Silverado (1985)

The Old West, mythical version. Four men (Danny Glover, Scott Glenn, Kevin Kline and Kevin Costner) meet, like each other’s compatible principles, ride together and eventually arrive with plans for various futures in the town of Silverado.

Alas, Silverado’s a place where dreams have gone sour, the sheriff's a former outlaw (Brian Dennehy) who is now the boot on the feet of the rich, and friendships and principles are put to the test.

I can’t say I really disagree with anyone calling Lawrence Kasdan’s not really revisionist western epic Silverado a bit – or a lot - self-indulgent. It does feel as if Kasdan wanted to cram all of the genre – apart from the “Evil Indian” tropes – into a single movie, having written it a maximalist love letter he’d then turn into a film.

However, I think there’s a joyfulness to the indulgence here, a genuine and very direct love for the genre, its look and feel and sound that’s utterly charming and that needs the scope of the kind of movie that’s close to the fifty minute mark when it actually arrives in the titular town. There’s space for characters and their relationships to breathe here, and while one could argue Budd Boetticher or Howard Hawks could create comparable depth of relations in much less time, I certainly wouldn’t have complained spending more time with any Boetticher or Hawks character, the virtue of concision be damned.

Kasdan’s approach definitely leads to a film that can feel like a world more than it does like a narrative, but it’s a world full of fantastic actors being fantastic, a series of fun western set pieces, and quite a few moments where Kasdan adds a telling detail or two to a character – even the villains - to turn them from stock to person.

There are also joyful little twists to the formulas of the genre – a black man (Glover is fantastic and feels so very young) as an actual lead among four and not a sidekick or Linda Hunt straight-up doing the Angie Dickinson part. It does help that the cast is absolutely brilliant, Lynn Whitfield, Jeff Goldblum (as a totally, absolutely, completely trustworthy gambler named “Slick”), Jeff Fahey and on and on, and everyone here has something that suggests a past and a future instead of just a narrative function.

The only bit where things do get a bit indulgent for my tastes is in the double climax – there’s really no need for two big shoot-outs directly after each other, though both of them are great. Which might be the reason why both of them are in the movie.

Shadowhunter (1993)

Los Angeles police detective John Cain (Scott Glenn) is suffering heavily under the circumstances of his divorce. He’s clearly depressed, and so hollow inside he is barely able to function in his job. His boss, not unsympathetic to Cain’s psychological plight, believes that getting a change of air would be just the right thing, so he sends Cain off to fetch a murder suspect arrested on a Navajo reservation. The reservation police under Frank Totsoni (Robert Beltran) suspects the man, one Nakai Twobear (Benjamin Bratt), to be guilty of some murders in their jurisdiction as well, but they don’t have the amount of evidence the LA cops have for their murders. They don’t seem completely unhappy to let Cain drive off with the man, anyway, for as we will soon enough learn, they believe Twobear to be a coyote man or skin walker.

There may very well be something to that idea, for Cain gets into a very curious accident while transporting the suspect through the desert, the sort of thing that suggests magic. Unless one doesn’t believe in such a thing like our protagonist, of course. But then, he has a point in so far as his own psychological state could very well cause a man to drive off a road. In any case, Twobear uses the accident to escape, taking with him Cain’s gun and badge, and some of the last bits of the man’s self-respect.

Cain hasn’t quite given up on himself, though, and decides to take an active part in arresting Twobear again, even if it means travelling through the desert with Totsoni, tracking expert Ray Whitesinger (Angela Alvarado) and a small posse. Obviously, Cain will have to confront his own failures and his psychological breaking points, and may very well need to rethink what he believes about magic and how the world functions.

The 90s were a point in time when a good handful of – predominantly white – not Native American filmmakers started making more serious attempts at films that take place on somewhat realistic depictions of reservations, usually featuring an honest interest in – typically Navajo – parts of their cultures and beliefs. For some of today’s tastes, this will of course smack of “cultural appropriation” but watching a film like Shadowhunter, I can’t help but find the attempts at portraying parts of Native American cultures genuine and honest. How correct director J.S. Cardone everything gets is most probably (I’m not an expert on Navajo culture, either) up to discussion, but then, the way for example Catholic exorcisms are portrayed in horror movies made by not always Catholic filmmakers isn’t exactly authentic, either. When in doubt, a filmmaker will change things to work better in a film; thrillers don’t have to follow the rules of the documentary.

