westley

Road House

Directed by Rowdy Herrington. Really. How perfect is that? (1989)

This is one of the greatest bad movies ever made, right up there with Teen Wolf. I think every single person in the entire world has seen this movie, and that is pretty remarkable in itself. I have talked with lots of people from lots of countries and they all know this movie. Germans call it something like The Man who had Four Fists; in China they probably call it something like Four-Fisted Grasshopper with Armor of Golden Hair. To me Road House is a comedy, the kind of comedy like when youre driving down the road and see a man who is jogging down the sidewalk trip on a crack and fall flat on his face. It wasnt meant to happen, it wasnt planned, it shouldnt be funny, but Im laughing my ass off. I dont know why. I think we love to laugh at people doing things badly. When I go to video stores and see Road House in the Action Section I like to move it into the Comedy Section; thats where it belongs and it pisses people off at Blockbuster. The Roadhouse Bandit strikes again, Fuck Blockbuster!

This movie is a feat of the imagination, or more like a reek of the imagination. It is a movie of extremes: extreme violence, extreme machismo, extreme gratuitous T&A, extreme wearing of Wrangler jeans and extreme use of Consort Hair Spray for Men. I think they would just bring in the entire cast at one time and douse them all at once with a power sprayer full of Consort, thereby fixing their hair and also starching their jeans in order to attain maximum tightness. Patrick Swayze must be crayze; he looks like, in this movie, what Corey Feldman would have looked like if he had fully developed testicles sporting a Shaun Cassidy cum Richard Marx bouffant. I call it a bouffullet.



Swayze plays the character of Dalton and hes the best bouncer in the business, but he likes to tell people hes not, that Wade Garrett is, because that allows there to be a reason for Sam Elliot (Wade Garrett) to be in the movie: Daltons mentor and father-figure bouncer of lore. The mere mention of either one of their names in the realm of their fraternal bouncer brothers causes raised eyebrows in reverent praise and respectful mumblings like, Daltons the best, he killed a man in Memphis! They then nod their heads in a mutual understanding of the Bouncers Way. Ive always wanted to introduce my friends like that, This is my friend Bob, he killed a guy in Tuskegee, Alabama. Instant cooooool!

So we start. Daltons working at a hot meat-market club catering to Krokus video extras rejects and men who wear pastel-colored mock blazers with shoulder pads, who are also rejects. Enter Frank, a club owner in Nowhere, America who wants to recruit Dalton to work at his club because its gotten too rough. Its the kind of place where they sweep up the eyeballs after closing, he says. Sounds more like a hot dog factory to me, but Dalton accepts the job for no apparent reason. Frank asks Dalton when he can expect him and Dalton says, You dont. End of scene.

Next day Dalton shows up and walks into one of the most blatantly choreographed, staged manipulations of reality Ive ever seen since the Intergalactic Circus of Wonders (half-time show of Orange Bowl 1999 where 250 people dressed up in rainbow colored spacesuits and danced around with solar system mobiles attached to their heads with flying midgets, yellow horses, and old men in skintight sequined jumpsuits. It was intergalactic, it was a circus, and it freaked me the *beep* out). Dalton enters Franks club, the Double Deuce, and walks through a, seemingly, invisible protective tunnel as bottles, chairs, bodies, busted light bulbs and tables fly all around, behind, in front of, and over him. This scene would have been equally as realistic if they had just put Patrick Swayze in front of a blue screen and ran the Wizard of Oz tornado scene with houses, people, mailboxes and tractors flying all around in the background. The director must have had a heyday with this scene: The stage is set, cameras ready, everybodys tense with anticipation chomping at the bit to start the shoot, oooohhhh, ssshhhhh, people hush each other for the commencement of the scene, Swayze enters the bar the director whispers under his breath carpe diem and solemnly begins his craft, ACTION! YOU throw the chair, YOU throw the table, trampoline people NOW, man with flannel shirt flip into the mirror, bottle people NOW!, flip table C NOW, pull the strings attached to the light bulbs NOW, man on stage jump into table D, man with DTs in corner puke on floor NOW, Lady B punch Lady C, man with other flannel shirt do flying forward somersault onto floor and roll for precisely 5 feet, not 4, stand up, man with no shirt punch somersaulting man upon rising, GO MAN GO!, bartender throw case of beer across the room NOW, everybody pick up a bottle of sugar glass and break it on each others head NOW!, prop men throw more bottles across the room NOW, Patrick walk to the bar and order a coffee NOW! Ok, thats a wrap, everybody you were wonderful!

