Hit List (1989)

If you’re a child of the 80’s and had an obsession with movies, you know what a wondrous place the video store was at the peak of the video rental boom.  Walking through aisles of VHS covers and having those lurid covers tantalizing your preadolescent mind was quite an experience.  It almost gave you a feeling that you were somewhere you shouldn’t be.  The VHS sleeves for movies like Zombie, I Spit on Your Grave, and Driller Killer will forever be imprinted on my brain.  Then there were the odd or curious looking box art.  The ones that had you guessing what they were about and what type of movies they were.  Films like Happy Birthday to Me or The Exterminator had interesting but somewhat ambiguous covers.  If it weren’t for them being shelved in a specific section of the store, you weren’t sure what you were in for.  One such film, for me anyway, was Hit List.  The image of the car running over a man always piqued my curiosity.  Was this a horror film?  An action film?  What was it?  Once I discovered it was directed by William Lustig and involved a psychotic hitman played by Lance Henriksen, I had to track it down.  And the fact that this movie remains available only on VHS makes it that much more curious.

Essentially, Hit List is a crime-thriller with flourishes of action and horror.  After a gangster is arrested for drug trafficking, he’s forced to turn state’s evidence and testify against his criminal boss.  The mob boss, worried that his lieutenant will rat him out, decides to put a hit out and ensure that no testimony is made; except that the hitman makes a vital error and goes to the wrong house during his assassination attempt.  After disposing of a man and woman he assumes are federal agents providing witness protection, he kidnaps a boy he believes to be the son of his target, whom he can’t find anywhere in the house.  This sequence of events sets in motion the revenge / rescue angle of the film and will make up the majority of the runtime going forward.

Jan-Michael Vincent plays Jack Collins, the family man whose son has been kidnapped, wife attacked, and friend murdered during the home invasion.  Collins is hell-bent on rescuing his son and finding the person responsible for turning his life upside down.  In order to make this happen, he’ll have to recruit the help of the gangster turned informant and intended target, Frank DeSalvo, played by Leo Rossi.  DeSalvo has his own vendetta to settle, now that he knows his boss (Rip Torn) tried to have him whacked.  Together, Collins and DeSalvo will have to fight off mafia thugs, elude the police, and battle a highly trained killer in order to save the kid and win the day.

Just like his prior films, Lustig’s cast for Hit List is made up of recognizable character actors.  Lance Henriksen, Leo Rossi, Rip Torn, and Charles Napier, who plays the lead FBI agent, are all familiar faces to movie fans and they all do a solid job in their respective roles.  Henriksen and Torn, in particular, are a lot of fun in their over-the-top performances as villainous characters.  The only issue with the cast is the leading man role, played by Jan-Michael Vincent.  Most will probably know Vincent from the TV show, Airwolf.  According to a 2008 interview, Lustig states that Vincent was drunk during the shooting of the film and it’s pretty apparent from the moment he steps onscreen.  He seems to struggle delivering his lines and I think you can even see him have trouble staying upright in some scenes.  In addition to this, he just simply can’t emote the grief that is necessary for his character.  When it’s explained to him that his wife is in a coma and that she has lost their unborn child, Vincent’s reaction to this soul-crushing news seems more appropriate for someone who has just been told that their favorite flavor of ice cream has been discontinued.   Lustig does his best to limit Vincent’s dialogue and shoot around his embarrassing performance, but there’s only so much you can do when your leading man is a disaster.  Jan-Michael Vincent almost sinks this entire film.  Fortunately, the rest of the cast brings it and a strong third act saves this movie from being a dud.

In that same interview, Lustig admits that he needed work and that this project was a director for hire job.  It definitely has that feel when compared to his earlier efforts, such as Maniac and Vigilante.  Hit List doesn’t have the same grit or nihilism that those films had.  Also, this film was shot in sunny Los Angeles instead of the rough streets of a pre-Giuliani New York City, where Lustig filmed his previous movies. This gives Hit List a more polished aesthetic, overall.  Still, Lustig delivers on the violence and action set-pieces, especially in the finale of the film.  There are a few memorable sequences that occur within the film.  There is a scene where Henriksen slips into a prison like a ninja and assassinates a potential witness after he takes out the prison guards.  There’s a fun shootout that takes place in a laser tag arena.  And there’s the standout car chase that eventually leads to a crazy sequence where Henriksen’s character is hanging from a truck as he tries to kill the driver.  I don’t want to spoil the end of this wild scene, but let’s just say that there is truth in advertising in regards to the VHS box art for this movie.

Nobody would claim that Hit List is one of Bill Lustig’s best films; including the director himself.  It doesn’t have that grindhouse feel of his earlier films and it doesn’t have a screenwriter like a Larry Cohen to inject some social commentary into the film, as he did for Maniac Cop.  And it certainly doesn’t help that your leading man is blotto through the film’s entirety.  Lustig and the supporting cast manage to somehow save this movie from being a complete disaster.  It’s a testament to Lustig’s skills as a director that he was able to salvage this film from what must have been a difficult shoot and turn in a decent action-thriller.  It may not be a cult classic, but Hit List deserves better than to linger in VHS obscurity.

MVT: The supporting cast of Lance Henriksen, Leo Rossi, Rip Torn, & Charles Napier

Make or Break Scene: The action packed finale!

Score: 6/10

Episode #308: The Maniac Cop Trilogy

Welcome back for another glorious episode of the GGtMC!!!

This week Sammy and Will are joined by Big Bad John Ross from the Feed My Ears facebook Group for coverage of The Maniac Cop Trilogy!!! We cover all three films and discuss the virtues of large chickens!!!

Direct download: ggtmc_308.mp3

Emails to midnitecinema@gmail.com

Adios!!!

Maniac Cop (1988)

I thought about being a police officer for a brief period of time.  I’m sure that, much like how the amount of FBI applicants rose when The X-Files became popular, this desire sprang from a love of shows like Beretta, Starsky And Hutch, and Hunter.  Unlike the sexier private detective characters , police (on television) most likely wouldn’t be roughed up and intimidated by polyester-clad goons.  No, they would do the roughing up, because that was life on the streets, baby, and you had to be tough as nails.  And that’s when it dawned on me: tough as nails, I ain’t.  Watch any detective show, and the crap these guys go through looks inordinately painful (if not at present then certainly the day after).  There was also the requirement of being able to run after perps in uncomfortable-looking footwear.  I have wide, flat feet, and just finding the shitty New Balance sneakers I wear around was a task and a half.  I’d hate to see how far I would have to go to get an agreeable pair of work kicks for walking a beat in the naked city.  Naturally, I don’t think most cops on the job go through anything even remotely approaching the level of action of Hawaii Five-O.  As a matter of fact, I tend to imagine that, in reality, there is a ton of paperwork to fill out.  I’m pretty good at paperwork, ironically enough.  I don’t love it, and I would rather be leaning on suspects, but all things considered, it’s probably safer than getting shot at.  Okay, I definitely should not be a police officer.

As Cassie (Jill Gatsby) is walking home from work one night, she is attacked by a pair of vicious muggers.  No shrinking violet, Cassie manages to fend them off long enough to make a break for it.  Spotting a policeman across a dark playground, Cassie darts for him, but her ersatz rescuer lifts her by the throat and snaps her neck.  As detective Frank McCrae (Tom Atkins) investigates, the victims of the Maniac Cop (Robert Z’Dar) continue to pile up.

The central idea behind William Lustig’s film is really simplicity itself.  In fact, it’s all right there in the title, and this is one of the big appeals of the film: It is plain in its intentions.  This is a quasi-Slasher about a maniac cop.  It has all of the puzzle pieces it needs, and it puts them all down in the proper order, so the audience never completely has time or reason to question the sillier aspects of anything that’s going on.  Add to that, good performances from solid character actors like Atkins, Bruce Campbell, and William Smith, and the film becomes a nice bit of comfort viewing.  Like a quiche at twenty-four frames-per-second.  

Of course, part of the simplicity of why the film works also leads to its more interesting facets.  At this point in time, the idea of the vigilante cop and vigilantes in general were still very popular in cinema.  The year before this film was released saw the fourth installment in the Death Wish series of films, and the same year as its release, the final Dirty Harry film, The Dead Pool, came out, just for two examples.  But what Maniac Cop does is turns these premises on their heads.  Our antagonist still kills with impunity, but he’s not cleaning up the streets from the scum of the Earth.  No, he’s killing innocent people, and inexorably he will turn on the brotherhood of which he at one time counted himself a member.  So, he’s sort of a vigilante for evil (isn’t that a contradiction in terms?).  Okay, you say, so he’s like every other Slasher antagonist, hacking up people left, right, and center?  Well, yes and no.  He has the physical traits of a standard slasher (imposing physique, seeming imperviousness to harm, relentless tenacity), and his kills are set up and executed like vignettes with a gruesome payout.  But his initial victims are completely unconnected and innocent.  There is no punishment of characters for having unmarried sex.  There is no punishment of characters for violating his territory.  Cordell’s victims are strictly victims.  But what they feel like in the terms of the film is practice for what is coming.

**POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD**  

This kind of leads into another element of the film.  It is very much concerned with ideas of betrayal.  One of our ostensible heroes is caught cheating on his estranged wife (Victoria Catlin) with our female lead (Laurene Landon).  He is then accused of being the maniac cop, thus creating a faux betrayal of the brotherhood of police.  Cordell’s friend Sally (Sheree North) actually does betray the police, though she initially has good intentions in what she does.  Cordell himself is a victim of betrayal by the police he had counted as his brothers (though he was reputedly a bit of a gunslinger even before his ordeal).  But more than all that, at its core, Maniac Cop is about the betrayal of the public trust (see how it’s all right there in the title?).  This is developed a bit in the story with a scared citizenry shooting first and asking questions later (what Cordell was accused of by some of his higher ups and colleagues).  Yet, the filmmakers never take it all the way to its logical conclusion, perhaps because of budget constraints, perhaps because of genre constraints, I can’t say.  

But it gets at a deeper concern many people have.  Can we really trust the people with whom we’ve placed our security?  Who, after all, will guard the guards themselves?  And how can you trust those guardians?  Ideas of police brutality are tossed around, and while the movie at the very least raises the questions, it also never really answers them.  Partly this is because to do so would make a very good Action/Horror film into a pedantic philosophical discussion.  Partly this is because I think Lustig, along with screenwriter/producer Larry Cohen, has enough faith in the audience to either know their feelings on the subject and even whether or not they would care to consider it.  Consequently, they give the viewers the ingredients and the instructions and leave the actual cooking up to the individual (another quiche reference?  How droll).  Using straightforward direction as well as some unobtrusive but still very impressive cinematography by Vincent J. Rabe (who only shot one other film, unfortunately), the filmmakers produced an entertaining little film that has something of a brain underneath, if you’re so inclined to dig that deep.  But you don’t have to in order to enjoy it.

MVT:  Lustig has always had a very unpretentious hand behind the camera, and his direction works because it doesn’t put on airs while simultaneously acknowledging that there is some thought at play.  It doesn’t pretend that it’s more than it is, but it also doesn’t pretend it’s dumb.

Make Or Break:  I think the first kill scene does a fantastic job of setting up the premise and the tone.  It has an edge to it, some unexpectedness (Cassie’s more of a badass than one would think at first blush), and a nasty little ending.  What more could you ask of a film titled Maniac Cop?

Score:  7.25/10                

Episode #104: Dust Maniac

This week we picked a couple horror themed flicks for Halloween!!! The Gents cover Maniac (1980) directed by William Lustig and Dust Devil (1992) directed by Richard Stanley. Kick back and relax and enjoy some deep conversation from the Gents!!!

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Voicemails to 206-666-5207

Adios!!!