Straight to Hell movie review (1987)
The movie was filmed in Spain, on the same sets that Sergio Leone used for his spaghetti Westerns, and it's a sendup of those movies, I guess. Fierce desperadoes stalk the streets of a Western town, shooting each other and drinking lots of coffee and buying hot dogs from the local vendor. The wind howls and the music is tense and lonely, and there are dozens of corpses by the end of the film.
But there is not, alas, a comic or satirical point of view. Cox and his co-writer, Dick Rude, have nothing they want to say about Leone or spaghetti Westerns, no angle of approach to their material, no characters they want to develop in an interesting way. In fact, they scarcely bother to develop characters at all; a group of people arrive at the beginning of the movie, mill about aimlessly, and are mostly dead at the end.
"Straight to Hell" was "filmed in three weeks on a shoestring budget of $1 million," but looks more as if it were filmed in one week on Cox's MasterCard. The cast is littered with familiar faces who dropped in for the fun: Strummer, Elvis Costello, Grace Jones, Jim Jarmusch, and Dennis Hopper - whose mere presence should have sent up some sort of a warning light. It was Hopper who went to Peru in 1970 and made "The Last Movie / Chinchero," another shapeless gonzo Western starring lots of rock stars and personal friends, and the backlash from that movie put his career on hold for years. Cox seems to have staged the same sort of come-as-you-are party.
Watching the movie in a dreary reverie, while nameless characters shot at each other for no discernible reason, I asked myself what it was lacking. And the answer, I guess, is sort of old-fashioned: It needed some kind of coherent narrative, so that I could understand the relationships and the plot enough to determine if I cared about them.
"Straight to Hell" is simply a record of aimless behavior, of a crowd of pals asked to dress up like cowboys and mill about on a movie set. The way I would like to interpret all of this is, Alex Cox is saving himself for his next film.
