STRAIGHT TO HELL
A film review by Steve Fritzinger
Copyright 1987 Steve Fritzinger
In STRAIGHT TO HELL, three inept hitmen/bankrobbers and their moll spend four days hiding out south of the border. Which border is never really clear, but they have defiantly crossed into a weird place. On the lam in a town run by Irish bandits, they drink a lot of coffee, beat up a hot dog vendor, and spend a lot of time talking about, but never actually having, sex.
Alex Cox's spoof captures much of what makes a great spaghetti western. Ugly tough men sit in a run-down Mexican town and exchange enigmatic dialogue, meaningful looks, and gun-fire, oppressed villagers hope for salvation, show fighting spirit, and die, etc. But mostly Cox unintentionally shows that the spaghetti westerns were a pointless indulgence in a genre that the director didn't really understand. The result is a rambling mish-mash that is entertaining as often as it is boring, and ultimately ends without ever having gone anywhere.
Cox recaptures the strangeness that made his earlier film, REPOMAN, a cult classic, but doesn't provide a story to carry the film. There is really no reason for any of the actions of any of the characters, and that is the downfall of STRAIGHT TO HELL. It proves that watching even the strangest antics can be boring if after twenty minutes nothing else happens.
Steve Fritzinger CCI-OSD Reston VA.
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