The Medusa Fora

Damn damn hell piss and blood. It's not coming anywhere near me. Well, I'll be in line for the DVD then.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/ne ... 9562.story


Jennifer Balgobin, left, Sue Kiel, Cait O’Riordan and Kathy Burke play the gun-toting women of Blanco Town in "Straight to Hell." (UCLA Film & Television Archive, UCLA Film & Television Archive )

By Mark Olsen, Special to the Los Angeles Times

November 15, 2010


There was a time in the mid-1980s when filmmaker Alex Cox would have been considered on par with such contemporaries as Jim Jarmusch, Gus Van Sant and David Lynch at the forefront of the ascendant notion of "independent film." Coming off the critical successes of "Repo Man" and "Sid and Nancy," Cox stood to bring a punk-inflected sensibility of subversive smarts to a broader audience.

Then he made the one-two punch of "Straight to Hell" and "Walker," both released in 1987, two unapologetically political, inside-out genre pastiches. "Straight to Hell," in particular, was a flaky, sweat-stained take on spaghetti westerns, hitman pictures and corporate intrigue that featured a catch-all cast of actors, friends and rock 'n' rollers.

"My career in features, I started out working for Universal and I ended up working for Roger Corman," said the English-born Cox, 55, during a recent phone call from his home in Ashland, Ore. "It's supposed to go the other way."



Film screenings

A new version of "Straight to Hell," dubbed "Straight to Hell Returns" — which screens Friday at the UCLA Film and Television Archive, where Cox is scheduled to appear in person — might help the movie finally get the reappraisal it has long deserved. This new cut is 41/2 minutes longer, with a few deleted scenes added back in — including a hilarious bit with a bound Elvis Costello being slapped silly by a roomful of women — some newly created animation and insert shots, a new sound mix and a digitally revised color scheme overseen by the film's original cinematographer, Tom Richmond.

Also screening over the weekend is 1986's "Sid and Nancy," which turned the doomed tale of Sex Pistols bass player Sid Vicious and his girlfriend Nancy Spungen (played with incendiary power by Gary Oldman and Chloe Webb) into something of a tragic romance, and "Highway Patrolman," Cox's Spanish-language 1991 story of a Mexican cop.

Shannon Kelley, head of public programming at the UCLA archive, noted that not only is Cox a graduate of UCLA's film program but also that the original elements used for "Straight to Hell Returns" were discovered at the school's archive.

"It's a nice chance to first of all salute a career like Alex Cox's and the conviction behind it," said Kelly, "but also to remind ourselves that it was fostered at this institution."

Shot in Almería, Spain, on locations actually used for classic spaghetti westerns, the film features the Clash's Joe Strummer, Costello, members of the Pogues and a young, chubby-cheeked Courtney Love as an odd assortment of killers, bandits and sidekicks. It's dotted with faces that have gone on to be familiar character actors, including Xander Berkeley, Miguel Sandoval and Sy Richardson, and there are cameos by Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones and Jim Jarmusch. British actress Kathy Burke and future director Sara Sugarman can also be seen in small roles.

Producer Eric Fellner has gone on to be part of the successful production company Working Title Films.

"It's densed up over the years," Cox noted of how the film arguably plays better today than when it was originally released. "Partially, there's a nostalgia aspect to it because some of the people who were in it aren't around anymore. I also think it's gotten better, with all the weird stuff we've just done to the film. Some films you can improve and other films — you couldn't really go and do a 'Citizen Kane' redux, that wouldn't make it any better."

Offbeat origins

The new version had its debut in San Francisco on Halloween and is making a small theatrical rollout at festivals and art houses across the country before being released on DVD in December.

The original "Straight to Hell" sprang from origins as offbeat as the story it tells. When Cox couldn't fund his initial plan of taking Costello, Strummer and the Pogues on a rock 'n' roll tour of war-torn Nicaragua in support of the Sandinista rebels — "Big media corporations do not support revolutionary movements in the Third World," noted Cox — he decided to shoot a feature film in the same period of time the musicians already had blocked off.

A script was quickly prepared, everyone decamped to Spain, and the film was shot in four weeks.

The response to the movie on its initial release in summer 1987 — with a local premiere at a Burbank drive-in — was largely one of derision and dismissal. "It's going straight to nowhere," proclaimed Variety, while the New York Times called it "a mildly engrossing, instantly forgettable midnight movie."

