In short: I, the Jury (1982)

Sleazy private dick – I choose the latter word for a reason – Mike Hammer (Armand Assante) has to take a break from sleeping with the wives of clients he’s supposed to spy on because their husbands fear they’re cheating on them, and his bizarre full-body relationship with his secretary Velda (Laurene Landon). An old Vietnam buddy of his is murdered, and nobody, not even his favourite cop Detective Chambers (Paul Sorvino) seems too bothered with doing anything about it.

Hammer’s investigation soon points him towards the sex clinic of Dr Charlotte Bennett (Barbara Carrera), and the product (Judson Scott) of a government conspiracy meant to build mind-controlled killers. Though I’m not quite sure why you wouldn’t just grab an actual serial killer if you want a serial killer, instead of laboriously creating a facsimile of one. In any case, once Hammer understands who his enemies are, he’s going to murder the heck out of them.

I’ve never been much of a fan of the hard-boiled novels of raving right-wing fantasist Mickey Spillane and his murderous, misogynist prick of a hero Mike Hammer, so don’t ask me how this measures up as an adaptation. It does take considerable liberties with the plot of the novel it is based on, but then, you wouldn’t expect a Larry Cohen script to go for evil commies and Italians and whoever else Spillane didn’t like that week.

Initially, Cohen was apparently meant to direct this as well, but was replaced by bland TV hand Richard T. Heffron. That poor man then had to make sense of a Cohen script the guy wrote for himself to direct, clearly leaving much room for improvisation nobody involved in the Heffron version really knew what to do with.

This leads to a movie with a particularly weird tone: sleazy and grimy, but in a way completely divorced from any sense of reality. It’s not an ironic approach to being exploitative so much as a strange fever dream idea of what exploitation might be, with some of the more absurd bits of sex and violence you’ll see in a movie featuring actual actors. Often, it is difficult to parse if certain elements of the film are meant to be terrible jokes or supposed to be taken seriously, which increases the highly peculiar vibe of the whole affair.

Most of the actors seem perfectly baffled as well. But then, what would you think about Hammer’s fish tank obsession in Assante’s position that sees him talking with a client while holding a dead fish in one hand in the very first scene? The big sex clinic orgy that would put off even the most easily aroused? Whatever is supposed to go on in the climax? Only Barbara Carrera seems unruffled, but then, she’s just doing her usual femme fatale bit; if the femme fatale – and the sex scenes – are a bit weirder than usual clearly doesn’t matter to her. Whereas this viewer rather enjoyed stumbling from one improbable scene to the next.

Blind Justice (1994)

Some time after the US Civil War. A nearly completely blind, yet still exceptionally deadly when shooting, gunfighter named Canaan (Armand Assante) roams the borderlands between the US and Mexico, carrying two guns and a baby, looking for a town that might not exist. He promised the baby’s father, whom he killed, to get the little one to her family, apparently, though Canaan and the film will be reticent about going into further detail.

After a meet-cute with a quartet of Mexican bandits – three of whom he shoots while the last one gets to hold the baby – Canaan comes to a small town that is under sieged by the gang of Alacran (Robert Davi). Alacran is after a wagon-load of silver protected by an ever decreasing number of soldiers. Their leader, Sgt Hastings (Adam Baldwin) has repeatedly sent men out to fetch help, but not one of them has come back alive, or seems to have reached the next cavalry outpost. Hasting is too dutiful to give Alacran the gold, or simply not stupid enough to believe the sadistic maniac wouldn’t murder his little troop in any case.

Canaan is still bitter, as well as PTSD-stricken, about what happened to him in the war, so he’s not terribly interested in the soldiers’ plight. He might be willing to do some blockade running for them, for a price, of course. Cigars and milk have to be paid, after all. In truth, the gunman will have trouble with Alacran and his men in any case, for one of the three bandits he shot before coming to town was the man’s younger brother; and while Alacran – a man who mutilates his own men regularly – doesn’t have many softer human traits, brotherly love was one of them.

I can only assume that when he was writing the HBO western Blind Justice Daniel Knauf asked himself why only blind swordsmen, masseurs, boxers and vigilante lawyers have all the fun, but nobody thinks about the poor, blind shootist and then proceeded to solve this problem. As directed by Richard Spence, the resulting movie is a lot of fun.

Clearly going for the spirit of the Italian western in its goofier variations, the film does a very enjoyable job of presenting touches of wonderful weirdness like Canaan’s disgust about having come to a town that has neither smokes, nor milk, nor booze - and yes, when our hero has got a smoke, he’s huffing it in the direction of the poor kid. These elements, Spence presents with a degree of camp, but never so much as to overwhelm the more dramatic or nasty moments of the film with the horrors of irony; here, it feels more like a companionable nod at an audience to suggest that, yes, the film knows it trades in silliness and well-worn clichés, but it also genuinely wants us to simply enjoy them as they are, and actually revel in them a little.

So we get a mix of jokes good and bad, some genuinely fine and creative shoot-outs, explosions, and standard Italian and Revisionist western scenes like our hero’s crucifixion. From the latter, Canaan is at least partially saved by an elderly and somewhat crazy Native American shaman (Jimmy Herman), who is put in stark contrast to the town’s traitorous Catholic priest (Ian McElhinney), which you may or may not want to read as a political statement.

There’s also a romantic subplot between Canaan and the town nurse (Elisabeth Shue), but the less said about this horrifying combination of no chemistry and bad acting choices (what the hell does the usually perfectly competent to awesome Shue think she’s doing!?), the better. It’s not so terrible as to actually damage the film as a whole – it’s just too weird at heart for that – but it sure does little to improve it either.

In general, the acting tends to broad scenery-chewing, strange line readings and the overwrought – particularly, and to nobody’s surprise, Assante and Davi are downright incredible whenever they get going, leaving no mouth in the audience closed. This is not a complaint, of course, for this style of acting is the only fitting approach to the movie’s mix of peculiarity and Italian western made in the USA two decades too late. You don’t go method when the going gets weird, unless you’re not as clever an actor as you think you are, Jared Leto.

As an added bonus for the “before they were stars” column, there’s a one-scene appearance of Jack Black as a Private who gets knocked out by an unarmed blind man. The stuff careers are made of, apparently.