Anyway, the film at hand is usually called an action film, but if one goes into it looking for many punch-ups and shoot-outs, or Scott Glenn ripping off his shirt to scream while shooting a machine gun, one will be sorely disappointed, for Cardone uses the old evergreen plot about a man and his companions chasing after a potentially supernatural threat to explore Cain’s brittle interior life, and how he comes to a kind of faith and a reawakening belief in himself and perhaps in others, while Twobear very literally attempts to fill the emptiness inside Cain with his own evil. So expect a lot of loosely paced scenes of people trekking and riding through the desert, dream sequences and explorative dialogue before any action happens. The climactic confrontation is pretty great, mind you, because Cardone is certainly an old pro at suspense and budget action, but it is also the outward culmination of Cain’s inner struggles. All of this works very well indeed thanks to Cardone’s intelligent and calm script and some fine performances by Glenn and Alvarado, and Bratt managing to project Evil and menace throughout (perhaps even when he’s not on screen, which does take some doing).

Shadowhunter is also a fine example of how to keep the supernatural in a film ambiguous without getting ridiculous about it. There’s nothing here that couldn’t be explained through Cain’s mental state and the fear of a man quite as destructive as Twobear is. Yet reading everything that happens through a supernatural lens makes complete sense as well, which to me seems a surprisingly good portrayal of how different frameworks of looking at the factual world can draw very different conclusions from the same facts.

In short: Man on Fire (1987)

Having left the CIA with a fine cocktail of PTSD related problems, John Creasy (Scott Glenn) is doing the lighter kind of bodyguard and security work, where actual danger and additional trauma is highly unlikely to come his.

His best – probably only – buddy David (Joe Pesci) has gotten Creasy a job in Italy as the bodyguard of Sam Balletto (Jade Malle), the young daughter of wealthy parents who seem to spend less time with her than with their hairstylists. Creasy doesn’t really do children because his biggest hit when it comes to trauma concerns a dead kid. However, Sam’s nearly in as dire need of a friend – even if it’s a middle-aged big brother kind of friend – as he is, and soon enough he’s doing all the bonding and parenting stuff you’d expect her parents to bother with.

Alas, some people with inside information manage to kidnap Sam, leaving Creasy behind wounded and very angry. So angry he eventually goes on a bit of a rampage trying to find the kidnappers and bring Sam back home.

I’ve written up Tony Scott’s (who apparently was initially in talks for this version) later remake of Man on Fire with Denzel Washington some months ago. Not surprisingly, I disagree with the general critical consensus that declares the intolerable Scott version to be clearly superior. But then, in its own way, Élie Chouraqui’s version of the material is just as pretentious as that of Scott is, it’s just a kind of pretension I actually find enjoyable and aesthetically agreeable to me. When in doubt, I’ll prefer the film introduced with the hard-boiled monologue of a guy in a body bag.

I also simply do prefer the slow, gliding, “look, I’m an arty European movie from the 80s” thing to staccato camera waving and the colour of piss. The film at hand is also much, much shorter, which does help with its not exactly deep and complicated plot, though it actually shares some of the problems the later remake has with uniting its character-based first half and its slow action thriller moves in the second.

The production design is generally lovely, though, the often empty or illogically populated industrial and semi-industrial places much of the latter half takes place in taking on a rather dream-like quality in Chouraqui’s hands, turning the violence Creasy commits curiously dream-like itself. That does cost the film quite a bit of the dramatic tension you’d expect these scenes to have, but then, I don’t think dramatic tension was ever something the filmmakers here were interested in. It’s more one of those European movies using and abusing the visual motives of thrillers and a couple of actors with a very American presence to re-dream pulp as floaty, strange, yet deeply exotic and sexy thing.


Which, obviously, is only going to make a very specific part of this movie’s audience happy.

In short: Off Limits (1988)

Vietnam, 1968, during the Tet Offensive. CID Sergeant’s McGriff (Willem Dafoe) and Perkins (Gregory Hines) are the kind of racist, violent shitheels you’d expect in that role during this time. However, when the murder of a local prostitute leads them on the trail of a whole series of murders of prostitutes during the last year, all showing a lot of disturbing parallels, and their investigation begins to suggest the serial killer to be an American officer, they don’t back down but go out of their ways to catch him, risking life and career. Of course, they are still treating the Vietnamese as well as enlisted US soldiers like crap while they are doing it, and can’t spend five minutes without going on about how terrible a country they deem Vietnam to be, so it’s probably just another day at the office for these two.

