The Blue Iguana

Excellent movie - Finally found the video after searching for a while. The quality of the tape was not the best, but I really enjoyed watching this movie for the second time. Flea made me remember this one, since I saw it the first time(ca.1990). He should have gotten an Oscar for his performance!

The Blue Iguana contains everything; action, rock'n roll, good actors, humour, a different story, lots of unexpected happenings. For me it,s one of the top ten of movies ever made, and it's the only freaky low budget B-movie on the ranking. If you haven't seen it, DO IT! Welcome to Diablo!

When this movie came out in the theaters in 1988, I won a free ticket from the local radio station. I got to take 3 friends and we ended up walking out about 20 minutes into the movie... It was really bad! It all started with some guy showing up at a hotel, The Blue Iguana. Can't exactly say what was wrong with it, but it was just all-around terrible.

Many years later it was playing on HBO. I turned it on, watched 5 minutes, then turned the channel. It is still bad all these years later! Please don't waste your time watching this movie! I am glad that a few of the people in the movie went on to successful careers, I bet they hope this movie remains unknown...

This send up of noir, with prodigious spaghetti western influence, is a real disaster. The director must have just called the cast together with a vague outline of the script, and simply turned them loose, hoping for the best. Dean Stockwell is almost unrecognizable as a nerdy I.R.S. agent, and James Russo plays a cartoon-like villain. The weird soundtrack is sort of a conglomeration of Ennio Morricone western spaghetti and doo-wop, and is without question, the best part of this scrambled mess. Naturally you get a good dose of car chases, and explosions, along with all the other nonsense. In summary, a waste of time and talent. - MERK

I don't know why Leonard Maltin's Move Guide gives this one a bomb. It's a quite amusing life-is-cheap movie that affords some of our favorite character actors (James Russo, Jessica Harper, Dean Stockwell, Tovah Feldshuh) the chance to chew some very fine jungle scenery. McDermott spends the whole movie with only one expression on his face (a smirk, I believe it's called) that could stand for the attitude the whole movie adopts towards what goes on therein. Maybe that's what p***ed Maltin off, but I liked it.

Harper, in particular, makes perhaps the best female crime boss since the '70s heyday of the "Mama" subgenre (Winters in Bloody Mama, Dickinson in Big Bad Mama I and II, Leachman in Crazy Mama). Stockwell's neckbrace-and-Coke-bottle-glasses-wearing, Q-tip swabbing secret agent is mighty funny too. Very enjoyable.