Straight to Hell
This week we’re presenting Straight to Hell (1987) on Thursday, July 24th at 8pm.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 7:50 and we’re starting the film at 8:10!
We’ve been in the midst of a secret July miniseries here at the From Below of Punk Films, with Hail the New Puritan as a punk dance film and now Straight to Hell as a punk western (and keep an eye out for a punk coming-of-age film in Time Square next week!)
In some ways, Straight to Hell sells itself. It’s director Alex Cox, following up his massively beloved breakthroughs Repo Man and Sid and Nancy with a neo-Spaghetti Western starring a who’s who of punk and alternative icons: not only Joe Strummer and Courtney Love in starring roles, but also Elvis Costello, The Pogues, Grace Jones, Dennis Hopper, and Jim Jarmusch making appearances, alongside Cox’s regular retinue of character actors and collaborators such as the incredibly named Dick Rude (cowriting the film as well), Sy Richardson, Xander Berkeley and Zander Schloss (two X/Zanders for the price of one!). It’s a phenomenal summer hangout movie inside and out: hallucinatory, sweaty, improvisatory, made on the fly as the result of a cancelled tour by Costello, Strummer, and The Pogues. The story is wilder than you’d expect: Alex Cox had a plan to take those three acts on a tour of Nicaragua in order to raise money for the Sandinistas. You may understand why he, uh, couldn’t necessarily secure funding for that plan.
So instead, Rude and Cox wrote Straight to Hell in three days, and got all of the musicians to the south of Spain to film on a pre-existing western set, allegedly created for a Charles Bronson-starring film called Chino that had been constructed slightly smaller than standard buildings to fit the diminutive action star. That is just one detail that lends Straight to Hell its otherworldly, dreamlike energy. In terms of the story (let alone the genre reappropriation), the film starts out as a proto-Tarantino-esque yarn of a bunch of besuited bank robbers on the run, hiding their money in a hole in a desert before wandering into a wild west town run by an Irish gang obsessed with making the best cup of coffee. From there the movie swerves from Reservoir Dogs to something much more befitting of someone like Jim Jarmusch, conversational and uncanny. It’s only fitting that the man himself makes an appearance!
Straight to Hell is one of those love-it-or-hate-it propositions, you’ll either be on this movie’s weirdo groove or not. I, for one, love it and can’t wait to spend a hot summer night in the From Below sharing it with y’all. Perhaps I’ll prepare a refreshing coffee cocktail punch to enjoy alongside our on-screen cowpunks?
Caffeinated and Perspiry,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark