Seeing as this movie is 25 years old I decided today would be a great day to review it. When I was a kid, I was pretty much allowed to watch any VHS tapes I wanted. The first film I remember seeing was in fact the first Terminator when I was a young infant. However there was one movie that I was not allowed to watch when I was 10 though and that movie was Road House. I think my mother caught 5 minutes of it once and decided that this one was barred from my house.
I never really understood the call to be quite honest (considering the other really fucked up shit I was allowed to watch) but it never stopped me watching it anyway.
Being 10 years old and watching this movie will always bring back great memories as I had never really been immersed in such a sleazy world via my video cassette player before. Yeah I had seen sex and violence before on TV but nothing this hot and nothing this cool or this stylish. Not to mention a killer sound track and people having glorified Royal Rumble contests in dive bars.
Oh yes it's time for Road House!
So the movie starts out at this hip 80's night club which has hot women and a band playing. There's a bouncer who works there called Dalton (played by Patrick Swayze) who is like the Chuck Norris of bouncers. If you don't behave he will rip your throat out and fuck you up. In reality it's just Patrick Swayze with a mullet and this time he knows some karate.
A nightclub owner (who I forgets name and real name) comes in and poaches Dalton for $500 a night to clean up some shit hole bar he's opened up in the sticks. Dalton agrees and ends up working in the worst pub this side of Debden!
The universe this movie is set in is one of sleaze, violence and pure fun. I don't know if this movie is meant to be serious or not but if you go in with a serious head it may disappoint you.. severely!
However if you like naked bitches, foul language, explosions, helicopters, monster trucks, kick ass fight scenes and more broken glass than a named pedophiles front porch than this movie may be the one for you.
So anyway, Dalton starts working at the Double Deuce and its the most horrible bar in America. The punters are all red neck power drinkers/sluts and the staff are 10 times worse. Dalton has a bit of a shakedown and sacks almost everyone interesting and leaves the really rubbish characters with their jobs intact.
This upsets Brad Wesley who is a local man who likes bullying everyone and scaring horses with his big old chopper (I mean his helicopter). Wesley (played by Ben Gazzara) is essentially Daltons neighbor as Dalton lives in an old barn and Wesley has a massive house which is next door but separated by a lake. Over the next few hours these 2 engage in some real neighborly rivalry in which they stare longingly at each other quite a bit over the lake.
Things start to escalate when Wesley keeps sending his henchmen in to cause trouble at the bar by causing all kinds of fights. Each time Dalton beats everyone up which annoys Wesley painfully. He cuts off the booze supply to the night club and sends the boys in again to beat up Dalton.
Enter Wade Garrett (played by Sam Neil) who is Dalton's mentor and the number one guy in the business. With his help he and Dalton clean the place up and kick a lot of ass.
Its around this point of the film that Dalton's love interest arrives played by Kelly Lynch. Together these 2 engage in with one of the most flat movie romances of all time which starts from her being repulsed by his medical records while stitching him up.. oh yeah she's a doctor as well and as it turns out Brad Wesleys ex wife. Small world.
Without giving out any plot spoilers the rest of the movie is about Dalton finishing off Wesley and his crew and saving the town. Road House is essentially a contemporary cowboy film made in 1989. It has all the ingredients and formulas of a John Wayne or Clint Eastwood movie when you think about it. The movie is about a stranger riding into a new town to rid it of the persecution from a band of outlaws.
Road House has some pretty awesome fight scenes both in and out of the bar environment. There are plenty of mass brawls in bars and the fights in the climax are pretty cool to. There are also some great one liners in the movie and one which really stays with me is "I used to fuck guys like you in prison!" during one of the climax fights which is comedy gold.
The way the violence escalates in this one is quite dramatic to say the least. It's hard to believe a movie about a bouncer cleaning up a shit hole pub would include scenes with helicopters scaring horses, monster trucks running over cars, exploding Mercedes cars and loads of explosions in general. A big part of me thinks that a lot of this was to use up the budget but this is a movie involving Joel Silver so fuck knows.
Another really funny thing I noticed in this movie was the fact that Dalton's girlfriend is absolutely repulsed by violence but doesn't mind going skinny dipping in a lake after watching Patrick Swazye kill someone and throw them in there. I am not nit picking but it's hard enough to get a girl to go skinny dipping as it is without taking her to a lake which has had a dead body floating around in it the past few days. Another thing about this movie is there are no cops just bouncers. The police turn up at the end but are very useless and are satisfied with the worst murder explanation in movie history!
Another really cool aspect of Road House is the soundtrack. The tunes were provided by the amazing blind blues artist Jeff Healey who played himself in the movie but went under another name like Cody or something. His performance and the music he brings to the table really add to the magic of this one.
The final verdict on Road House is a good one from me. Don't get me wrong it's not the greatest movie ever but its sure as hell not a bad one either. It's just a cool cheesy action movie from the twilight of the 1980's about Patrick Swayze having bar fights. This is a proper lad film and there are parts girls would like as well as they played it safe by casting the guy from Dirty Dancing and they even put in a crappy romance angle which even involves a scene of slow dancing.
So if you wanna watch something fun I highly recommend this movie.
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