Road House (1989)

Dalton (Patrick Swayze), a legendary bouncer with a tragic past that clearly has taught him the art of bouncer Zen, is hired on by Tilghman (Kevin Tighe) to clean up the small town road house he has acquired a short time ago. Right now, it’s the kind of place where drugs are sold pretty much openly, and where things are so rowdy, the house band (The Jeff Healy Band, whose leader is actually as pleasant a natural amateur actor as you can find) has to play in a cage to protect them from an audience that throws glass bottles at blind singer/guitarists. With his legendary reputation (yes, this film takes place in a world where bouncers can become legends), his insistence on being nice first and only hitting when that doesn’t work out, and his air of calm, Dalton actually does make great strides towards cleaning up the place, even finding time in his schedule for a romance with local doctor Doc (Kelly Lynch) he initiates by bringing his medical records and the explanation that “pain don’t hurt”.

Unfortunately, pain hurting or not, he soon comes into conflict with the town’s very own Big Bad, Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara) and his gang. Wesley controls the place with the verve of a Bond villain – and has the appropriate kind of underlings, too. So eventually, Dalton has to get back to the old ways of his tragic past again and do what 80s action heroes do. Though most action heroes don’t have a mentor played by Sam Elliott at his most Sam Elliott-ish they can call in.

When it came out, Rowdy Herrington’s Road House wasn’t terribly well-loved (I certainly remember being nonplussed by it myself when I first saw it when I was sixteen or so) but by now the film has grown quite the cult following. It’s a properly deserved cult following too, for when it comes to 80s action films taking place in the kind of strange parallel world where Brad Wesley runs a town by doing evil deeds like destroying the place of a car-salesman who gets uppity with a monster truck, and where a bouncer can be a lot like a western hero who comes to town trying to find peace only to have to fall back into violent ways, this one’s actually as brilliant as that description sounds.

A lot of the film’s impact certainly has to do with Swayze. The guy’s speciality when appearing in action movies was being the soft tough guy – someone who can be just as violent as your typical macho but usually chooses not to because he’s above proving his manliness by breaking your face, but over the lines he draws you certainly shouldn’t step; yet also one of those action heroes who is believable in the romantic moments because he can actually act like a guy in proper love. Basically, Swayze’s the anti-Seagal, is what I’m saying, believably projecting being a guy who may know one thing or the other about ripping throats out with his bare hands (in what I assume to be a pretty wonderful nod to what Sonny Chiba does as a much less nice hero in The Streetfighter and its sequels) but who also knows that actually doing that is wrong. Swayze is also simply genuinely great at physical acting and screen fighting, and while he may have a comparatively small range as an actor, the things he does well, he does well.

Of course, Swayze’s not the only wonderful actor on screen. Gazzara chews the scenery with insane enthusiasm, gripping the opportunity to be a completely self-centred asshole with a bad case of megalomania and a complete lack of a sense of proportion with both hands (and probably also digging his teeth in), so that a guy with a handful of goons lording it over a small town becomes some kind of supervillain. If you want to read something into the film, you may want to take a look at the difference in the performance of manliness between Wesley and Dalton. The former is all about “alpha male” dominance, abusing (and weaponizing) his girlfriend, kicking his men when they are down, and clearly having never encountered a situation in his life that isn’t a dick measuring contest. Whereas Dalton clearly couldn’t care less about “dominance”, obviously wants his sexual partners to have an orgasm (it’s impossible to read the emphasis in the film’s sex scene any other way), treats everyone he meets as an equal, and only resorts to violence as a last measure against the violent. The film even acknowledges that Dalton’s way is still not good enough when it still ends in a bloodbath.

Apart from that, Road House is just incredibly well constructed, with any given scene taking care of the needs of characters, plot, and theme and usually throwing in some action too, with everything going on making total sense if you are willing to accept the film’s set-up, and flowing wonderfully. Herrington’s a very fine action director, too, certainly never trying to be an 80s Hong Kong action filmmaker, but really doing wonders with the classic American punch-up style of action.


Road House is just a completely wonderful film, as flawless as any you’ll encounter, unless you don’t like fun, or road houses, or Patrick Swayze ripping a guy’s throat out.

Virtuosity (1995)

Welcome to the weird and wacky near future of yesterday. Former cop Parker Barnes (Denzel Washington) is serving a lengthy prison term for not only killing the terrorist and gang who had just murdered his wife and child but accidentally blowing away a couple of reporters too – and all this while missing an arm. I mention the arm so you don’t forget he now has a bionic arm he alas never uses like the Six Million Dollar Man did, but which will come in handy when the film’s climax needs to handwave away a bomb. Also, so you fully understand we are in the times of extra badass Denzel Washington here. Take that, Bruce Willis.

Anyway, Barnes has made a deal to shorten his sentence which results in him getting strapped into a VR machine thingy for some SCIENCE(!) business. In the VR world, he is pitted against evil AI SID 6.7 (Russell Crowe). SID isn’t just a sharp dresser in primary colours, we will later learn that his virtual brain is also fashioned after a couple hundred of history’s greatest mass murders and serial killers. Would you believe the guy who killed Barnes’s family is one of them? Now, you might ask yourself: what’s the point of the experiment at all? Why purposefully create an AI that’s basically The Joker? I don’t know, and I’m pretty sure the film doesn’t know either.

But I digress into the realm of logic and sanity. At the same time, in the world of the movie, SID convinces his creator (I think, again, I’m not sure the film knows) to trick a hapless tech geek into building SID a body made of nanites so he can escape from Planet VR into the real world. Poor tech geek believes he is helping create a body for the sexy virtual chess program he is rather, ahem, fond of, by the way.