At times, Christopher Crowe’s attempt to transfer 80s cop movie clichés to the more interesting background of the Vietnam War, actually does manage to make these clichés somewhat more interesting and lively; at other times, I couldn’t shake the feeling the director uses the background as an excuse to be more racist and have more unpleasant main characters than he could have gotten away with in a film set in the 80s. Crowe certainly knows how to stage a chase scene and other action movie core elements, giving them a grimy and dirty edge that fits the rest of a film whose Vietnam feels a lot like New York in action movies made at this time by people like James Glickenhaus.

The plot’s not terribly good at leading us from action scene to action scene, though. Crowe’s script never really manages to make the actual investigation terribly interesting – and honestly, if you don’t guess the whodunit very early on, I’d be very surprised. The thin characterisation of everyone involved here doesn’t make the plot any more interesting either. There’s a desperate attempt to humanise at least Dafoe’s character a little with a romance plot between him and a French novitiate sister played by the not terribly French (but lovely) Amanda Pays, but it’s so perfunctorily written, it doesn’t do much beyond adding scenes to the movie.


The characters are so bare-bones, even actors with as much heft as Dafoe, Hines or Fred Ward don’t manage to suggest much depth to these men; only house favourite Scott Glenn has an opportunity to actually do something of interest acting-wise, but he’s not in too many scenes.

Slaughter of the Innocents (1993)

Warning: some spoilers ahead because there are a couple of moments late in the movie I need to mention, for I am only human!

Top FBI agent Stephen Broderick (Scott Glenn) seems to have rather a lot of leeway with the Bureau. At least, it seems to be par for the course for him, when it is not going to be dangerous, to take his crime obsessed boy genius son Jesse (Jesse Cameron-Glickenhaus) with him. Apparently, Broderick appreciates his help analysing cases of serial killing, rape and so on and so forth. It is very possible that Jesse is supposed to be somewhere on the Autism spectrum, but then this is a film where a little kid habitually helps his FBI father solve crimes, so its ideas what is neurotypical and what not may differ rather a lot from most anybody else’s.

With Jesse’s help, Stephen nearly – the local prison warden is alas an ass - manages to save the life of a young mentally ill guy on death row in Utah for a murder and kidnapping he certainly did not commit. The crime fighting duo also finds out that this case is part of a whole series of related crimes committed by a disorganized killer if ever you’ve seen one.

Will Jesse make his way to Utah on his own and get into great danger when his dad decides things are getting too dangerous for him? You betcha.

Even James Glickenhaus amateurs like me know that the director/writer/producer was generally all about movies about cops and vigilantes made and set in grubby Koch era New York. But what’s an exploitation filmmaker to do when suddenly, post Silence of the Lambs, nobody wants to see unwashed men shooting drug dealers while rats skitter through blue lit streets? Not making any films at all is no solution for any working director, so a film about an FBI guy hunting a serial killer it was for Glickenhaus. And while one is at it, why not add a weird kid as assistant, gate to the wonders of modern technology and object to be threatened in the end? Films with kids always go down well, right? And hey, when you can cast your own son, it’s going to be a cheap kid too.

Jesse Cameron-Glickenhaus, as becomes obvious rather quickly, is not one of the great child actors, and his Jesse certainly isn’t a believable kid at all, but then, given that he’s not written as one, it’s unfair to lay the blame on the poor kid. As a matter of fact, if you go into Slaughter of the Innocents expecting anything or anyone in it to be describable with the word “believable”, you’re absolutely out of luck. This is the serial killer thriller at its most absurd, with a finale that sees Jesse finding the killer’s secret cave in the desert, which is a place where our antagonist has built a new ark and dressed it up with rotting human corpses, as well as taxidermied animals, including a giraffe. The giraffe is, obviously, a plot point that leads the kid there. As it will turn out, it is also particularly annoying to the killer that his god still hasn’t gotten around to a new flood despite him having brought a giraffe to his ark. This, mind you, is not played for comedic effect at all (or Glickenhaus’s humour is drier than the desert), but follows a scene of an increasingly traumatized child stumbling through the killer’s Cave o’Corpses that wouldn’t feel out of place in particularly crass slasher.


