Straight to Hell (1987) Island Pictures/Action-Comedy-Western RT: 91 minutes (Director’s Cut) Rated R (strong graphic violence, sexual content, language, drugs) Director: Alex Cox Screenplay: Alex Cox and Dick Rude Music: Pray for Rain Cinematography: Tom Richmond Release date: June 26, 1987 (US) Cast: Sy Richardson, Joe Strummer, Dick Rude, Courtney Love, The Pogues, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Edward Tudor-Pole, Jim Jarmusch, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, Sara Sugarman, Biff Yeager, Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, Terry Woods, Xander Berkeley, Graham Fletcher-Cook, Del Zamora, Luis Contreras. Box Office: $210,200 (US)
Rating: * ½
Alex Cox once showed a lot of promise. The director’s first two films, the cult punk rock comedy Repo Man (1984) and the biopic/doomed love story Sid and Nancy (1986), were outstanding. Then he did Straight to Hell, a send-up of spaghetti westerns in which nearly all of the characters end up dead by movie’s end. It’s one thing to subvert a genre; it’s quite another to trash it altogether. This one is guilty of the latter. It’s an incomprehensible mess.
I first saw Straight to Hell in 1991 during my brief period of employment at a video store. I couldn’t remember a single thing about it when the subject of Alex Cox came up during a recent discussion of Caught Stealing, a crime thriller with the same punk attitude as his early work. I decided a rewatch would be in order. That’s when I found out there was a director’s cut of the 1987 movie. I then made the decision to pair it with This Is Spinal Tap for my Sunday double feature. It left me reeling and not in a good way. I had one burning question: what the hell was that?!
Apparently, Straight to Hell came about as a result of a concert in Nicaragua featuring several punk bands (The Pogues, The Circle Jerks and Amazulu) being cancelled due to the country’s political problems. Cox decided to use the situation to his advantage and make a film starring several members of the bands along with whatever actors he could round up on short notice (e.g. Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones and Jim Jarmusch). It turns out it was easier getting funding for a movie than a big concert tour. He and co-star Dick Rude wrote the script in just three days. It was filmed in Spain in four weeks on the same set as the 1973 Charles Bronson western Chino.
For what it’s worth, here’s the plot of Straight to Hell. It centers on three hitmen- Willy (Rude, Repo Man), Simms (Clash lead singer Strummer) and Norwood (Richardson, Repo Man)- who hightail it across the border after a botched job. Along with Norwood’s pregnant wife Velma (Love, Sid and Nancy), the gang robs a bank along the way. Their car breaks down in the desert and after they bury the money from the robbery, they continue on foot until they reach what initially looks like a deserted town.
Naturally, the small, dusty town is NOT deserted. It’s actually occupied by a large group of coffee-addicted cowboys (yes, java junkies!). It’s run by the McMahon clan, a gang of ruthless killers. There are a lot of McMahons. The other townspeople live in fear of them.
This is all I’m really clear on. The rest of Straight to Hell is an aimless journey to nowhere. A few things happen along the way. There’s some business about the murder of the McMahon patriarch. A lot of people want to get their hands on the money the outsiders buried out in the desert. At one point, a couple of strangers (Hopper and Jones) show up and disappear as mysteriously as they appeared. The crime boss (director Jarmusch) the hitmen are on the run from also shows up. It all ends with a huge shootout that leaves almost everybody dead. That’s it; end of movie. It makes you wonder if the trip was really necessary. My one-man jury is still out on that.
The truth is part of me admires the hell out of Cox for once again doing his own thing and not giving a s*** about how Straight to Hell will play in Peoria. It’s clear to me he has an affection for spaghetti westerns with all the visual amd musical cues throughout. His screenplay is loosely based on Django Kill…. If You Live, Shoot! (1967). He pays homage to Sergio Leone with close-up shots of the characters’ eyes in the final standoff. He even names one of the townspeople after Lee Van Cleef’s character in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). All of this is cool. If only it was enough to save the film from drowning in a sea of self-indulgence.
Good intentions aside, there’s no getting around how bad a movie Straight to Hell really is. It’s not just bad, it’s aggressively bad. Cox isn’t known for being subtle, but this one comes at you like a jackhammer hooked up to a sound amplifier that goes to 12. The storyline is a confused mess. Characters are either poorly developed or not developed at all. The acting is terrible. Love especially got on my nerves with her screechy way of talking. The nicest thing I can say about the cast is that they’re all in on whatever Cox is up to. They just go with it, never mind the hit on their resume.
I don’t hate Straight to Hell, but I can’t say I like it either. It’s barely watchable. To me, it felt like I was watching a promising artist set his career on fire on purpose. Perhaps that’s the point. Maybe we’re looking at anti-art here. Maybe he’s making a statement about the industry and how it tries to force visionary filmmakers to conform rather than experiment with form. If that’s the case, Straight to Hell is a great big middle finger to money-minded studio executives. I respect that. It doesn’t change the fact that it’s a great big bloody mess, but at least it has something resembling a point.