Obviously, SID really gets a body and manages to escape and goes on a bit of a rampage, composing a sampler symphony out of the screams of his victims. This is not a metaphor. Clearly, Barnes is the only one who can stop SID. Why? I have no idea, and neither has the script. Be that as it may, Barnes, for reasons unknown teamed up with psychologist Madison Carter (Kelly Lynch), is indeed promised his freedom if he manages to find and destroy SID.

Quickly, the film decides that it’s best that SID starts fixating on Barnes because the personality of the guy who killed Barnes’s family surfaces, and a duel of wits (I kid), guns and explosions ensues. There’s also a particularly idiotic subplot where SID successfully frames Barnes for murder, kidnapped children, and other assorted nonsense to witness.

Nominally, Brett Leonard’s Virtuosity wasn’t written by a drunken monkey, but looking at this assortment of plot holes so gigantic they are basically their own movie trilogy, ideas so stupid you’d be embarrassed to have come up with them, and a plot so plain idiotic I’m suddenly feeling rather good about myself, it’s probably best to pretend it actually was. Now, I love to go and on about the craziness of the Italian exploitation movie factories in the 70s and 80s, but Virtuosity is another proof that batshit crazy ideas were alive and well in mid-90s US mainstream action and (sort of) SF cinema, too.

In fact, Virtuosity’s sheer bizarre dumbness, the total insistence on having not a single scene or character that does make even a lick of sense during the whole course of this thing, would get it a proud place in the pantheon of Italian bullshit filmmaking. Only that comparable Italian productions would never have had the obvious nice and cosy budget this one cam throw at the screen, or been able to afford young Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, just on the cusp of biggest stardom.

Speaking of Washington, one of the best, and actually most insane, elements of the film is how much the man treats the whole mess of noise and nonsense surrounding him with utmost seriousness, apparently approaching this thing with the same sense of professionalism and style he’d use on a film with an actual script parsable by humans. There’s certainly no phoning in from Washington, which makes a delicious contrast to the total wackiness of his surroundings. Which nicely brings us to Crowe, also not phoning it in but actually chewing the scenery, the script and probably the air itself in a version of cartoonish evil murderous villainy that really would have suggested the man as a pretty great Joker for a Batman movie. It’s really a joy to watch these guys doing their very contrasting respective things, putting effort into every dumb thing the script throws at them.

They are assisted in this effort by a cast of a dozen or so character actors and cult film favourites like Lynch, William Forsythe, Louise Fletcher, William Fichtner, and so on and so forth, all of whom are of course game for any stupid shit.


So, despite being dumber than a rock, Virtuosity is just great fun to watch, its wacky and wrong ideas flying at you without pause, with a good handful of highly professionally and effectively realized action sequences adding even more joy to the affair. It’s always very clear the film did have a decent budget, too, so its misguided and improbable ideas about the near future, humanity, the way anything in real life works, and life itself, are realized in lovely sharp colours, shot with style and edited with verve. And of course, the contrast between the batshit craziness of it all and the slickness of its surface adds another layer of charm to Virtuosity, turning this into quite the experience.

Three Films Make A Post: You were right to be afraid of the dark.

Daemonium: Soldier of the Underworld (2015): This Argentinean SF/action/horror film directed by Pablo Parés and apparently written by half a dozen people consequently features a nearly unintelligible and wildly overambitious plot that includes everything you might think of - from battle androids to rebellious arch angels –, characters whose design looks cheap yet awesome in all the right ways but who mostly lack any visible reason to do the things they do, and a running time of nearly two hours where eighty minutes would have sufficed.

Yet this is also clearly a labour of love that looks and feels like the adaptation of an especially bonkers European science fiction comic. It throws visual clichés and inventiveness at its audience with great vigour and enthusiasm, features some wonderfully chosen and framed locations (Argentina apparently looks like a weird far future post-apocalyptic wasteland), and has action scenes that are bloody, clever and much better staged than you’d expect. So, despite its flaws, I find this one impossible to dislike. This was clearly made by my people.

The Frontier (2015): Oren Shai’s deeply 70s cinema and noir inspired and 70s set crime movie is a bit of a mixed bag. Jocelin Donahue’s main performance is excellent, and Kelly Lynch and Jim Beaver lend equally good support, but the rest of the acting is very hit or miss, which is no surprise seeing as the film demands from its actors to approach 70s-style naturalism with a conscious distance. This also follows from a script which at times can feel stilted and too interested in demonstrating its knowledge of gestures taken from other movies than in making its own. The result is a film that often feels artificial for no good reason beyond demonstrating the filmmakers’ ability to make it so. Which, ironically enough, is the polar opposite to the kind of 70s cinema it can’t stop telling us it is inspired by; while the noir way of stylisation (the film’s other hallmark) never was interested in stylisation as an end in itself.

Legend of the Phantom Rider (2002): In theory, Alex Erkiletian’s western/horror mix about two ancient spirits – one good, one evil, of course – doomed to be reincarnated again and again to murder one another this time around having their little spat in the Old West, sounds like a sure enough bit of entertainment. At least if you like your westerns and your horror films and like them even better when they get together (that is, if you are me).

Unfortunately, practice finds this direct-to-video film to be rather tedious, giving us scene after scene after scene supposed to prove to the audience how evil the bad guy is but which mostly demonstrate that watching a bald guy who can’t act for shit (Robert McRay) being a bit off a sadist gets boring pretty damn quick. I have no idea how his henchmen cope with the boredom.