'Badge of honor'

Dick Rude, cowriter and costar of the film, specifically remembers that when "Straight to Hell" made a list of the worst films of the year in the Los Angeles Times, "I was so proud. It was such a badge of honor to me. That meant I succeeded in making people feel something. And it served as a paradigm for years after that when people would write about other films — 'this is almost as bad as 'Straight to Hell.'"

Since "Straight to Hell" and the follow-up film "Walker" — a historical story in Nicaragua filled with purposeful anachronisms — Cox has remained extremely prolific, though off the radar of the Hollywood industry. He hosted the British television show "Moviedrome" for seven years and has continued to make features such as "Death and the Compass," "Three Businessmen," "Revengers Tragedy" and "Searchers 2.0."

Cox is heartened that "Straight to Hell Returns" could receive some retroactive appreciation.

"It's a bizarre fusion of its time and right now," said Cox. "It has become the film that it should have been."

calendar@latimes.com

Today's Guardian film blog by Danny Leigh:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/filmblog ... l-alex-cox

Punks, guns and coffee: why Straight to Hell gives me a thirst for the past
Alex Cox's 1987 spaghetti western homage was loathed on release, but its reissue is a reminder of a bygone counterculture

Nostalgia is a feeling I try to avoid. Even so, I couldn't help a pang while re-acquainting myself with Straight to Hell – director Alex Cox's berserk homage to Sergio Leone made back in distant 1987, a tribute to the spaghetti western so grubby it had blood and pasta sauce down its shirt, which is now the recipient of a polished-up DVD reissue complete with once-deleted scenes restored. It's no one's idea of a lost masterpiece; it's far from its creator's best work; and yet it's still in some small, strange way a landmark.

That said, I think we can be confident there will have been little thought while the film was being made that it would be the subject of critical pondering 23 years later. While occasionally hugely enjoyable, the whole thing is the definition of throwaway, and the plot's portrait of a trio of bank robbers taking refuge in a dusty ghost town is the flimsiest of pretexts for a series of deadpan riffs on guns, caffeine and sexual jealousy. But plot was never the selling point here – that was the then all-conquering Cox, and the cast he assembled in Leone's old Spanish stomping ground of Almería. From his deathless debut Repo Man came the jittery Dick Rude and laconic Sy Richardson, joined by the comebacking Dennis Hopper, a young Courtney Love, and a ragbag of rock stars including Elvis Costello, Shane MacGowan and, in the lead, Joe Strummer.

Written in three days, shot in three weeks and widely loathed on release, the film now reveals what might best be described as a wilful sloppiness. But it's hard not to be charmed by the freewheeling energy and genuine oddball sensibility (for all the bloodshed, the closest thing to foul language is an invitation to "go boil yer 'ead"), while Strummer in particular is unexpectedly great. The result is, if nothing else, an interesting halfway house between the sardonic glee of Repo Man and the Central American odysseys of Walker and Highway Patrolman, three films that provide the bulk of their director's finest moments.

Yet the really striking thing about re-encountering this parched romp in the bitter final weeks of 2010 is the gulf between today and the era from which it sprang – watching it now, it feels as distant as a silent movie. Part of that is probably down to the period being the all-but-forgotten high watermark of Cox's career, his success with 1986's Sid and Nancy meaning he could casually wave away job offers from Hollywood – this time missing the chance to direct Steve Martin in Three Amigos, disappear into the desert to piss about with his friends and have the results released into cinemas worldwide.

But still more anachronistic might be the film's sense of being part of what was, however quaint it sounds, a true counterculture, influenced by and bound up with punk rock. It was a mood expressed in, for instance, the edgiest stretch of Martin Scorsese's career (notably The King of Comedy with its cameo for Strummer and the rest of The Clash and After Hours with its Bad Brains interlude), and the green shoots of an independent-minded new school that included Cox alongside the likes of Jim Jarmusch, Spike Lee and the Coen brothers, still then spiky weirdos rather than literary adapters and remakers for hire.

And if the circumstances of the film being made owed much to such a quintessentially 80s cause as declaring solidarity with the Sandinistas, then it also came out of Cox embracing the role of film-maker as someone who simply hustles up a tiny budget, packs his camera and heads off into the unknown. I know that his funding occasionally came from Universal Studios – but I still can't think of many directors who more deserved the title of guerrilla film-maker, making only the movies he wanted to make on only the terms he felt comfortable with. Whereas now, in some quarters, that phrase has simply come to mean making hugely commercial projects on the cheap – not so terrible an ambition, but not quite the same thing in polarised times like these, when the prime minister's chipper brief for British directors is to help promote UK tourism. Like I say, it's not good to give in to nostalgia. Sometimes, though, it's unavoidable ...

