Straight to Hell (1987)

Aside From Courtney Love's Screams.....

For die-hard Clash fans, rather for fans of the late 1970's English punk movement, this movie is hard to resist. An eclectic group of musicians and actors, including Joe Strummer, members of The Pogues, Dennis Hopper, Elvis Costello, and Jim Jarmusch, this homage to Spaghetti Westerns is wonderful. If you get it. For those who might necessarily appreciate the actors, the humor may be lost.
This project was director Alex Cox's immediate after Sid & Nancy, the story of Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious and his violent love affair with Nancy Spungen. In fact, Courtney Love may have been channeling Nancy for her role in Straight to Hell. She is the only truly bad addition to this movie. Her annoying and insescent screaming was hard to get through at certain points.
Overall, if you have an appreciation for all of these personalities on one set, in one film, then it is well worth the purchasing price. February 10, 2007

Cool Movie

I was worried about not liking this movie. I'd read a lot of Reviews that said it was weird or boring. But I love Joe Strummer so I had to check it out. and I was pleasantly surprized to find a quirky laugh out loud movie. IT Is a DARK comedy. and you'll either love it or hate it, get it or not. I only gave 4 stars because Courtney Love annoys me she's the only downside to the movie, but her part isn't hugh so it's bareable. I loved seeing Strummer playing a cool sexy guy, he had some great funny moments. Shane Macgowan made me crack up when ever he's on screen. I was also surprized to see some actors in it that are now recgnizable from their recent work like an actor from medium and one from 24. Give this movie a chance and you'll be rewarded. August 19, 2006

Hysterically funny reviews

Yup, this film--which happens to be one of my all-time faves--is not for everyone. Way back a bit before Sting and Bono gave a whole new meaning to the idea of pompous jerk, British punker musicians brought a real Midlands working class sense of irony and absurdity to the world--often not only through their music but through their stage chatter. Some of the flat-out funniest people I've ever encountered were punkers from the Eighties. The single-most un-funny human I've ever known was a major league grunge performer, and let's not even go near modern rappers and the whole EMO phenomenon. In other words, if you're a Post-Eighties kid this movie probably won't work well for you as you're probably soaked in earnest and dreary. A Brit recently told me that Americans have totally lost their sense of irony. There you have it.

The premise of this film was brilliant--let's take a bunch of Brit rockers to Spain (because a concert gig in Central America fell through), write a script in two days, and make a Spaghetti Western using a dilapidated old set from the early 70's. This couldn't happen today for a variety of reasons, one being that a bunch of musicians with any public reputation wouldn't put up with the lousy accommodations in order to have a bit of fun. Then there's that sense of humor thing again, I can't think of any performer today who could pull off what (just to give a few examples) Joe Strummer and all the Pogues do here. They probably lived on Pepsi and hot dogs for the three weeks it took to shoot this wonder, and they probably didn't give a hoot. And then again, this couldn't have happened back then with American punkers who tended to be snots. I think we stopped being funny a long time ago.

The pace is slow because the film does a great job of emulating its models; mainly those classic Clint Eastwood films. So there. However, it's beyond mere parody and there's plenty of terrific slapstick and just goofy humor all the way through the flick. It's one of those films where there are almost too many memorable vignettes--a bit where Strummer is in a clinch with a gal and his gun accidentally goes off and he has to fake having been bitten by a snake is, for me, one of the classic funny moments in film. The soundtrack alone (at least until kids who are easily bored started writing reviews for Amazon) was, for many years, considered to be classic. The, uh, "violence" is farcical and hardly graphic; also, to have fun, they scrupulously avoided obscenity and nudity in the film, which is what everybody expected from this gang. I understand it got an R rating almost by accident.

Anyway, I love Buster Keaton, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, and all those screwball comedies of the 1930's and this film is one of my favorites. Elsewhere in Amazonia another youngster expresses her boredom over the Cary Grant collection that includes "The Awful Truth"--a flick that rivals Shakespeare. Need I write more?

Some day, when all us tedious Americans who think humor is sadism, making fun of people, and/or doing disgusting things (the lowest forms of humor by the way) are all dead and gone, and the country is full of newcomers who can find genuine joy and laughter in things, this film will be regarded as a classic.

[Raegen Butcher down below gets it dead right by describing this film as a people-sorter in the manner of "Big Trouble in Little China"--a gem that is for me up there with "Gone With the Wind" and "Citizen Kane." I generally find that anyone who doesn't like "Big Trouble" or this flick puts ME to sleep in minutes. And while I'm at it, what's with these one-star reviews because something bores you? Everybody I know under the age of thirty these days is bored by anything that isn't exploding in their faces. It tells me more about the reviewer than the product being reviewed]

July 17, 2006

funny as Hell

I saw this twice during its too brief(one week!)run in Seattle in 1987 and i was always showing it to people later on video who thought i was INSANE, which may or may not be beside the point, but this is one of THOSE movies, like BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, that can inform you about someones personal sense of humor and taste. Either you get it or you don't. I think this movie is some kind of psychopathic classic that perfectly sends up the extreme amorality of the spaghetti westerns and prefigures the homicidal men in black suits later to turn up in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. And few films can top it for sheer nihilistic rip-it-apart glee. I am glad it is finally being seen on DVD in its original aspect ratio, because in the theaters it had very carefully staged WIDESCREEN compositions which were lost on video. The cast is uniformly weird and wonderful: Sy Richardson, channeling pure self-righteous macho bad-ass blackness, JOE STRUMMER, showing a surprisingly light touch for comedy, Dick Rude,hilariously channeling a psycho-punk James Cagney,COURTNEY LOVE (Hang in there, girl!)gives a truly committed performance as a shrill whining NANCY SPUNGEN MONSTER, the POGUES almost manage to say their dialog, ELVIS COSTELLO doesn't have much dialog but acquits himself well. I could go on and on about the rest of the cast, and there's plenty of them still to mention, including and especially MIGUEL SANDOVER, who does the greatest CLINT EASTWOOD send-up i have ever had the pleasure of watching.

Watch this film ...you'll either get it...or you won't. I laughed like hell.
August 21, 2005

How to get a studio to pay for a party for you and friends

Step 1} Make a wonderfully surreal movie (Repo Man)

Step 2} Make a critically acclaimed film about a rock/punk icon and his dead girlfriend (Sid & Nancy)

Step 3} Get a bunch of punk/new wave musicians, buddies, characer actors, etc together, and tell the studio you're going to go to Spain and make a wonderfully critically acclaimed surreal movie.

It doesn't matter if you're telling the truth in Step 3, because after you've spent the studio's money and delivered the resulting cans of celluloid worms, they only have two choices (if your contract was cleverly-written enough, anyway):

Choice 1} Release it.

Choice 2} Sit on it.

They released it.

My first wife and i watched it.

We loved it.

The more you know about/appreciate spaghetti westerns, the more you'll probably like this film.

And the music is wonderful -- not surprising, considering it includes in the cast the Pogues, members of the Circle Jerks, Joe Strummer and so on.

All i can say is that, if you can enjoy sloppy self-indulgent silliness made by a talented cast having fun, you might want to look at this film.

(There is a re-issue of the soundtrack album, but it's missing some of the better music -- particularly the Pogues' version of "The Good the Bad and the Ugly", but does retain Zander Schloss's "Salsa y Ketchup" and the Pogues' alternate [and better] version of "If I SHould Fall from Grace with God") June 4, 2005

More reviews at Amazon.com ...