Highlander

For my money, Highlander (1986) has one of the coolest premises of any adventure/fantasy film to come out of the 1980s – a decade chock full of classic genre films. It depicts a timeless battle between beings known as “Immortals,” warriors that have lived for centuries and are scattered all over the world. They can identify the presence of another through senses known as “The Quickening,” and can only be killed by decapitation. These immortal beings are bound together in an eternal contest that culminates at a time known as “The Gathering” where those that remain will battle it for the final Prize, where the last remaining Immortal receives the combined powers from all the others of his kind that have been killed. This fascinating premise is ripe for all kinds of possibilities, which may explain why Highlander, despite its lackluster box office, went on to spawn three sequels, a live-action television show and even an animated one.

From an early scene that features dizzying camerawork dramatically swooping and gliding its way through Madison Square Garden before zooming in on Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert introduced in moody noir lighting), Highlander flaunts its stylistic flourishes with pride. This continues with an exciting swordfight deep in the bowels of the legendary auditorium as MacLeod faces off against another Immortal by the name of Iman Fasil (Peter Diamond) in an underground parking garage. These fights are the highlights of the film and director Russell Mulcahy fills them with sparking swords, flips, near misses, atmospheric rain effects and the climactic beheading that ends all battles between these beings. It isn’t mentioned often, but Highlander has some truly expertly choreographed swordplay that I would rank on par with the Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader duel in The Empire Strikes Back (1980), but still not as good as the one in The Princess Bride (1987), which is still the gold standard for that era. That being said, the ones in Highlander are exciting and visceral.

The opening fight brilliantly sets the stylish tone for the rest of the film as it proceeds to flash back and forth from MacLeod’s days as a 16th century highlander, where he first discovered immortality, to the present day where his centuries-old feud with an Immortal named The Kurgan (Clancy Brown) culminates in The Gathering in the heart of New York City. After the opening battle, MacLeod, now going under the name of Russell Nash, is immediately picked up for questioning and crosses paths with Brenda Wyatt (Roxanne Hart), a forensics expert intrigued by the enigmatic murder suspect and the rare weapon that was used.

At the time of Highlander’s release, French actor Christopher Lambert was at the height of his international stardom, fresh from the high-profile role in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). If his thick accent is jarring, he certainly looks the part, especially in the contemporary scenes with his slick ‘80s attire and brooding good looks. At times, he struggles with his dialogue, which is a bit distracting, and it doesn’t help that he’s sometimes saddled with clunky words, especially his initial interaction with the police, which is laughably bad.

Once you get past Lambert’s dodgy on again, off again Scottish accent, the flashback scenes come to life once Sean Connery appears as Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez, a fellow Immortal that teaches MacLeod about the Quickening and prepares him for battle with Kurgan. Connery brings his trademark charisma to these scenes playing a gregarious adventurer with a mischievous twinkle in his eye as he puts Lambert’s MacLeod through his paces. There’s a fantastic swashbuckling vibe to these scenes, which makes Ramirez’s demise that much more painful because of how much we’ve grown to admire him in the short time he’s on-screen. As an aside, I always find it amusing how the film doesn’t address the jarring clash of Ramirez’s Spanish name with Connery’s Scottish accent and then throws in the detail that his character is Egyptian!

A film this steeped in fantastical elements needs a larger than life villain and has one with Clancy Brown’s muscular performance as Kurgan. He has an imposing presence and clearly relishes playing up his character’s nastier tendencies. Kurgan loves being an evil Immortal, plain and simple. Brown has a wonderfully gravelly voice, which he uses to full effect when he openly taunts MacLeod every chance he gets. Actors love playing bad guys in films because it allows them to cut loose and play colorful characters chock full of bad behavior. You can tell that Brown is having a blast with the role as evident in the way Kurgan gleefully torments Brenda after kidnapping her and driving into oncoming traffic just to scare her. To add insult to injury, he even mocks her terrified reaction. I also like how, in the present day, Kurgan dresses up like a punk rocker, which is in sharp contrast to MacLeod’s expensive suits.