The film has returned.
"......All to be in theaters again in October and November 2010, and on DVD and download on December 14. This - along with Microcinema's release of SEARCHERS 2.0 - must be the perfect stocking-filler. Oh! And did I mention all the digital violence by Collateral Image, and the dolly tracks, and the new shot of George's shoes?......"

[img]http://www.alexcox.com/images/STHR_screening_Westwood_000.jpg
http://www.alexcox.com/dir_straighttohell.htm[/img]
http://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=news&cd=1&ved=0CCoQqQIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.indiewire.com%2Farticle%2F2011%2F03%2F04%2Falex_cox_straight_to_hell_returns_opens_the_door_to_the_wretched_party&ei=xqGPTZGlFonfsgaD-fjSAw&usg=AFQjCNFOS3o1Sska-q-JtbtUD4rmcvuQCg

http://www.nypress.com/blog-8378-straig ... x-cox.html

"...New York Press: Tell me about the Straight To Hell Returns. How close is the relationship to Straight To Hell?
Alex Cox: It’s really the same film. It contains additional scenes which weren’t in the original version, because we cut them in the eleventh hour. It has a completely different visual aspect, because the cameraman, Tom Richmond, re-toned the picture, gave it this completely different color cast. It has a new soundtrack, because everything of course has to be 5.1 stereo and the original soundtrack was mono. And it has additional violence, bloodshed, flies and skeletons, all of which were either done digitally or as stop-motion motion animation (you know, like when they move the little puppets one frame at a time)........."

Was the above Returns DVD [not the music cd] ever realeased in region 2 (Eire ,UK, Europe,etc ) format.
Or was it just a USA Region 1 encoding (requires a North American or multi-region DVD player and NTSC compatible TV. )

Have seen the original film Straight To Hell and have video and dvd copies but have never see the revisted "Straight To Hell Returns".The one with extra scenes etc.

Now Showing
http://projectionbooth.moonfruit.com
http://www.nowtoronto.com/movies/repcinema.cfm

The Projection Booth

1035 gerrard e. 416-466-3636, projectionbooth.ca

Thu 27 - City Of Life And Death (2009) D: Lu Chuan. 9 pm.
Fri 28 - Straight To Hell Returns (2010) D: Alex Cox. 6:30 pm. Grinderhouse Halloween Party including screenings: Bong Of The Dead (2011) D: Thomas Newman. 8:30 pm. The Millennium Bug (2011) D: Kenneth Cran. 10:30 pm.
Sat 29 - Cartoons. 10 am. Bong Of The Dead. 5 pm. Straight To Hell Returns. 7 pm. Autumn (2011) D: Steven Rumbelow. 9 pm.
sun 30 - Cartoons. 10 am. The Millennium Bug. 5 pm. Straight To Hell Returns. 7 pm. Bong Of The Dead. 9 pm.
mon 31 - Carry On Screaming! (1966) D: Gerald Thomas. 7 pm. Straight To Hell Returns. 9 pm.
Tue 1 - The Millennium Bug. 7 pm. Straight To Hell Returns. 9 pm.
Wed 2 - Son Of The Sunshine (2009) D: Ryan Ward. Discussion with director to follow screening. 9 pm.
http://www.nowtoronto.com/movies/repcinema.cfm
http://www.nowtoronto.com/movies/story. ... ent=183397

http://press-street.com/scumbag-cinema- ... t-to-hell/
Scumbag Cinema – Hated! & Straight to Hell
Film Screening: 9:00pm Wednesday, December 7, 2011
Location: Press Street's Antenna Gallery - 3161 Burgundy Street, New Orleans, LA 70117
.Admission FREE

ALEX COX (Repo Man, Sid and Nancy) comes to Dallas for a two-night stand. He will screen an original 35-mm print of Walker (1987, 95 mins., R) on Dec. 1 at 7:45 p.m., and he will present Highway Patrolman (1991, 104 mins., not rated) followed by a restored 35-mm print of Straight to Hell Returns (2010 director’s cut of 1987 movie, 91 mins., R) on Dec. 2 starting at 7:45 p.m. A Q&A will follow each screening at the Texas Theatre, 231 W. Jefferson Blvd. in Oak Cliff, Dallas. $7.75-$9 per film; $14-$15.50 for double feature. 214-948-1546. thetexastheatre.com.