Microcinema DVDs - Straight to Hell Returns

2010-11-18 LA Weekly
By Karina Longworth

There are two surprising things about Straight to Hell Returns, the digitally spiffed-up version of Alex Cox's 1987 "paella Western." The first is that it even exists, considering the low esteem in which Straight to Hell was held upon its release. The second is that, as far as director's cuts that nobody asked for go, it's completely worthwhile. Judge for yourself Friday night in a UCLA program at the Hammer's Billy Wilder Theater, when Cox presents the film in advance of its DVD release as part of a six-film series recently launched by Microcinema International.

Starring Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, Sy Richardson, Dick Rude and a pre-grunge Courtney Love as hard-living bank robbers hiding out in a town run by violent coffee addicts, Straight to Hell was decimated by critics in 1987, particularly trade journalists assessing the film's market value. "One of the worst films of this or any year," wrote BoxOffice magazine. "So self-indulgent, incomprehensible, inept and boring, it should be titled 'Straight From Hell.' " The scourge of overly clever insult reviewing inspired by Cox's third feature extended to this very publication, which dismissed Hell as "masturbatory art ... really like opening the bathroom door in a strange house and catching a bunch of self-conscious adults in frenzied autoerotic activity." Most critics suggested Cox and crew had used the million production budget to party, as if the film was an incidental byproduct of a drunken jam session in the Spanish desert.

"Well, it would have been great if that could've been so, if it had been like a Burning Man experience for us all and we just had a big party and went home," Cox says today. He's calling from his home in Oregon, where he's lived for the better part of the two decades since his Hell follow-up, the implicitly anti-Contra period epic Walker, "derailed my career."

"It is always a struggle to make a film with not really enough money. But I think, maybe our mistake was also letting on that it was tremendous fun at the same time. We should have kept that a secret."

One reason Straight to Hell might have been dismissed as a disposable lark — beyond the fact that the closing credits offer a "special thanks" to "all the bars in Southern Spain" — is that it's literally the product of its makers having too much time on their hands.

After Costello, Strummer and the Pogues played a successful concert benefit in Brixton, south London, for the Sandinista National Liberation Front, Cox and Nancy producer Eric Fellner tried to arrange a one-month concert tour of Nicaragua featuring the musicians, to be funded by a video deal — which never happened. The rock stars had already freed up the month, so Cox switched gears and decided to make a film instead. As Cox writes on his website, "It was easier to raise million for a low-budget feature starring various musicians than to find ,000 to film them playing in a revolutionary nation in the middle of a war."

The goal with Straight to Hell Returns was to use contemporary technology to cover the tracks of the film's initial limited budget. The soundtrack has been remastered, the gore has been digitally enhanced, the color has been gorgeously corrected and two brief elements of stop-motion animation have been added as narrative punctuation. "It's more fully realized than it was before," Cox says. "The technology has caught up with the intentions."

Straight to Hell was guaranteed lasting novelty value by its cast alone, but the restoration reveals it to be more than a curiosity with impeccable record-nerd cred. It is, against all odds, a real movie, even a pretty good one. What A Hard Day's Night is to Quickie Pop Heartthrob Flicks, Straight to Hell is to a different sub-sub-subgenre: Films Full of Rock Stars in Which None of Them Play Music.

It's a languid narrative, spotted with explosive bloodshed: Norwood (Richardson), Simms (Strummer) and Willy the Kid (Rude) party too hard and sleep through a scheduled hit job, forcing them to go on the lam with Norwood's pregnant moll (Love). When their shitty car breaks down in a town full of sultry women and French press-sipping "ruthless men" (some played by the Pogues, with Costello as their coffee-serving butler), the gang's dynamic is fatally altered by new flirtations.

The digital intervention enriches Straight to Hell's sweaty visuals, enhancing the film's dark romanticism: For all of its gonzo gags, this is ultimately a film that's propelled to its final shoot-out on a steadily mounting wave of sexual longing and jealousy.

As Cox acknowledges, it's prescient of some of the stylistic tropes that would dominate indie film five to 10 years later, from its blood splatter to its costume design to its B-genre pastiche. "Back in the '80s, the late '80s, there wasn't this, sort of, enthusiasm for Italian Westerns that there is now; they hadn't been rehabilitated and viewed as a serious, worthwhile form. And there wasn't a spate of films with hitmen in black suits and ties and stuff."

So would Straight to Hell have been received differently had it postdated Quentin Tarantino's ushering of both Sergio Leone love and skinny-tied criminals into the zeitgeist? Cox pauses before answering. "I think by that point, that sort of postmodernism had seeped into the minds of film reviewers, perhaps. It was only a few years later, but something had changed in the meantime."