Crassness really is a large part of Slaughter of the Innocents special charms. There’s also the discovery of the bloody corpse of a little girl early on, as well as a grim and overheated portrayal of an execution, and other moments in the same style. Glickenhaus is not quite wallowing in this sort of thing enough to make the hardened exploitation viewer queasy, but clearly has no shame at all in doing things in an unpleasant way even when it isn’t strictly necessary. This crassness, the willingness to go there is paired with the nearly comical absurdity of the whole plot – the killer makes no sense, his background makes no sense, the clue trail includes a stolen giraffe – as well as with an effective sense of the grotesque. The killer’s home, for example, isn’t just crass, but it also looks absolutely like the product of a perverted religious imagination that is to equal parts based on kitsch and violence, so while it is absurd, it also provides the right kind of frisson.

Night of the Running Man (1995)

Las Vegas taxi driver Jerry Logan (Andrew McCarthy) is either very lucky or very unlucky: a particularly nervous fare is murdered, leaving behind a bag with a million bucks. Jerry, ignoring all that silly grown-ups stuff about consequences to actions one might have running around in one’s brain in this sort of situation, grabs the money and runs.

Not surprisingly, the money belongs to a gangster and casino owner (Wayne Newton). Or rather, it was stolen from said gangster by one of his underlings who found himself blackmailed by one of his underlings. The killed fare was the bagman initially hired to deliver the money to the blackmailer. Said bagman had a change of heart about the affair and decided to steal the loot for himself. Got all that? No? Well, then you’ll be happy to hear that little of this business is actually going to be important for the plot for more than a handful of filler scenes that are most probably just in the movie to bring it up to feature length.

What is important is that the gangsters send out crazy killer David Eckhart (Scott Glenn) to get the money back and kill Jerry. David is brutal, unnecessarily cruel and rather good at following Jerry to whichever city the guy flees to. Later developments find Eckhart teaming up with his old partner, a man nearly as sadistic as he is, Derek Mills (John Glover), and Jerry picking up instant love with a nurse (Janet Gunn) who will also be very useful for the obligatory kidnapping and threatening of loved ones scenes. Jerry should be thankful for the unfortunate incident with Mills, a bucket of cooking water and his feet that introduces him to his new favourite woman.

Director Mark L. Lester’s official career high point was probably the (not terribly enjoyable to an Arnold non-admirer like myself) Schwarzenegger vehicle Commando. Before and after, he directed quite a few other action films and thrillers, even some of the better skinemax films, usually pressing a watchable and entertaining film out of dubious material.

It’ll come as no surprise that you could probably hide a truck in Night of the Running Man’s (a film, by the way, mostly taking place by day and during the course of several of them, and not featuring much non-metaphorical running) plot holes, and can most certainly test some viewers’ ability to suspend their disbelief to the breaking point. That’s par for the course for low budget and mid-level action movies (hell, the more costly one’s aren’t always much better at that “logic” lark either), though, and while some developments here can make the less mild among us a bit testy, most of the film is in good fun, with even the filler scenes having some point to them – even if that point is only giving some supporting actor something entertaining to do.

Fortunately, there’s a lot of fun stuff going on: Glenn’s gleefully evil killer – first introduced when he murders his favourite prostitute because she’s starting to get rather fond of him - is a sight to behold; John Glover clearly thought so too, and turns out an evil sidekick of the same type and style. The film’s violence has a sense of the gleeful too, Glenn’s Eckhart blinding a mugger and throwing a waitress off a dam with a certain pleasurable nonchalance. The actual action scenes are tight and well-paced, and while they aren’t especially crazy, they are still working rather well on the old adrenaline glands.

Fun seems to be the film’s watchword. It’s all about delivering unpleasant personal-level violence as a fun and exciting thing to watch. and that, Night of the Running Man manages to do wonderfully.

In short: Into the Grizzly Maze

For various not boring reasons, a bunch of idiots and arseholes (played by dependable pros like James Marsden, Thomas Jane, Piper Perabo, Scott Glenn and Billy Bob Thornton) converge on a piece of Alaskan wilderness one character’s dead dad dubbed the Grizzly Maze because “even grizzlies can get lost there”. There’s killer grizzly stuff, brotherly reconciliation, and so many clichés any drinking game would be of actual physical danger.

