Road House (1989) - by J. Molotov

I once read a description of Road House by Chuck Klosterman in which he said, “outside the genre of sci-fi, I can’t think of any film less plausible than Road House.” He did not intend that as a negative statement. It was, in fact, his rationale for loving the movie. It was also the reason I wanted to see it.

There are thousands of campy, insane, stupid movies out there. A large percentage of those are from the 1980s. Most of them don’t achieve anything other than being campy and insane. The plot elements are commonly about as arbitrary and nonsensical as those in Road House: Patrick Swayze is Dalton, a bouncer with a PhD in philosophy who is lured away from his big-city bouncing gig to a town in Missouri for the purpose of taming a bar that is so completely out of hand that the house band (led by blind Canadian guitarist Jeff Healy) has to play behind a cage. When Swayze stands up to the man who controls the town (and whose girl he has become involved with), the violence escalates to catastrophic proportions. 

What makes this film rise above the others is the surprising and preposterous level to which the violence escalates. When Dalton comes to town, the bar is constantly the scene of fairly intense brawls and corruption in the form of selling drugs and liquor under the table. His methods for cleaning it up are to fire the most egregious offenders among the current bouncers and to instill in those remaining the philosophy of “being nice until it’s time to not be nice.” That time is stipulated by Dalton. Very quickly, the bar becomes a desirable hangout with efficient crowd control, no cage around the band, and a velvet rope at the doorway. It is a success based on a modicum of control; one cool head to guide the hotheads that abound in this rural outpost.

However, there is one hothead that doesn’t appreciate Dalton’s control. He is Wesley, the man who has the whole town in his pocket. He is the ex of Dalton’s new love interest, Dr. Elizabeth Clay. Threatened by the newcomer, Wesley attempts to bring Dalton under his control by offering him employment. Since Wesley is clearly the “bad guy”, whose henchmen Dalton has already been roughed-up by, the morally superior Dalton refuses. In the ensuing confrontation, Wesley begins a calculated assault on all of Dalton’s friends in town, burning down people’s businesses and blowing up their houses, in addition to cutting off the liquor supply to the bar. The repeated attacks make Dalton lose his hard-won control, until finally he forgets his cool head, reverts back past all of his philosophical training into the slavering, raging, cornered beast he once was and reveals the act that has haunted him all these years. In a fight with one of Wesley’s meanest henchmen, Dalton becomes the embodiment of many vicious predators rolled into one. He chases the motorcycle-riding man on foot and pounces on him from higher ground, and like a puma he rolls him off the motorcycle to the ground. In the struggle, he reverts back to his shameful past and he tears the man’s throat out with his bare hands. He then drags his lifeless body through the creek like an alligator with the carcass of a wildebeast, finally abandoning it and letting it drift with the current. 

And this is before the murder of Dalton’s friend and mentor, the best cooler the world has ever seen, Wade Garrett. He came to this shithole town to help Dalton tame it, he danced with the Doc, sweeping her off her feet and into his protégé’s arms, only to end up killed. That is my personal worst moment of the film, since the ever-charming Sam Elliott’s sexiness level is at an all-time high in this movie and seeing him curled up, stabbed on the bar, his beautiful, long, gunmetal grey hair over his bemused but lifeless face is too much for me to handle. Because why put in the hotness just to take it away? Anyway, as you can probably guess this also makes Dalton go apeshit. 

His best friend dead, his girlfriend disgusted by his savage ways, and the town a complete terror zone, Dalton knows he must continue to fight Wesley to the death. But in the moment when he has him pinned, his coolness returns. Mustering all of his control, Dalton turns away from Wesley, giving him the chance to attack. Fortunately, the fed up townspeople kill him anyway. But the victory for Dalton is won over himself; once again he has regained control of the beast that lives just beneath his skin. Now it is time to be nice again.