Director Matthew Bright loves young women, who are at the center of his films of sex and violence. He also loves children’s stories. In Confessions of a Trickbaby, which enjoyed a prescreening at the American Cinematheque on July 15, 1999, he tells a variant of the Hansel und Gretel fairy tale by focusing on two girls, one of whom is drawn to a psychic in Tijuana to cure her compulsion to murder; the other has a compulsion to eat enormous quantities of food and thus agrees to seek a cure as well. The film begins with the two sixteen-year-olds (María Celedonio and Natasha Lyonne) in a juvenile prison. They escape, thanks to wirecutters placed near the barbed wire fence, and residents of a nearby house are killed so that they can enjoy temporary shelter. Next, they take the money from the couple and head for the California border so that they can go to Tijuana. En route they are responsible for more deaths. When they arrive in Tijuana, they find the psychic (played by Vincent Gallo), who demands money to effect a cure. Natasha rolls her clients to pay for the “treatment,” but also beats them up. With no cure in sight, the Baja police track them down. A bloody showdown ends the story. MH