Roxanne Hart plays the intrepid Brenda Wyatt who has the smarts and the tenacity to figure out who Nash is and in the process fall in love with the Immortal. For most of the film she plays a fairly proactive character until the last third when she’s reduced to a damsel in distress as MacLeod and Kurgan battle it out. The scene where Kurgan terrorizes Brenda is an interesting one in that it is where Highlander dips its toe in the horror genre as the villain takes his captive on a guided tour of New York all to the strains of Queen covering “Theme from New York, New York.” He delights in pushing her to see how much of his kamikaze driving she can take until passing out. To be fair, she is clearly out of her depth and can’t hope to compete with the likes of these beings. Hart is obviously beautiful, but there’s a down-to-earth or levelheaded quality to Brenda that grounds the character – something that seems absent from a lot of adventure/fantasy films in the 1990s and beyond.

Gregory Widen wrote the screenplay for Highlander as a class project while studying film at UCLA. It was inspired by a hitchhiking trip he made across Europe when he was 20-years-old. “I was standing in the Tower of London amid the world’s largest armory collection. And it suddenly struck me, what if I owned all this and had actually worn the armor in battle?” Based on this idea, he wrote a script that his screenwriting teacher really liked. He gave Widen a lot of encouragement and support. This gave him the confidence to send his script to various agents and it was eventually bought by producers Peter S. Davis and Bill Panzer in 1982. They were fans of adventure films and it was this element that drew them to Widen’s script. It was originally much darker in tone before being rewritten by Peter Bellwood and then Larry Ferguson, much to Widen’s chagrin: “Along the way it has gotten more black and white in the lines drawn between who is good and who is evil,” and this was done by altering the dialogue to “give the characters a different feel.” However, the producers weren’t happy with their rewrites and brought Widen back in to rewrite the rewrites!

Early on, the producers decided that the material required an unconventional approach and opted for a director that could bring a unique style to the film. They picked Russell Mulcahy after seeing his first film Razorback (1984) and a collection of his music videos. He was originally slated to direct Heavy Metal: The Movie (1981), but when no one could agree on a central storyline he moved on and read the script for Highlander: “It leapt off the page as instant visuals.”

Kurt Russell was originally cast as MacLeod and Catherine Mary Stewart as Brenda, but the former decided not to do it based on advice from his girlfriend Goldie Hawn, while the latter “suddenly became unavailable.” Christopher Lambert was cast based on his work in Greystoke and Luc Besson’s Subway (1985). He read the script and loved the idea of playing an immortal. Sean Connery received an impressive one million dollars for only seven days of shooting, which required long days in order to complete all of his scenes.

Financed by Thorn-EMI Screen Entertainment on a budget of $16 million, Highlander was shot over 70 days starting in late April 1985 with filming taking place on location in Scotland during May before returning to London in June. Principal photography ended in July after two weeks in New York City. Mulcahy was used to working very fast and shooting a lot of film. During the first week of filming some people on the production had difficulty keeping up and quit as a result. For certain sequences, he drew on other films for inspiration. For example, the swordfight between Ramirez and Kurgan was inspired by the films of Errol Flynn and the skeleton swordfight in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958).

Connery and Lambert were taught a stylized fighting style that combined samurai technique with swordsmanship styles through the centuries, including intensive fencing training. English stunt coordinator Peter Diamond claimed that the two actors did 95% of their own swordplay and stunts. The climactic battle was originally supposed to take place on the Statue of Liberty, but when it featured prominently in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (1985), they re-staged it under the famous Silvercup sign, which the producers spotted on a location scout.

Highlander did not receive very many positive notices when it was first released. In his review for The New York Times, Walter Goodman wrote, “Since none of the characters makes sense even on the movie’s own terms, Highlander keeps on exploding for almost two hours, with nothing at stake.” Gene Siskel gave it one-and-a-half stars and wrote, “Oh, how one wishes for some human moments in Highlander. If these are indeed the people who are going to save our planet, as the film suggests in quick conclusion, well, maybe it’s a good time to consider buying an acre in Montana or someplace else remote.” Leonard Maltin also gave it the same rating and wrote, “Former rock video director Mulcahy’s relentless showy camera moves may have you reaching for the Dramamine.” However, People magazine, of all periodicals, wrote, “This picture is a mesmerizing triumph of style over substance. Director Russell Mulcahy, a music video director, has turned what might have been just another wacky fantasy adventure into a moody combination of Blade Runner, The Terminator and your last really good nightmare.”