Dalton just floats right through like a swan on a quiet pond, unfettered and free from the world that surrounds him. Daltons the best; he killed a man in Memphis!

I didnt start out watching this movie to do a lot of counting, but interestingly enough I found myself entertained by it, and so I started counting up some stuff and doin some cipherin, Road House style. The first thing I took note of was the amount of broken glass in this movie. That includes bottles, windows, windshields, headlights, glasses, storefront windows, whiskey decanters, mirrors, and light bulbs. At one point, I lost count and had to start using large sweeping estimates, which included things like approximate number of glasses on a shelf, or number of windows on a storefront, etc. By my best count, there are approximately 2450 broken units of glass in this movie. This movie single-handedly supported the sugar glass business for an entire year. There are approximately 62 gun discharges; 45 people involved in a series of 14 fight scenes; 8 knife attacks; 4 (maybe 5) deaths; 2 large explosions; not one single cop throughout the entire movie until, literally, the last minute of the movie (and then they dont say anything), and the word Road House is not used one single time during the entire movie.

Dalton starts cleaning house and getting rid of the trash by firing people who arent up to snuff. Dalton fires the head bartender for skimmin and now weve got our plot. The bartender is the nephew of Brad Wesley, the famous extortionist and racketeer of this small town. He has an entire platoon of goons and thugs. The typical kind of southern stock, strong-arm men who made their way through the 80s doing stints in shows like The Fall Guy, Scarecrow and Mrs. King, and Crazy Like a Fox playing the parts of strong-arm men for shady-dealing construction lot owners, race car track owners, petty ante loan sharks, and the like. Some of them might have been old enough to be in some Rockford Files as well. Brad Wesley wants his nephew hired back, but Dalton says no and the games begin. Dalton is cut in another sugar glass bottle incident and has to go to the hospital. He got cut up at the very beginning of the movie as well, by another sugar glass bottle, in another fight and administered his own stitches that time, this time hes going to the hospital though. His doctor is Kelly Lynch (Drugstore Cowboy chick) and her name is Doc and they fall in love. I looked around trying to find out what her real character name was in the movie and had no luck. Lets just call her Doc. Well, Doc is the ex-wife of Brad Wesley; shes also the niece of Red, the local auto parts store owner, who gets extorted by Brad Wesley. Red is best friends with Frank, the owner of the Double Deuce, who is the brother of some Big Guy with a Moustache who owns the local car lot, and who also hates Brad Wesley. Dalton lives with Emmet, who wears full-length red thermal underwear and also hates Brad Wesley, and Emmet and Dalton now live together across the small river in town from Brad Wesley.

Brad Wesley stops the Double Deuce from getting any liquor, Dalton gets hit on by BWs lustful moll and then disses her, BW blows up Reds auto parts store, Dalton and his gang (get it, the Dalton Gang) beat up most of BWs guys including the one with a knife attached to the end of his boot, BW has his monster truck run over the Big Moustache Guys car lot, Dalton beats up some more guys, BW blows up Emmets house, Dalton saves Emmet and kills BWs right hand goon, BW has Wade Garrett killed, Dalton kills the guy who killed Wade Garrett, and then the rest of the townsfolk weve been exposed to: Frank, Red, and the Big Moustache Guy kill BW with shotguns and when the cops come nobody says a word and they all walk scott free. Yin and Yang, flim and flam, push and pull, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth; this is the Swayze Way. The Intergalactic Circuuuuuuusssssssss of Woooonddeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrss (tremolo in B-flat). Dalton is something of a philosopher in this movie; in fact in the movie he has a philosophy degree from NYU. He dons himself periodically in a dojo shirt which he actually tucks into his Wrangler jeans. This shows his sense of Eastern balance accompanied with a few kung fu moves and he says things like, Pain dont hurt, and Nobody wants to fight, and the bigger they are the harder they fall and he says it philosophically; I found this very moving in a deep down kind of way.