Cox has directed seven features since his post-Walker retreat from Hollywood (including Mexican cop drama Highway Patrolman, which screens on Saturday at the Hammer in a double feature with Sid & Nancy), financed by foreign presales, DVD residuals and, in the case of the 2007 Western Searchers 2.0, producer Roger Corman. Most of these films you've probably not heard of, let alone seen — the Microcinema releases will be the first real exposure for many of them in the U.S.

With no desire to return to the corporate filmmaking fold — give him an opening and he'll rail against former employer Universal and its various subsidiaries — technology has fired up Cox's DIY instincts. His last feature, an unofficial sequel to Repo Man called Repo Chick, was made Spy Kids–style with heavy use of garage green-screen, and allowed him to keep working under the radar and without interference. If he has his way, his next project will be as lo-fi as they come.

"I want to do a film either with Rudy Wurlitzer, who wrote Walker, or with Harry Harrison, who's an American science fiction writer who lives in England," Cox says. "Um, and in either case, I want to do a film with hand puppets."

2010-11-15 LA Times
By Mark Olsen

There was a time in the mid-1980s when filmmaker Alex Cox would have been considered on par with such contemporaries as Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant and David Lynch at the forefront of the ascendant notion of "independent film." Coming off the critical successes of "Repo Man" and "Sid and Nancy," Cox stood to bring a punk-inflected sensibility of subversive smarts to a broader audience.

Then he made the one-two punch of "Straight to Hell" and "Walker," both released in 1987, two unapologetically political, inside-out genre pastiches. "Straight to Hell," in particular, was a flaky, sweat-stained take on spaghetti westerns, hitman pictures and corporate intrigue that featured a catch-all cast of actors, friends and rock 'n' rollers.

"My career in features, I started out working for Universal and I ended up working for Roger Corman," said the English-born Cox, 55, during a recent phone call from his home in Ashland, Ore. "It's supposed to go the other way."

Film screenings

A new version of "Straight to Hell," dubbed "Straight to Hell Returns" — which screens Friday at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, where Cox is scheduled to appear in person — might help the movie finally get the reappraisal it has long deserved. This new cut is 41/2 minutes longer, with a few deleted scenes added back in — including a hilarious bit with a bound Elvis Costello being slapped silly by a roomful of women — some newly created animation and insert shots, a new sound mix and a digitally revised color scheme overseen by the film's original cinematographer, Tom Richmond.

Also screening over the weekend is 1986's "Sid and Nancy," which turned the doomed tale of Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen (played with incendiary power by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb) into something of a tragic romance, and "Highway Patrolman," Cox's Spanish-language 1991 story of a Mexican cop.

Shannon Kelley, head of public programming at the UCLA archive, noted that not only is Cox a graduate of UCLA's film program but also that the original elements used for "Straight to Hell Returns" were discovered at the school's archive.

"It's a nice chance to first of all salute a career like Alex Cox's and the conviction behind it," said Kelly, "but also to remind ourselves that it was fostered at this institution."

Shot in Almería, Spain, on locations actually used for classic spaghetti westerns, the film features the Clash's Joe Strummer, Costello, members of the Pogues and a young, chubby-cheeked Courtney Love as an odd assortment of killers, bandits and sidekicks. It's dotted with faces that have gone on to be familiar character actors, including Xander Berkeley, Miguel Sandoval and Sy Richardson, and there are cameos by Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones and Jim Jarmusch. British actress Kathy Burke and future director Sara Sugarman can also be seen in small roles.

Producer Eric Fellner has gone on to be part of the successful production company Working Title Films.

"It's densed up over the years," Cox noted of how the film arguably plays better today than when it was originally released. "Partially, there's a nostalgia aspect to it because some of the people who were in it aren't around anymore. I also think it's gotten better, with all the weird stuff we've just done to the film. Some films you can improve and other films — you couldn't really go and do a 'Citizen Kane' redux, that wouldn't make it any better."

Offbeat origins

The new version had its debut in San Francisco on Halloween and is making a small theatrical rollout at festivals and art houses across the country before being released on DVD in December.

The original "Straight to Hell" sprang from origins as offbeat as the story it tells. When Cox couldn't fund his initial plan of taking Costello, Strummer and the Pogues on a rock 'n' roll tour of war-torn Nicaragua in support of the Sandinista rebels — "Big media corporations do not support revolutionary movements in the Third World," noted Cox — he decided to shoot a feature film in the same period of time the musicians already had blocked off.