Highlander is a stylish film whose look epitomized the ‘80s music video aesthetic thanks to the flashy direction by Mulcahy who helmed some of the most iconic videos of the era, including ones for bands like Duran Duran, Spandau Ballet and The Buggles. Speaking of music, from the rousing anthem, “Princes of the Universe,” that kicks things off, the Queen songs that feature prominently in the film act almost as a Greek chorus, commenting on the action. This is particularly evident with “Who Wants to Live Forever,” a ballad that plays during the scene where MacLeod outlives his 16th century Scottish wife (Beatie Edney) and serves to underline the tragic aspect of his existence. He will outlive any woman that he becomes romantically involved with and watch them get old while he doesn’t age.

Highlander delivers on its intriguing premise with an action-packed adventure featuring a hero that is a bit of a tragic figure – doomed to live forever, always looking over his shoulder for others of his kind that are determined to kill him so that they can achieve the Prize. Widen’s screenplay wisely doesn’t try to over-explain the film’s mythology, which allows us to fill in the gaps by using our imagination – something that is not evident in the subsequent sequels.

SOURCES

Jones, Alan. “The Making of Highlander.” Cinefantastique. May 1986.

Pirani, Adam. “On Location with Highlander.” Starlog. March 1986.

Rabkin, William. “Greg Widen – The Route to Writing Highlander.” Starlog. June 1986.

Further reading: check out John Kenneth Muir's excellent look at this film over at his blog.

John Dies at the End

With a few notable exceptions, most mainstream horror films are predictable as the cinematic landscape is littered with unimaginative remakes like Evil Dead (2013) and Carrie (2013) or a seemingly endless assembly line of sequels to lucrative franchises like Paranormal Activity. As always, it’s up to independent filmmakers like Don Coscarelli to come up with unique and original horror films. His claim to fame comes from the much beloved Phantasm series of films, but in recent years his output has slowed down considerably with his last effort being Bubba Ho-Tep in 2002. So, it is great to see him resurface in 2012 with John Dies at the End, an adaptation of David Wong’s gonzo cult novel of the same name. The end result resembles a souped-up episode of Supernatural as if written in the spirit of esoteric hybrid genre films like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai (1984) and Big Trouble in Little China (1986).

The film begins with our protagonist David Wong (Chase Williamson) extolling the merits of replacing an axe and then the blade itself because, hey, that can happen when you’re trying to dispatch a zombie skinhead with a swastika tattoo on his tongue and who won’t stay dead even when his head has been chopped off. This is Dave’s dilemma. He’s a twentysomething that once saw a man’s kidney grow tentacles and free itself from the body, but, y’know, that’s another story.

Dave meets a reporter by the name of Arnie Blondestone (Paul Giamatti) and tells him a story about a crazy adventure he and his friend John Cheese (Rob Mayes) went on at three in the morning. They investigate a young woman’s claims that her boyfriend, who’s been dead for several months, is harassing her. So, Dave and John go over to her house not expecting much only to discover a freezer in the basement that’s full of meat, which proceeds to assemble itself into a large meat monster looking for its nemesis, one Dr. Albert Marconi (Clancy Brown), a popular television infomercial psychic.

Dave and John are amateur paranormal investigators who met a couple years out of high school. Dave was a jaded skeptic who met a Jamaican man known as Robert Marley (Tai Bennett) at a party. He was able to read Dave’s mind and this, understandably, rattles Dave as Rob espouses the notion that he can see into the future. These arcane insights into the universe come courtesy of a substance known as Soy Sauce, a black liquid that allows one to perceive time in non-linear fashion as well as alternate dimensions. Dave and John are eventually enlisted by Marconi to prevent a sentient organic computer known as Korrok from spreading his brand of evil across multiple dimensions.

Dave is the audience surrogate, taking us through this crazy world where he can be talking to John on the phone while his friend is dying in a nearby room (in a sly parody of a similar scene in David Lynch’s Lost Highway), or a man’s moustache can detach itself from its owner’s face and flutter around the room like a bat. In other words, some pretty crazy shit. Throughout it all, Dave tries to make sense of these other realities opened up to him thanks to the Soy Sauce. Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes are well cast as Dave and John, grounding the film with their engaging performances. Each one of them brings a different energy with the former portraying Dave as a skeptic and the latter instilling John with an infectious optimism. It is a lot of fun to see them bouncing off eccentric characters played by the likes of Angus Scrimm, Clancy Brown and Paul Giamatti.

