STRAIGHT TO HELL (1987) – IT’S QUENTIN TARANTINO MINUS QUENTIN TARANTINO

STRAIGHT TO HELL (1987) – For a glib, one sentence review of this movie, how about “Quentin Tarantino minus Quentin Tarantino equals Straight to Hell?” Though this flick came out years before Tarantino’s films it clearly influenced him and to this day it feels like a lost, inferior effort by Quentin. 

After Alex Cox became known as one of THE up-and-coming directors following his films Repo Man and Sid & Nancy he was trying to arrange a punk concert film (or documentary of an entire concert tour, depending on what source you read) in Nicaragua.

Given the violent and unstable situation in the country at that time, few wanted to invest in a concert film being made under such risky conditions. However, investors WERE willing to shell out a million dollars for a movie directed by Cox and starring many of the punk acts who were going to perform in Nicaragua.

Alex threw in some of his stable of regulars from his two earlier films, slapped together a script in three days (co-written by Dick Rude) and used a mere few weeks to make this oddball genre-bender in Spain.

The result was a movie that the post-Tarantino world can easily relate to, but which audiences and critics of the time dismissed as a rambling mess. Straight to Hell is certainly too self-indulgent and self-satisfied to qualify as a good film, but it’s far from the one-star or two-star disaster that many IMDb reviewers dismiss it as.

THE STORY – A gang of inept Los Angeles hitmen trying to impress their criminal employer botch their assigned assassination. Fearing reprisals from the powerful crime boss, they rob a bank and flee across the border to Mexico, where they bury their loot and lie low in an incredibly strange town full of sweaty, violent weirdos and a lot of gunplay.

It’s entertaining to read reviews of Straight to Hell which were written during the 1980s. The reviewers struggle to describe the film’s odd blend of incredibly weird dialogue, casual violence, sadistic cruelty and aggressively bizarre characters. More recent reviews can simply invoke the term “Tarantino-esque” to immediately let potential viewers know what they’re in for.

Surprisingly, there are virtually no profanities or racial slurs thrown around in this movie, which is its main difference from the later QT flicks.

Unfortunately, the poor acting from the musician cast members kills all the potential that Straight to Hell had going for it. Getting a passable performance from even ONE singing star can be a chore for most directors, but when their cast is made up mostly of such stars, forget it.

Joe Strummer, from the Clash and the Pogues, embarrasses himself the least as Simms, a character who would be played by Tim Roth if this was a QT joint. Strummer is very watchable and kind of cool throughout.

Sy Richardson, the African-American actor from Alex Cox’s earlier movies, plays Norwood, the cold, calculating leader of the would-be professional criminals. His attitude and facial hair make him a spiritual forerunner of Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.

Courtney Love IS Fat Tina Yothers as Velma, the pregnant wife of Norwood. She accompanies our main characters on their journey and is gratingly shrill and unlikable.

Dick Rude portrays Willy, the third of the inept hitmen. His character is too passive and friendly to ever succeed in the criminal world. 

The Pogues portray various members of the MacMahon Family, a dysfunctional, sadistic clan who basically run the town where our main characters are trying to lie low. The MacMahons get a LOT of screentime, meaning the musicians playing them muck up several scenes.

Throw in Elvis Costello, a Circle Jerks member or two and lesser-known punk rockers as part of the supporting cast and get ready to cringe.

Dennis Hopper appears as the worst ambassador for convenience stores/ gas stations this side of the supernatural figures in Twin Peaks lore. Hopper emerges as the main villain pulling all the strings from behind the scenes and has the less than subtle name I.G. Farben. He and his lady Sonya (Grace Jones) supply weapons to Norwood, Simms and Willy at a crucial point.

Jennifer Balgobin is as beautiful and dangerous as always as Fabienne, the unfaithful wife of the town’s hardware store owner George (Miguel Sandoval himself). She steals every scene she’s in and I will never understand why she did not become a huge star. Maybe she refused to play along with the scuzzy Harvey Weinsteins of the entertainment industry.

Noted director Jim Jarmusch shows up late in the film as Amos Dade, the dangerous crime lord who wants to inflict fatal punishment on Simms, Norwood and Willy for failing to whack their target in the pre-credits scene.

Assorted women who played punk rock groupies in Sid & Nancy pose and vogue in small supporting roles as gunslinging members of the villainous MacMahon Family. One of them even murders the clan’s elderly patriarch and lets a stranger in town take the blame for the deed.

Alex Cox has emerged as one of the cinema world’s foremost authorities on Spaghetti Westerns, one of the genres that Straight to Hell serves as a valentine to. His 1970s documentary on Spanish locations for Italo-Westerns is very good and his book 10,000 Ways to Die offers a lot of scholarly insight on such movies.

This film centers on the similar qualities of Spaghetti Westerns and gangster movies, with Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia as a sort of Missing Link between the genres.

SPOILERS AHEAD!

After a lot of killing, near-rapes and near-dalliances over the course of a few days, our main characters are finally traced to the tiny, decrepit town by Amos Dade and his goons. In the climactic orgy of violence that follows, everybody winds up dead except for Norwood, Fabienne and the MacMahon women.

A few background characters are also still standing, but the actual winner of the bloody conflict is Dennis Hopper’s Farben Oil, which can now drill on the land the destroyed town stood upon.

Alex Cox was trying to make this movie a comment on the war in Nicaragua at the time with the bit on an outsider corporate fascist (Dennis Hopper) fueling the bloodshed in pursuit of profits. It plays like an afterthought in Straight to Hell but Cox’s next film Walker would tackle the subject matter head on.

This movie is pretty disappointing but is so well filmed that it’s another flick which – if watched with the sound muted and no subtitles on – seems like it MUST be a classic. Though technically a dark comedy, Straight to Hell makes the same mistakes committed by films like Epic Movie and Vampires Suck, in that it apparently believes REFERENCE equals FUNNY!

I got some enjoyment from picking out the obscure EuroWesterns that Cox was making sly nods to, but that’s not enough for a feature-length production to get by on. If anything, the oddly out of place final shot of the reanimated skeleton of the dead George emerging from the ruins of his burned-out hardware store hinted at the kind of From Dusk Til Dawn genre-mash that might have livened up this movie.

This is a must-see for Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez fans who want to see the influence it may have had on those two filmmakers. Others aren’t missing much.

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