Phil Elmore: Individual Authoring Services

Movie Corner
Road House

I have failed you.

In the course of several columns I have reviewed some good movies and some bad ones, featuring everything from zombies to Europeans. But in my foolishness I have neglected the movie from which all bad movie reviews flow, the movie for which bitter, angry movie critics live. I have neglected the movie that David Kronke described as "so insulting to its audience that it's nice to be able to turn the tables and laugh at the filmmakers," the movie that Leonard Maltin categorized as "brain-dead yahoo fare." I have ignored a film that sends children to huddle under their comforters, sobbing and calling for their mothers. I have failed to critique a movie that prompted test audience members to seal their eyes shut with a sticky paste made from malted milk balls and eight-dollar Cokes.

Ladies and gentlemen, that movie is Patrick Swayze's Road House. It is a movie so delightfully bad that the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000 wrote the carol A Patrick Swayze Christmas just because they could. At the core of this film is, of course, Patrick Swayze himself, the man who created the Meatloaf Rule.

The Meatloaf Rule

As an actor, there are certain events or actions that constitute the death knell for your career. The Hollywood Squares is one of these; while it is possible to survive a tour through the periphery of the squares, landing in the Center Square guarantees that you and Jim J. Bullock will be sitting alone at the office Christmas party, wondering why your agents don't call you. Another of these career death-rattles can be summed up as:

Whenever Meatloaf is chasing you, for any reason, your career is over.

Patrick Swayze, who in Road House was so taut and muscular that he could have bounced oxygen molecules from his abs, has followed a predictable downward career arc since making the movie. Most recently, he appeared in Black Dog, a movie that asks the question, "Do overweight truckers make compelling characters?" The answer, of course, is an emphatic "no," unless the movie is Convoy. But in Black Dog, an increasingly double-chinned Swayze struggles to make us care about his disgraced trucker character's unfortunate entanglement with large-truck-driving gun runners.

The lead villain is none other than Meatloaf, and at the film's climax he and Swayze engage in a truck chase in a desperate plea to end the film before it robs them of their souls. Too late, Swayze probably realized -- as he looked in the rearview mirror at Mr. Loaf and knew, in his heart of hearts, that his days in film were numbered.

Road House is set in a universe that is not our own, though the flimmakers obviously intended us to believe it was. In the RoadHouse-iverse, great effort is expended by members of society to make nightclubs safe from the violent depredations of a permanent underclass of nightclub-disrupting ruffians. All nightclubs, you see -- which are the only places available where one might seek entertainment or beverages, unless one enjoys drinking coffee in diners -- maintain stables of bouncers who outnumber the patrons. At the head of every stable of bouncers is someone or something called "The Cooler," a man whose responsibility it is to coordinate the bouncer army and repel constant attacks by the aforementioned ruffians.

As the film opens, we see that Patrick Swayze -- looking young and long-haired and so taut of muscle that he must have weighed about seventy pounds when the movie was made -- is just such a man, the "best damned Cooler in the business." When we first meet him, Swayze -- who plays a man named "Dalton" -- is displaying his brilliant Cooler skills at a fashionable nightclub called "The Bandstand." His brilliant strategy, which he displays for the audience, is to allow hooligans to stab him repeatedly until they grow fatigued, at which point he beats them up and throws them out of the club.

Busily sewing himself up in the club's bathroom, Dalton is confronted by a wormy little man named Tillman, who seeks to hire Dalton for Dalton's superb getting-stabbed ability. It seems Tillman has come into some money -- enough money to hire the fabulously overpaid Dalton -- and wants to clean up his own ruffian-infested nightclub, the Double Deuce.

Dalton agrees, and we are treated to a thrilling scene in which he abandons his beater car and gets his expensive Mercedes out of storage. He drives cross-country to the movie studio backlot where the Double Deuce set has been built, pretending to believe -- and hoping that we will believe -- that this club sits in the middle of a town, rather than in a field in the middle of nowhere.