John Dies at the End is chock full of clever and amusing dialogue, like the police detective (Glynn Turman) that doesn’t believe in other dimensions, but does believe in hell: “The grease trap of the universe … It is not just some place down there. Oh no, it’s right here with us we just can’t perceive it. It’s kinda like the country music radio station. It’s out there in the air even if you don’t tune into it.” This is just a sample of the kind of wild observations and theories that run wild throughout this film making it more than just some instant cult film for stoners to mull over between bong hits. For an indie film, John Dies at the End looks as slick and polished as any studio effort. Coscarelli’s years of experience makes this film look more expensive than it is as he effortlessly shifts from comedy to horror to science fiction in a way that is very entertaining.

John Dies at the End started as a webserial written by Jason Pargin (under the pen name David Wong) that began appearing online in 2001. He described it as a “150,000-word novel for people who consider a 140-character tweet too much.” It was eventually edited into a manuscript and published in paperback form in 2007. Filmmaker Don Coscarelli discovered the book via Amazon.com’s “Amazon Recommends” function on their website. He read Pargin’s book, loved it, tracked down the author and bought the film rights. One of the things that drew Coscarelli to David Wong’s novel was that underneath the comedy and horror was “some philosophical thoughts running throughout that are quite captivating.” It tapped into his interest in multiple dimensions: “When I read these ideas from great sci-fi authors about inter-dimensional travel and then from the great scientists about multiple membrane universes layered on top of one another, I just find it compelling … when I can work those kinds of themes into a wacky horror film, all the better.”

Actor Paul Giamatti was a fan of Coscarelli’s films starting with Phantasm (1979) back when his brother snuck him in to see it as a kid. While in Prague filming The Illusionist (2006), he met director Eli Roth who was there making Hostel (2005). They talked about Giamatti filming a cameo, but it didn’t pan out and the actor told Roth how much of a fan he was of Coscarelli and how he would like to work with him. Roth knew Coscarelli and introduced the two men. They planned to work together on a sequel to Bubba Ho-Tep. However, they couldn’t get financing for it and moved on to John Dies at the End. Coscarelli and Giamatti approached several major Hollywood studios for financing, but none of them understood the script and so they realized that independent backing was the way to go. Due to the film’s limited budget, Coscarelli cast two unknown actors as the leads. Both Chase Williamson and Rob Mayes had never acted in a feature film before, which was a bit of a risky gamble for Coscarelli, but he surrounded them with veteran actors like Clancy Brown and Giamatti. Williamson was a student in the University of Southern California’s drama department and on his first day of filming he had to do eight pages of dialogue with Giamatti!

John Dies at the End received mixed reviews from mainstream critics. In his review for The New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote, “It has the loose, goofy feel of a project that a bunch of college students (or dropouts, in Dave’s case) might dream up during a long weekend of beer and bong hits. And yet at the same time it looks like a real movie – artfully shot, cleanly edited and very much in control of the laughs and scares that arise from its insanely convoluted set of premises.” The Village Voice’s Nick Pinkerton wrote, “The loquacity and temporally shuffled narrative is off-the-rack Tarantino; the bizarre mind-benders, ‘Lynchian’; the horror-comic asides combining the mundane and the fantastic, ‘Raimi-esque’; the grab bag borrowing of avant-garde techniques, straight up Natural Born Killers.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Robert Abele wrote, “Flaked with offbeat witticisms, cheese ball effects and fanboy splatter gore, the surreal John Dies at the End has the vibe of a shaggy dog story, which works both for and against it.” Finally, Rolling Stone magazine gave it two-and-a-half out of four stars and Peter Travers wrote, “Go for the freaky fun of it, though a little soy sauce on the side sure wouldn’t hurt.”

John Dies at the End is one of those films that you either dive in and go on the ride with, trusting that Coscarelli knows what he’s doing, or resist and give up – it’s a cinematic litmus test for one’s ability to deal with a lot of weirdness being thrown at you. It’s sink or swim time as the film doesn’t wait for you try and catch up. He’s always had a kinship for offbeat subject matter, be it a funeral home with a portal to another dimension in Phantasm or Elvis Presley teaming up with an elderly African American man who thinks he’s John F. Kennedy to stop an evil monster in Bubba Ho-Tep. John Dies at the End certainly fits comfortably in his wheelhouse as it refuses simple summarization, piling on one bizarro encounter after another. There’s a wonderful unpredictable energy to this film that is refreshing and makes all the soulless remakes and sequels look safe and tired by comparison.

