills to be found here – the entrapment combined with a loss of autonomy, the looming threat of torturous punishment or worse, the cat and mouse, the grievous, gory injuries, the constant sexual peril – perhaps the greatest horror is that this family of rape-happy murderers remains quite convinced of their own moral rectitude, even godliness. “Are we bad parents?”, Lilly asks in a rare moment of introspection – but the conclusion that both she and her lawman husband reach is that, far from being bad parents, they are merely looking out for their son and his issues, and building an accommodating, loving family around them under God’s fearsome but forgiving eyes. This is what makes Straight on Till Morning sit interestingly with Scott Beck and Bryan Woods’ Heretic, released in the same year. For both films concern a pair of young women trapped in a house of primal patriarchy – and even if Dani and Kaitlin, far from being Mormon missionaries, are secular and uninterested in religion, both films encapsulate the precarious place of women today in an America whose views on marriage and sexual relations risk shifting ever backwards, making the road ahead seem rather less open.
In this polarised landscape, everyone is motivated by love, and everyone regards the other side’s love as perverted. “There is nothing, nothing in this world stronger than love,” Lilly insists – but once we see what these characters are willing to do for their love, we might also agree with Dani’s suggestion that “Love is this wasteland where dreams go to die.” Certainly, as a considerable part of the nation wishes to return to fundamental(ist) principles, the American Dream is on hold.
strap: Love perverted: Craig Ouellette’s dysfunctional family horror finds the open road of the American dream leading only to culture war
For more information on the film and screenings, check here
© Anton Bitel