The Double Deuce does indeed have its problems. Like any nightclub in the RoudHouse-iverse, it employs more bouncers than it has patrons, but these bouncers are an undisciplined, confused lot, without a Cooler to guide them. Dalton swings into action, following a carefully conceived plan that one presumes is his normal "cleaning up the nightclub" routine. He sits all the employees down and bores them with a three-hour speech consisting of his ill-conceived and poorly comprehended philosophy, punctuating his Swayzean ramblings with such gems as "It's my way or the highway," "You are the bouncers, I am the Cooler," and "I want you to be nice, until it's time to not be nice." He then fires most of the employees for a variety of pretenses, likely selecting the ones who looked most bored during his tirade.

What follows is scintillating entertainment. We get to watch as Patrick Swayze buys a car without test-driving it or asking how much it costs. As if this weren't exciting enough, he then buys tires at a local junk yard. He caps this mayhem by renting a furnished room over a barn, mostly because he likes the smell. Whether that smell is horse manure or the old man who rents the barn is unclear.

As you might expect, every town that has a nightclub that needs cleaning up ("It's the sort of place where they sweep up the eyeballs after closing," Tillman tells Dalton in one touching scene) is owned and run by an evil short man. That evil short man may be either Ben Gazzara or Anthony Zerbe; this time around, it's Gazzara, who plays the evil, rich, and short Brad Wesley. Wesley maintains a stable of thugs, mostly because he can, and his thugs are well equipped. They have guns and knives and a monster truck, and they hang out at his house, where they party all night while a contented Wesley looks on. And Wesley has his own pet slut, a bleached-blonde charmer who, when Wesley's not around, likes to visit the Double Deuce and hit on unshaven, taller men. She never wears a bra.

The rest of Road House is a testosterone-soaked Western-meets-Hollywood-Hunk vehicle. Wesley's thugs show up from time to time at the Double Deuce, trying to beat up Dalton and put the place out of business. There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of rationale for this behavior, though Wesley's rat-faced nephew was fired from his bartender job by Dalton, and this is apparently enough justification for a gang war that tears apart an entire town.

Swayze gets into lots of fights, both in the bar and out, and its obvious that he's a Martial Arts Master. He can't seem to throw a proper side kick to save his life, but apparently sloppy form hasn't stopped him from being Super Bouncer. There are a few bogged-down plots and subplots, most notably a Hot Lady Doctor who dates Patrick Swayze because he has more of his original adult teeth than anyone else in town. There's no guarantee he smells better, but the Doc has apparently accustomed herself to that.

Unfortunately for her, she must also accustom herself to Dalton's bad habits. One of these is a nagging tendency to rip people's throats out with the first three fingers of his hand. Doc and her man go on dates, and every so often Dalton rips out the waiters' throat; Dalton meets her family, and a holiday tragedy is narrowly averted by the presence of a turtleneck sweater. Okay, I may be making some of this up, but Dalton does rip out the throat of Jimmy, a young buck of a thug employed by Wesley. Jimmy's hobbies were petty theft, martial arts, and sodomy. Nobody really misses him.

Wesley perpetrates plenty of evil as the movie squeaks and rattles toward its climax like an old pickup truck bouncing over railroad tracks. At one point, Wesley's thugs use a knife to pin a note on the chest of Dalton's mentor, a grizzled old Cooler who presumably taught Dalton everything Dalton knows about alienating townspeople and ripping out people's throats. Dalton, slightly put out by the death of his homoerotic mentor, drives over to Wesley's house and kills everybody.

The movie ends on a happy note, with Dalton and the Doc kissing as they frolic in a pond. One supposes they're in the water to wash off the hundreds of thousands of gallons of stage blood that have found their way onto Swayze's person during the film's climactic battle.

I cannot stress enough, my gentle readers, that you must see this movie. You have not seen a bad movie until you have seen Road House. If Patrick Swayze ever reads this, he'll probably show up at my door some night, having flown his Cessna drunk to my place and landed in the dumpsters at the back of the apartment complex. And he'll bring his sloppy side kick and his three fingers of throat-pulling death with him.

And then it will be his way, or the highway, I guess.