Through all the above there are a couple of uh, remarkable, action scenes. Movies like this are actually written around the action scenes and the plot layers are added later to mesh it out. Somebody meshed this movie up. The first deals with Jimmy, and the second one deals with Jimmy. Jimmy is the right hand strong-arm man of BW and he says things like, Prepare to die, and I used to fuck guys like you in prison; impressive by any standards. He also wears blue denim shirts with the sleeves cut off, or ripped off, and also tight Wrangler jeans. First fight Jimmy saunters onto the dance floor after staring down the Dalton Gang and clears the floor with his grimacing scowl, flips his pool stick around with some judo/tai chi *beep* and then raises his arm slowly to the Dalton Gang, and does the Come on motion real quick with his hand. YEAH, lets go! He beats everybodys ass and then decides to get really fancy and makes a dash for the stage, where the band is still playing, and applies his pool stick into the gut of a fat guy who is unconscious on the floor in order to pole vault onto the stage doing a full nip and tuck tumble landing perfectly on the stage with arms squared away in a boxers pose; he looks left, he looks right and then gives another Come on hand motion, then he immediately jumps back off the stage right where he started from. Next time we see Jimmy hes just blown up Emmets house. This is something that had to be done in order to make Dalton mad enough to kill; I cant think of any other conceivable reason. Jimmy actually drives his motorcycle right up to the front of the blown up house after the explosion, where Dalton has pulled out Emmet, and gives a whopping Fu Manchu laugh, bwah bwaaahhhh, bwaaahhhhhaaahhhhhhaaaa and drives away. Dalton spots him and cuts him off at the pass. This is a real fight, the fight weve all been waiting for: Jimmy vs. Dalton: Showdown in a Shit Town. They exchange blows of course, sometimes Jimmys down, then Daltons down, then theres a resurgence, then theyre both down, then it looks like Jimmys got him but Dalton gets his 8th wind and traps Jimmys leg in the fork in the tree and starts his wallopin. This brings about the introduction of what I like to call The Gnarled 3-Finger Turkey Claw of Death. Its been hinted at that he used this patented gesture move to kill the guy in Memphis and we see it twice in the movie, once now and later when he almost kills BW with the G3FTCD but doesnt. We get a shot from every angle and the music strikes a pensive dis-chord as the G3FTCD goes in and removes Jimmys larynx. Thats a wrap, everybody you were wonderful!

Some people call Road House a parody but I dont. This movie was meant to be cheesy but was not meant to be funny. It is an amalgamation of about 20 other movies: Shane (a super-classic), Mr. Majestyk with Charles Bronson, Mitchell with Joe Don Baker, Prime Cut with Lee Marvin, Point Blank with Lee Marvin, and Enter the Dragon with Bruce Lee and many more. The director is obviously a fan of these old-style 60s and 70s action dramas and wanted to reproduce that in 1989 but created something that comes off as more of an iconoclasm than a tribute. It is impossible to recapture the sense of cool that these movies had when the Clint Eastwoods, Lee Marvins, Charles Bronsons, hell, even the Joe Don Bakers were at their peak. I think this is because those guys seemed real back then and they were, even though they were cheesy as well. But they did it first! Nowadays pictures have to think long and hard about the bottom line and are more demographically aware and therefore bring in actors, writers, and production crews who will make sure that the movie sells as many tickets and videos as possible. Road House is one of the most unoriginal movies ever made after The Shawshank Redemption; not a bad movie in itself but it is a literal patchwork quilt of all the great prison flicks ever made, and I mean all of them. Lee Marvin never got paid shit, those guys set the standard and I love that genre of movies. Road House got sloppy seconds and is original in only one way: the hero is a bouncer/philosopher and he killed a guy in Memphis.