STRAIGHT TO HELL (US/UK - 1987) Directed by Alex Cox. Written by Dick Rude and Alex Cox. Cast: Sy Richardson, Joe Strummer, Dick Rude, Courtney Love, The Pogues, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Edward Tudor-Pole, Jim Jarmusch, Juan Torres, Biff Yeager, Zander Schloss, Sara Sugarman, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, Xander Berkeley, Kathy Burke, Michele Winstanley, Sue Kiel, Ed Pansullo, Graham Fletcher-Cook, Luis Contreras, Del Zamora, Fox Harris, Cait O'Riordan, Martin Turner, Jem Finer. (R, 91 mins) Born in 1954, Alex Cox established himself as a major new talent with 1984's cult hit REPO MAN and 1986's critically-acclaimed SID AND NANCY, and as a result, the British wunderkind immediately found himself being courted by the major studios for a variety of commercial, big-budget projects. He turned down offers to direct THREE AMIGOS (eventually made by John Landis), ROBOCOP (Paul Verhoeven), and Arnold Schwarzenegger's Stephen King adaptation THE RUNNING MAN (Paul Michael Glaser), and instead chose to make the low-budget, spaghetti western-inspired STRAIGHT TO HELL for the prestige indie Island Pictures. A critical and commercial bomb in the summer of 1987, STRAIGHT TO HELL only made it into a handful of theaters on the same day as DRAGNET and SPACEBALLS, and topped out with a final box office tally of $210,000. The script was written over the course of three days by Cox and co-star Dick Rude, and only came about because the far-left Cox had organized a benefit concert in Nicaragua to be headlined by Elvis Costello, The Clash (shortly before they disbanded), and The Pogues with the intention of filming a documentary before the political tumult in the country led to everyone involved concluding that it wasn't a good idea. Still wishing to work with the musicians in some capacity, Cox came up with STRAIGHT TO HELL, which ultimately plays less like a real film and more like a self-indulgent home movie with Cox and a bunch of cult rocker buddies dicking off in Almeria, Spain.
A textbook example of a film where it's obvious everyone had a blast during filming but the end result leaves the audience feeling like they're deliberately being excluded from the joke, STRAIGHT TO HELL opens with a quartet of incompetent bank robbers barely getting away with a suitcase full of cash in Spain: irate leader Norwood (Sy Richardson), cynical Simms (Clash frontman Joe Strummer), hyper Willy (Rude), and Norwood's abrasive, screeching girlfriend Velma (22-year-old Courtney Love, during her brief early acting career prior to fronting Hole and meeting Kurt Cobain). Their car dies after Simms stupidly fills the gas tank with diesel, stranding them in a middle of nowhere desert. They bury the money and happen upon a small town straight out of an old western, run by the large, coffee-addicted McMahon family, led by Frank (Biff Yeager), with most of the others, excluding Preacher McMahon (Xander Berkeley) and Stupid McMahon (Martin Turner, who's also credited as "sex and cruelty consultant," which is maybe the film's only funny joke), played by members of The Pogues. After intervening in a conflict between two McMahons and deranged rival Rusty Zimmerman (Edward Tudor-Pole) that sees Norwood, Simms, and Willy blowing away Rusty, the outsiders earn the trust of Frank McMahon. All that goes straight to hell when Frank's doddering old father (Jem Finer) is killed by his niece (Kathy Burke), a murder that's pinned on Whitey (Graham Fletcher-Cook), a flunky sent to search for Norwood and his cohorts by their employer, feared crime boss Amos Dade (Jim Jarmusch). This sets in motion a chain of double crosses and unholy alliances, complicated by the arrival of obscenely wealthy American gas station/convenience store magnate I.G. Farben (Dennis Hopper) and his wife Sonya (Grace Jones), who supply Norwood, Simms, and Willy with a Gatling gun and other weapons to start a war with the McMahons, the clan standing in Farben's way of redeveloping the desert town into an expensive housing development.
Cox having Hopper's Farben supply the fugitive bank robbers with weapons draws obvious parallels to the soon-to-explode Iran-Contra scandal, which the director would explore with more muddled results in 1987's WALKER, released six months after STRAIGHT TO HELL. An intentionally anachronistic, revisionist "biography" of William Walker (played in the film by Ed Harris), an American mercenary who declared himself president of Nicaragua in 1856 (Marlon Brando played Walker in Gillo Pontecorvo's BURN! in 1969), WALKER was Cox's most ambitious film to date, a bonkers left-wing polemic with helicopters and cars in 1856 Nicaragua and featuring a good chunk of STRAIGHT TO HELL's cast along with Marlee Matlin in her first role after winning an Oscar for CHILDREN OF A LESSER GOD. Barely released at the height of the holiday awards season as if it had a chance of winning anything, WALKER was somehow bankrolled by Universal, who had no idea what to do with it, and it grossed only slightly more than STRAIGHT TO HELL, effectively ending Cox's career in Hollywood. Like any terrible bomb that loses a lot of money, it's developed a cult following over the years, most notably from the Criterion Collection, who have taken it upon themselves to serve as WALKER's chief apologists.
