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Feature Review #9

How to get a major studio to pay for a  party for you and your friends Straight to Hell (DVD) Dir: Alex Cox with: The Pogues, Dennis Hopper, Joe Strummer, etc.

Step 1} Make a wonderfully surreal movie (Repo Man) Step 2} Make a critically acclaimed film about a rock/punk icon and his dead girlfriend (Sid & Nancy) Step 3} Get a bunch of punk/new wave musicians, buddies, character actors, etc together, and tell the studio you're going to go to Spain and make a wonderfully critically acclaimed surreal movie with a bunch of punk icons. Step 4} Party hard in the desert and shoot a lot of footage which you will later edit together in some semblance of a story It doesn't matter if you're telling the truth in Step 3, because after you've spent the studio's money and delivered the resulting cans of celluloid worms [Step 4], they only have two choices (if your contract was cleverly-written enough, anyway): Choice 1} Release it. Choice 2} Sit on it. They released it. My first wife and i watched it. We loved it. The more you know about/appreciate spaghetti westerns, the more you'll probably like this film. And the music is wonderful -- not surprising, considering it includes in the cast the Pogues, Elvis Costello, members of the Circle Jerks, Joe Strummer and so on. All i can say is that, if you can enjoy sloppy self-indulgent silliness made by a talented cast having fun, you might want to look at this film. (There is a re-issue of the soundtrack album, but it's missing some of the better music -- particularly the Pogues' version of "The Good the Bad and the Ugly", but does retain Zander Schloss's "Salsa y Ketchup" and the Pogues' alternate [and better] version of the title track from their (then) upcoming album, If I Should Fall from Grace with God)