A script was quickly prepared, everyone decamped to Spain, and the film was shot in four weeks.

The response to the movie on its initial release in summer 1987 — with a local premiere at a Burbank drive-in — was largely one of derision and dismissal. "It's going straight to nowhere," proclaimed Variety, while the New York Times called it "a mildly engrossing, instantly forgettable midnight movie."

'Badge of honor'

Dick Rude, cowriter and costar of the film, specifically remembers that when "Straight to Hell" made a list of the worst films of the year in the Los Angeles Times, "I was so proud. It was such a badge of honor to me. That meant I succeeded in making people feel something. And it served as a paradigm for years after that when people would write about other films — 'this is almost as bad as 'Straight to Hell.'"

Since "Straight to Hell" and the follow-up film "Walker" — a historical story in Nicaragua filled with purposeful anachronisms — Cox has remained extremely prolific, though off the radar of the Hollywood industry. He hosted the British television show "Moviedrome" for seven years and has continued to make features such as "Death and the Compass," "Three Businessmen," "Revengers Tragedy" and "Searchers 2.0."

Cox is heartened that "Straight to Hell Returns" could receive some retroactive appreciation.

"It's a bizarre fusion of its time and right now," said Cox. "It has become the film that it should have been."

2011-11-16 The Big Takeover
By Allan MacInnis

When Straight To Hell was released in 1987, Alex Cox did have a cult following, established by Repo Man and Sid & Nancy; but though several actors from those films appear in Straight to Hell, including co-writer Dick Rude, Circle Jerks bassist Zander Schloss, Sy Richardson, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, and even J. Frank Parnell himself, Fox Harris, the films couldn’t be more different. Repo Man, while also a comedy, shows the strongest contrasts: located on the fringes of the LA punk scene, it riffs on the noir Kiss Me Deadly to offer a darkly funny poke at alienated urban life, replete with generic groceries, decomposing aliens, a radioactive Malibu, incompetent MIBs and pseudo-Scientologists. By contrast, Straight To Hell is a rather gleefully silly spaghetti western homage, with a starring role for Joe Strummer and smaller parts for the Pogues, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Jim Jarmusch, and Edward Tudor Pole. People who found Repo Man funny wouldn’t necessarily appreciate the far broader humour of seeing Fox Harris as a lounge singer delivering a godawfully melodramatic performance of Tom Jones “Delilah” to a party of cowboy-attired baddies – including most of the Pogues – who periodically shoot their pistols in the air in appreciation. Though there were probably fans of Cox’s previous films other than myself who also loved Straight To Hell, I must admit that I never encountered one until this year, and had no luck, video store geek that I was at the time, in convincing my customers of its merits.

With the benefit of hindsight, really, the failure of Straight To Hell to find an audience in 1987 is no surprise.The vogue for postmodernist manipulation of the codes of cinema gone by was yet to be established, with Quentin Tarantino, in 1987, still a video store geek himself, and films like Sukiyaki Western Django and The Good The Bad and The Weird things of an undreamt-of distant future. Further, though the film was obviously intended to appeal to music fans – growing, as it did, out of an initial, abandoned proposal to film various bands on tour in revolutionary Nicaragua – people who came to see Joe Strummer, the Pogues, and Elvis Costello in acting roles wouldn’t necessarily notice, let alone care about, the nods to For a Few Dollars More, Point Blank, Cool Hand Luke and other films. What could it mean to a non-cinephile, too, that Straight To Hell was filmed in the oft-used Sergio Leone location of Almeria, Spain, on the set of a Charles Bronson movie called Chino (AKA Valdez the Halfbreed), where the buildings had all been designed, according to Cox, to a somewhat smaller stature, so the shortish Bronson might appear tall? This is the sort of apocrypha film geeks drool over, but music geeks are a different species, and unless you were a bit of both, you were likely to feel at least partially excluded from the proceedings. Indeed, on the commentary for the previous DVD edition of Straight To Hell, Cox comments that a Tucson punk once told him that watching Straight To Hell was like being at a great party to which you were not invited.

There is some reason to think the film has a better chance now. Audiences are more sophisticated; the young, then-unknown female lead of the film, Courtney Love, has gained celebrity status, however troubled it may be; and several of the cast members – including Joe Strummer and Dennis Hopper – have passed on, adding to the mythical impact of their names. Fortunate, then, that Cox has recut the film, digitally enhanced it, and is presently touring it around the United States, under the new title, Straight To Hell Returns.