Despite Criterion's insistence that it's a misunderstood masterpiece of gonzo cinema, WALKER is all kinds of terrible, as is STRAIGHT TO HELL, which is in some ways a more freewheeling, improvisatory test run for WALKER, both in terms of Hopper's weapons-selling Farben as well as the borderline slapstick antics of the three stars. The underrated Richardson, who provided REPO MAN with some of its funniest moments, displays some comedic chops both physically and in his facial expressions and tough guy act, but almost nothing in STRAIGHT TO HELL is even remotely amusing. It's laborious, slowly-paced, filled with obnoxious characters and a diverse cast that's just goofing off while Cox gets enough footage to piece a movie together. Why do the rough-and-tumble McMahons have a perpetually befuddled, properly-attired butler named Hives, and why is he played by Elvis Costello? Costello seems to be patterning his performance on both Rowan Atkinson and Donald Sutherland's "clumsy waiter" in THE KENTUCKY FRIED MOVIE, but like everything else, there's no rhyme or reason to it. Cox and Rude made this up as they went along and got Costello, Strummer, the Pogues, and pals like Richardson, Del Zamora, Fox Harris, and Miguel Sandoval, and called in some favors from Hopper (then in the midst of a major career resurgence following BLUE VELVET and HOOSIERS) and Jarmusch and just hoped the eclectic ensemble could somehow make something happen. It doesn't really work as a spaghetti western satire or spoof because Cox has nothing to say about the genre and only creates some sense of purpose once he introduces the heavy-handed Iran-Contra parallels. Even then, with the potential of some topical political commentary along the lines of the late '60s "Zapata" westerns, Cox can't get his shit together because he's too busy buying his own hype. It's an aimless mess where no one's in charge and there's no endgame. The Nicaragua concert got cancelled but everyone still wanted to hang out. That's the only reason STRAIGHT TO HELL exists.
Cox revisited STRAIGHT TO HELL in 2010, adding a five minutes of cut scenes and sprucing other shots up with visual effects and CGI splatter (including the obligatory "blood hitting the camera lens" schtick) and it got a brief release on the arthouse circuit as STRAIGHT TO HELL RETURNS. That's the version on Kino's new Blu-ray, now rechristened STRAIGHT TO HELL: THE DIRECTOR'S CUT. In any incarnation, it represents the beginning of the end for Cox, who has almost completely regressed like a directorial Benjamin Button in the decades since, helming a series of increasingly amateurish projects with decreasing budgets and very little exposure. His last behind-the-scenes association with anything resembling a real movie was when he scored a co-writing credit on Terry Gilliam's FEAR AND LOATHING IN LAS VEGAS. He's also acted in several films, most notably Alex de la Iglesia's PERDITA DURANGO (aka DANCE WITH THE DEVIL). Cox has long believed that WALKER got him blackballed in Hollywood, but as his standing as a filmmaker has cratered in the last 30 years, he has become a reputable spaghetti western historian, appearing on several DVD commentaries and writing a book about the subject titled 10,000 Ways to Die. He's also written other non-fiction books on a variety of topics--including a memoir, a book about JFK and Lee Harvey Oswald, and an analysis of the cult TV series THE PRISONER--and he's directed TV documentaries on Akira Kurosawa and the 1970s EMMANUELLE films. As a narrative filmmaker, Cox's place in movie history is secure thanks to REPO MAN and SID AND NANCY, but the combined, quick-succession tanking of STRAIGHT TO HELL and WALKER proved too toxic to overcome, with Cox imploding hard and hitting his nadir with 2011's ill-advised, desperate, and all-greenscreen semi-sequel REPO CHICK. Cox's most recent film is a crowd-funded time travel western with unknown actors called TOMBSTONE RASHOMON, which was screened as a work in progress at some film festivals in 2017 but has yet to be officially released. You'll likely never see it, and that's probably for the best.