SOURCES

Collis, Clark. “Paul Giamatti and Director Don Coscarelli Talk About Their Demented Horror-Comedy.” Entertainment Weekly. January 22, 2013.

Gencarelli, Mike. “Don Coscarelli Talks about John Dies at the End and Bubba Ho-Tep and Phantasm Sequels.” Media Mikes. April 9, 2013.

Labrecque, Jeff. “Sundance: Bubba Ho-Tep Director Back with a Vengeance.” Entertainment Weekly. January 24, 2012.

McIntyre, Gina. “John Dies at the End: Paul Giamatti, Don Coscarelli on Cult Cinema.” Los Angeles Times. January 22, 2013.

Pace, Dave. “Q+A: Don Coscarelli on John Dies and Independent Filmmaking for 30+ Years.” Fangoria. April 11, 2013.

Walton, Brian. “John Dies at the End’s Paul Giamatti and Don Coscarelli.” Nerdist. January 15, 2013.

Extreme Prejudice

Film director Walter Hill has had, at times, a frustratingly and wildly uneven career that features stone cold classics (The Warriors) alongside baffling misfires (Crossroads). His main stock and trade is old school tough guy action films and they don’t come anymore badass than the criminally underrated Extreme Prejudice (1987). Based on a story co-written by John Milius (Apocalypse Now) and starring Nick Nolte and Powers Boothe, it was Hill’s two-fisted homage to the films of Sam Peckinpah who he had worked for early on his career as the screenwriter for The Getaway (1972). Like many of Hill’s own action films, Extreme Prejudice is a modern western featuring two uncompromising men at odds with one another.

Six mysterious men show up in El Paso, Texas. Officially listed as dead by the United States government, they are part of an elite top-secret military unit led by the no-nonsense Paul Hackett (Michael Ironside), a D.E.A. agent. We soon meet Texas Ranger Jack Benteen (Nick Nolte), a lawman with the cojones to go into a crowded Mexican bar with a loaded rifle looking for a suspect only to coolly gun him down when the guy pulls a pistol. He teams up with local county sheriff Hank Pearson (Rip Torn), the man who taught him how to be a lawman. It turns out that the suspect was a “poor dirt farmer” running dope for Cash Bailey (Powers Boothe) in order to make ends meet. Cash is the local drug kingpin and a man so tough he lets a scorpion crawl along his hand before crushing it. He and Jack were best friends in high school but now they are on opposite sides of the law. Unbeknownst to Jack, Hackett and his men are intent on busting Cash as well.

Nick Nolte plays one of Hill’s trademark laconic men of action and of few words, like the enigmatic getaway driver in The Driver (1978), Swan in The Warriors (1979) and Tom Cody in Streets of Fire (1984). Jack and Cash are throwbacks to a bygone era. 100 years ago they’d have been gunslingers in the Wild West. Nolte has got the steely determination thing down cold and an innate understanding of Hill’s worldview, embodying it with ease. Like many of the director’s protagonists, Jack doesn’t like to talk about his feelings, not even to his long-suffering girlfriend (Maria Conchita Alonso). He’d rather do something than talk about it. It’s great to see him reunited with Hill after their initial collaboration on 48 Hrs. (1982). In an ideal world, they would be making all kinds of films together with Nolte the De Niro to Hill’s Scorsese, both bringing out the best in each other.

For the role of Jack, Hill wanted someone who was “representative of the tradition of the American West – taciturn, stoical, enduring,” and had Nolte watch a lot of films starring Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott and John Wayne. Nolte wanted to recapture “the demeanor of how those ‘40s characters carried themselves – how they dressed and carried their guns.” In order to play a credible Texas Ranger, the actor asked writer friend Peter Gent (North Dallas Forty) to recommend someone to act as a model for his character. Gent suggested real-life Ranger Joaquin Jackson. He and Nolte went over the screenplay and incorporated more of the type of language Rangers use and their relationship with other law enforcement agencies.