Which, apart from the cast, all sounds rather second rate SyFy Original, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, while certainly looking much better than your average second rate SyFy Original, David Hackl’s Into the Grizzly Maze is much less entertaining. It might be its nearly offensive stupidity (yes, even in comparison), a script so full of bizarre holes, plain stupid plot devices and clichés its basically inexplicable, or the problem might just be that the film makes a lot of grand gestures supposed to suggest it is a nature strikes back movie on the level of Jaws when it is rather one on the level of Grizzly (without the whole “cheap as dirt” excuse the Girdler film has going for it, mind you).

The actors are completely wasted on characters that are walking, talking clichés, and not the kind of cliché that feels like an archetype but one that feels like lazy writing and disinterest in making any character here interesting instead of obvious. The poor people also have to get through dialogue as bad as it comes. Just try and keep a straight face through even a single sentence Thornton’s Great White Hunter character says, or stop groaning whenever anyone opens his or her mouth.

Even this much crap could still have been made watchable through competent animal attack sequences and decent thriller pacing. Alas, both aren’t in the cards either, for the animal attacks are generally neither clever, nor interesting, nor awesome but are set up with just as little intelligence as the rest of the film demonstrates, while the pacing stops and starts thanks to the film’s insistence on having a lot of characters that are only in the film to talk nonsense and spend way too much time on their uninvolving melodrama (whose ends and consequences are of course obvious right from the start in any case for anyone who has not grown up on some sort of isolated island where TVs and cinemas don’t exist).

In short: The Keep (1983)

1940. A troop of German soldiers under the command of Hautpmann Klaus Woermann (Jürgen Prochnow doing his usual “good German” shtick that has little to do with the atrocities the real Wehrmacht committed quite without SS help, but you know how it goes with these things) takes control of an ancient, and rather strange, keep in a Romanian mountain pass. Some greedy soldiers accidentally free an Ancient Evil™ from its captivity, and soon, said Evil is killing about one soldier a night. Woermann finds himself helpless to do anything against it.

Things don’t improve when SS major Kaempffer (Gabriel Byrne) arrives with his men to “help out”. Carting in a Romanian, Jewish scholar (Ian McKellen) and his daughter (Alberta Watson) just before they’re deported into a concentration camp only provides the Evil with a useful Renfield. Fortunately for those parts of the world who aren’t fans of the whole evil thing, our AE does have an Ancient Enemy™, too. A certain Glaeken (Scott Glenn) slowly makes his way to Romania and just might get around to doing some good.

I’m what you’d generally see as a good candidate to appreciate Michael Mann’s The Keep (based on one of the few readable novels of the mostly insufferable libertarian F. Paul Wilson), as I’m the kind of guy who often sees no problems with films taking a “style over sense” approach. Of course, most of those films don’t make heavy, yet empty gestures towards saying something profound about the nature of “Evil”, and aren’t as dull as The Keep is.

Pretty the film sure is, though, with Tangerine Dreams’ ill-fitting soundtrack and Alex Thomson’s beautiful photography producing some fine picture postcards with sound. Alas that prettiness is completely at odds with the tone the film needs to have to actually reach the effect it is aiming at. It’s rather difficult to feel dread, or even become convinced of the existence of Evil when the film’s visuals have nothing whatsoever to do with these things. Mann’s type of artificiality as a director is the completely wrong one here too, completely missing the mark of the dream-like state the film needs to induce in its audience to work, given the vacuousness and just plain bad craftsmanship of a script that drags out the least important scenes until they feel as if they were going on forever, and barely finds time for the important stuff.

One might think the really rather wonderful cast might manage to salvage something out of the script’s mix of dullness and disinterest in the themes its supposedly about, but all performances are just as dull and lifeless, the unconvincing and uninteresting dialogue delivered in ways suggesting everyone involved was replaced by a life-sized manikin of themselves.

The resulting film has such an air of boredom surrounding it I’m not even interested enough to find out what went wrong during the course of The Keep’s production (because this surely can not be the film Mann actually wanted to make); I’m just glad it’s over and I won’t have to watch it again until I’ve forgotten how little I care for it.

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