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| Courtney Love in Straight to Hell |
Cast: Dick Rude, Sy Richardson, Courtney Love, Joe Strummer, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, Sara Sugarman, Biff Yeager, Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, Terry Woods, Xander Berkeley, Kathy Burke, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Jim Jarmusch, Grace Jones, Zander Schloss. Screenplay: Dick Rude, Alex Cox. Cinematography: Tom Richmond. Production design: Andrew McAlpine. Film editing: David Martin. Music: The Pogues, Dan Wool.
About 40 years ago, a group of Very Cool People found themselves with time on their hands, so they gathered some of their Very Cool Friends and went to the place in Spain where a lot of spaghetti Westerns were made and made one of their own. The story of Alex Cox's Straight to Hell is negligible because nobody took it seriously: Four bank robbers stash the loot in the desert and hole up in a ghost town that suddenly comes alive with a variety of residents, and then everybody pretty much kills everybody else. It's scarcely even a parody of the spaghetti Western. Nobody much liked it at the time. Roger Ebert called it "an indulgent mess" and it bombed at the box office. But it survived as a cult film, and in 2010 it got a "director's cut" version. It's still an indulgent mess, but a few comic moments survive the mayhem, and there is occasionally some funny dialogue: "A gun is like a tool. Ain't no better or no worse than the man that uses it." "Just like shoes."