In a precursor to his grinning baddie in Tombstone (1993), Powers Boothe plays a genial antagonist in Extreme Prejudice while also sporting a dapper white suit. Cash sees the drug trade as simply giving the people what they want. Early on, Boothe has a nice scene with Nolte where their two characters meet and Jack warns Cash that if he crosses the border into the U.S. he will bust him and his operation. Unfazed and as cool as they come, Cash says to his old friend, “I got a feeling the next time we run into each other we’re gonna have a killing. Just a feeling.” Think of this scene as the pulpy precursor to the legendary diner scene in Heat (1995) between Robert De Niro and Al Pacino only with two legendary character actors instead. The message in both scenes is the same: the next time Cash and Jack meet, one of them is not going to survive the encounter. For any fan of these two actors, this scene (and their final one at the end of the film) is a lot of fun to watch as these forces of nature square off against each other with Cash being gregarious yet still threatening and Jack all stoic determination. With his portrayal, Boothe has said that he wanted Cash to be “multi-faceted, a fully-rounded human being.” I don’t know if he achieves that exactly, but Cash is certainly more than a mere stock villainous character.

The cast of Extreme Prejudice is populated with an embarrassment of character acting riches. William Forsythe (The Devil’s Rejects) plays a grinning good ol’ boy troublemaker; Michael Ironside (Scanners) is the all-business leader of a group of soldiers; Clancy Brown (Highlander) is one of his reliable henchmen; and Rip Torn plays Jack’s mentor who recognizes what Cash represents: “How it comes around. Right way’s the hardest. Wrong way’s the easiest. Rule of nature, like water seeks the path of least resistance so you get crooked rivers and crooked men.” Well said, sir!

Hill not only indulges in his Peckinpah admiration with some of the film’s themes but more explicitly in how he stages and edits the exciting action sequences complete with slow motion carnage that culminates in the climactic bloodbath between Jack, Hackett and his men and Cash and his private army that evokes the penultimate showdown in The Wild Bunch (1969). This is also evident Hill’s storytelling method as Extreme Prejudice is trimmed of any unnecessary narrative fat. Every scene services the story with refreshing efficiency by someone who knows how to tell a story and tell it well.

At the time, Extreme Prejudice was viewed as Hill’s take on the drug wars and the U.S. government’s handling of it with Jack as his mouthpiece when he tells Hackett at one point, “Bunch of bureaucratic fat asses fluffing their duff. They been sitting on my request for drug information for over a year but it’s classified. They’re afraid somebody or some country’s gonna get their feelings hurt.” Hill clearly sees the government as an impediment rather than a resource to men like Jack who are fighting the war in the trenches, dealing with it on a daily basis. The director said in an interview that he saw the film as a critique of “machismo politics” and of “American military involvement beyond our borders, beyond constitutional means.”

Extreme Prejudice is highly critical of the drug wars but refuses to be preachy about it as is the tendency of films like Traffic (2000). Hill is more interested in depicting the struggles of foot soldiers like Jack and how it affects him personally. It also suggests that the government regards people like Hackett and his men as “just numbers on a bureaucratic desk,” as one character puts it. Jack and Cash are above all that because they don’t care about the system. They work within it when they have to but have their own personal code of honor, which they follow. This highly critical viewpoint may explain why it took 10 years for the film to get made, going through several studios and directors because of its “political ramifications” as Boothe said in an interview.

Extreme Prejudice received a perfunctory theatrical release and was not a commercial success. It received mostly positive reviews from critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “What makes the film good are Hill’s style and the acting.” In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “If Mr. Hill, whose best films have a genuinely hard-boiled glamour, never intends this as parody, neither is he ever more than a hair away.” The Chicago Tribune’s Dave Kehr wrote, “If characters are caught in a shrinking world that leaves no room for notions as grand as ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ but only a sordid, creeping malignancy that levels everything in its path.” In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote, “Sensational rather than serious, it is an exploitation picture but one with class: it has style, a point to make that happens to be highly topical and, thankfully, a dry, saving sense of humor.” However, the Washington Post’s Richard Harrington felt that “there are simply too many problems, starting with Hill’s clumsy exposition and clumsier development.” Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen was also critical of “Hill’s calcified, comic-book notion of movie machismo.” Extreme Prejudice has largely been forgotten, even by fans of Hill’s films, but deserves to be rediscovered and recognized as one of his very best efforts.

NOTE: This post was inspired by Sean Gill's own highly entertaining review over at his blog.

SOURCES

Lovell, Glenn. “Nick Nolte Far From Down, Out.” Orlando Sentinel. April 29, 1987.

“Names in the News.” Associated Press. April 25, 1987.

Scott, Vernon. “The Rev. Jim Jones Haunts Actor.” United Press International. May 27, 1987.