There's a number of scenes that are almost too painful to watch in this harrowing documentary about Bobby Liebling, frontman for the Washington, DC cult doom metal band Pentagram. Liebling has been an underground metal legend for 40 years, yet when filmmakers Don Argott and Demian Fenton (ROCK SCHOOL, THE ART OF THE STEAL) find him in 2007, he's 53, addicted to heroin and crack, and living in the basement of his elderly parents' Germantown, MD home (his father worked for the Defense Dept). Liebling spends his days wallowing in drug abuse, his gauze-covered arms riddled with track marks and open sores, and he's convinced parasites are burrowing under his skin. He has a patient ally in friend, manager, and Pentagram superfan Sean "Pellet" Pelletier, a former Relapse Records staffer who seems to be devoting his life to the resurrection of Bobby Liebling, who's tried to keep Pentagram going through the years with a constantly rotating backing band, as all the past members get fed up and quit. The original lineup of the band was brought to NYC in 1975 to record a demo with Blue Oyster Cult producer Murray Krugman, an early supporter of Pentagram who dubbed them "a street Black Sabbath," but a stubborn Liebling clashed with Krugman in the studio and the deal never happened. Former guitarist Victor Griffin wonders why people even bothered buying advance tickets for Pentagram shows, as there was a 50/50 chance Liebling would be unable to perform or not even show up. Footage of a disastrous 2001 gig shows then-guitarist Joe Hasselvander letting the audience take turns at the mic when Liebling is a no-show, then when Liebling finally appears onstage during the last minute of the last song, they almost come to blows. At a 2005 show, a catatonic Liebling has to be carried on stage and propped in front of the mic like a sick WEEKEND AT BERNIE'S homage, then he collapses into the drum set. In short, the man is a wreck and looks to be at death's door. That comprises most of LAST DAYS HERE until Liebling finally decides to get his shit together.
Argott and Fenton could've easily turned this into a rubbernecking freakshow, but they don't. While not shying away from the brutal, and frequently disgusting, state of Liebling's life, they still regard him with respect and dignity. They took breaks in filming at various points, and we catch up with Liebling some months later, and we never know if he'll be better or worse. When he finally gets better, you'll almost feel as overcome with emotion as Pelletier does. The filmmakers do somewhat assume the audience is at least a little familiar with the metal scene, so it may take neophytes a bit longer to get acclimated with the film and who some of the peripheral figures are, but the redemptive story of Liebling is riveting regardless of your musical tastes. I wish the filmmakers didn't let Liebling's parents disappear from the film. One of the best moments is a brief aside of his mother chuckling as she says "He always tells me he'll be in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame this year or next," and we next see Liebling frantically searching for a crack rock that fell between the couch cushions. (Unrated, 92 mins)
HIT SO HARD (US - 2012)
An occasionally interesting but unfocused and often rambling look at former Hole drummer Patty Schemel, HIT SO HARD uses a lot of camcorder footage shot by Schemel herself while touring with Hole in the '90s. Schemel, a recovering addict clean for six years at the time this was made, comes across as very natural, honest, and down to earth, but director P. David Ebersole can't really decide what he wants with HIT SO HARD. For a documentary ostensibly about Patty Schemel, there's going to be a lot of Hole, and that's vital to her story, but Ebersole seems to get sidetracked with Courtney Love and Kurt Cobain, who appear quite frequently in some of Schemel's camcorder footage. He could've told Schemel's story without once again telling Cobain's, but he probably needed an excuse to use all of the exclusive footage that Schemel had, including a lot of Cobain with daughter Frances, and while it's very moving to see him as a loving, doting father goofing off with his daughter and difficult to fathom that he'd kill himself just a few months later, it doesn't really belong here. Schemel talks of her struggles with drugs and the music business from her perspective as a female drummer and an out lesbian, and there's a very emotional segment where her mother recounts 17-year-old Patty inadvertantly coming out to her friends after an awkward pass made at one of them, but there's not enough of stuff like that. Even the film's trailer can't stay focused on what it's supposed to be about.
HIT SO HARD finally finds some momentum once Schemel leaves Hole after being replaced in the studio by session drummer Deen Castronovo during the recording of 1998's Celebrity Skin, and goes on to become a homeless crack addict, but most of it is just the usual stories of drugs, the record biz, the rigors of touring, etc. Featuring Love (who, of course, takes the opportunity to once again trash-talk Cobain's Nirvana bandmates Dave Grohl and Krist Novoselic, because that has a lot to do with the Patty Schemel story), Hole bandmates Eric Erlandson and Melissa Auf der Maur (who replaced late bassist Kristen Pfaff and seems to have been Schemel's closest ally in the band), Faith No More keyboardist Roddy Bottum, plus notable female drummers Debbi Peterson (The Bangles), Gina Schock (The Go-Gos), Nina Gordon (Veruca Salt), and Kate Schellenbach (Luscious Jackson), and, for some reason, NPR "social observer" Sarah Vowell, HIT SO HARD is probably worth seeing for any fan of the '90s alt rock explosion, but Ebersole just never really brings it all together and there's a frustrating lack of direction to the whole project. As cool as she comes across and with nothing but respect for her kicking drugs and getting her life together, is Schemel's story really worthy of a 103-minute film? With the way Ebersole pads the running time with concert footage and Sarah Vowell getting choked up about Kurt Cobain's death, I'd say probably not. At least with LAST DAYS HERE, covered above, there was a dramatic element to the Bobby Liebling story as the filmmakers followed him as the story unfolded. Feeling like an overlong DVD extra, HIT SO HARD would've made a great hour-long VH-1 BEHIND THE MUSIC episode, but a feature film? (Unrated, 103 mins)
