Alphabet City (1984)

Until now, drug dealer Johnny (Vincent Spano) has had quite the career, going up through the ranks fast. Doubts must have trickled in already with the birth of his little baby Renee (Christina Marie Denihan), with his artist wife Angie’s (Kate Vernon) various attempts to talk him out of the life of crime, his partner and friend Lippy’s (Michael Winslow, yes, the guy with the noise imitation shtick) slow descent into addiction, and his younger sister Sophia’s (Jami Gertz) start into the life of a prostitute

The night the film takes place in turns out to be the final straw, though, when Johnny is tasked with burning down the tenement building his mother (Zohra Lampert) and sister are living in. At first he’s just not very happy doing it, but then decides completely against it, well knowing that this will probably lead to very unhealthy consequences for him, while the building’s just going to be burned down by some other asshole as some great career move.

So it’s clear Johnny, together with Angie and the baby, will have to flee New York at the end of the night. Until then, he’s going to drift through the night, steal the money he’s usually collecting for his boss as his own private pension fund (the guy’s going to want to kill him anyway, right?), and try to survive if there are already people after him (which of course there are).

On a plot level, Amos Poe’s Alphabet City sounds like a pretty typical and not terribly original crime movie. It certainly is as close as Poe – coming out of the New York No-Wave – ever came to mainstream cinema. It is still as stylized and weird as you’ll find this sort of plot treated, using the set-up as an excuse for Spano to drift through the neon-coloured New York night, encounter strange people and peculiar variations on standard genre situations. The drug den, for example, must be seen to be believed, and cannot be explained with the few words I have. The genre’s expected action set pieces are staged and filmed as weirdly as the director could get away with too, clearly made with a knowledge of the more classic way to do things and a decision against doing anything that way.

The film’s structure does of course make this an older sibling to other movies about characters drifting and running through neon lit city nights like Into the Night or After Hours, a sub-genre which to me always feels a little like condensed road movies, trying to express the richness and strangeness of a city – or at least a certain number of city blocks – through episodic encounters, trying to capture a spirit of the place more than paint an outwardly realistic picture.

Poe’s New York here is drenched in all the colours of Dario Argento, turning the gritty New York of its time into a dream- and nightmarescape, with Johnny as our increasingly desperate Virgil, pointing out the circles of the damned. Alphabet City is much more an attempt at creating a sense of place through mood and strangeness than a proper narrative; it is also never less than riveting, explaining the love and desperation many of its inhabitants seem to have felt towards their city when this was made in the only way feelings like that can be explained – ambiguously and with a bit of the weird involved.

Renegades (1989)

Buster McHenry (Kiefer Sutherland), 80s action movie cop by trade, spends his vacation on a private undercover mission, trying to puzzle out the identity of the crooked cop helping violent dirt bag Marino (Robert Knepper when he was still Rob in an excellently lizard-like outing) do his violent deeds. Unfortunately, Buster’s plan to achieve this goal consists of planning the robbery of a jewellery store with Marino, in the hopes off convincing Marino to let him meet the bad cop in person before the robbery can actually take place. However, idiotic plans like this can go wrong rather easily, and soon Buster finds himself indeed committing the robbery with Marino and his gang, and still without the information he seeks. Dead civilians and quite a bit of property damage result.

On the flight, the gang and the idiot cop stumble into an exhibition where Marino finds the time and inclination to grab the holy lance of the Lakota, and shoot one of the Lakota men watching over it. That man’s brother, Hank Storm (Lou Diamond Phillips), promises to get back the lance and take revenge for his brother. A fine opportunity to start on this work opens up to Hank when his mystical Indian tracking powers (seriously, that’s how the film plays it and will continue to play it) lead him to Buster, who is in rather bad shape after Moreno ended their short-lived partnership by shooting him.

Luckily for Buster, Hank’s dad (Floyd “Red Crow” Westerman himself) is a capable shaman and takes time out of his busy schedule to pray his gunshot wound a bit better. Who needs a physician, right? Once that’s over, Hank and Buster will have to team up, at first (of course) very reluctantly but increasingly (of course) with full 80s buddy movie man love.

I am not the greatest fan of 80s buddy movies but it’s pretty difficult not to like a film whose future buddies are young Kiefer Sutherland (in his pre-“torture is awesome” phase) and Lou Diamond Phillips (in his pre-“Sheriff roles only” phase). Together, in good 80s action movies tradition, they fight slightly more crime than they commit themselves, crash cars, smash a large amount of things, and hurt or kill a lot of people in hilarious and improbable ways.

Director Jack Sholder’s just the right kind of guy at the right kind of place here, shooting the insipid, the hilarious and the exciting all in the straightforward and unpretentious manner this kind of thing demands, until nothing made of glass isn’t broken. It’s such a bunch of merry carnage (not terribly brutal as these films go) broken up by semi-embarrassing Indian (that’s the word the film prefers to use, even though it has the perfectly good word “Lakota” right there in the script; Buster of course is racist dickhead enough to always call Hank “chief”) mysticism, and general nonsense that it’s easy to miss that the script actually has some perfectly neat ideas beside the nonsense.

For once, the captain character in this sort of film (given by cop specialist Bill Smitrovich) does have an actual role to play in the plot apart from reaming out the insane, violent cop working for him, and even Buster’s absurd crusade against crooked cops has a reason to it. It’s nothing original, mind you, but I do think including some bits and pieces that actually make a degree of sense and hint at the real world in a plot only helps to make the general outrageousness of your typical action movies that decisive bit more interesting. Characters for their part are seldom not improved by adding some motivation for their actions either.