Blind Justice (1994)

Some time after the US Civil War. A nearly completely blind, yet still exceptionally deadly when shooting, gunfighter named Canaan (Armand Assante) roams the borderlands between the US and Mexico, carrying two guns and a baby, looking for a town that might not exist. He promised the baby’s father, whom he killed, to get the little one to her family, apparently, though Canaan and the film will be reticent about going into further detail.

After a meet-cute with a quartet of Mexican bandits – three of whom he shoots while the last one gets to hold the baby – Canaan comes to a small town that is under sieged by the gang of Alacran (Robert Davi). Alacran is after a wagon-load of silver protected by an ever decreasing number of soldiers. Their leader, Sgt Hastings (Adam Baldwin) has repeatedly sent men out to fetch help, but not one of them has come back alive, or seems to have reached the next cavalry outpost. Hasting is too dutiful to give Alacran the gold, or simply not stupid enough to believe the sadistic maniac wouldn’t murder his little troop in any case.

Canaan is still bitter, as well as PTSD-stricken, about what happened to him in the war, so he’s not terribly interested in the soldiers’ plight. He might be willing to do some blockade running for them, for a price, of course. Cigars and milk have to be paid, after all. In truth, the gunman will have trouble with Alacran and his men in any case, for one of the three bandits he shot before coming to town was the man’s younger brother; and while Alacran – a man who mutilates his own men regularly – doesn’t have many softer human traits, brotherly love was one of them.

I can only assume that when he was writing the HBO western Blind Justice Daniel Knauf asked himself why only blind swordsmen, masseurs, boxers and vigilante lawyers have all the fun, but nobody thinks about the poor, blind shootist and then proceeded to solve this problem. As directed by Richard Spence, the resulting movie is a lot of fun.

Clearly going for the spirit of the Italian western in its goofier variations, the film does a very enjoyable job of presenting touches of wonderful weirdness like Canaan’s disgust about having come to a town that has neither smokes, nor milk, nor booze - and yes, when our hero has got a smoke, he’s huffing it in the direction of the poor kid. These elements, Spence presents with a degree of camp, but never so much as to overwhelm the more dramatic or nasty moments of the film with the horrors of irony; here, it feels more like a companionable nod at an audience to suggest that, yes, the film knows it trades in silliness and well-worn clichés, but it also genuinely wants us to simply enjoy them as they are, and actually revel in them a little.

So we get a mix of jokes good and bad, some genuinely fine and creative shoot-outs, explosions, and standard Italian and Revisionist western scenes like our hero’s crucifixion. From the latter, Canaan is at least partially saved by an elderly and somewhat crazy Native American shaman (Jimmy Herman), who is put in stark contrast to the town’s traitorous Catholic priest (Ian McElhinney), which you may or may not want to read as a political statement.

There’s also a romantic subplot between Canaan and the town nurse (Elisabeth Shue), but the less said about this horrifying combination of no chemistry and bad acting choices (what the hell does the usually perfectly competent to awesome Shue think she’s doing!?), the better. It’s not so terrible as to actually damage the film as a whole – it’s just too weird at heart for that – but it sure does little to improve it either.

In general, the acting tends to broad scenery-chewing, strange line readings and the overwrought – particularly, and to nobody’s surprise, Assante and Davi are downright incredible whenever they get going, leaving no mouth in the audience closed. This is not a complaint, of course, for this style of acting is the only fitting approach to the movie’s mix of peculiarity and Italian western made in the USA two decades too late. You don’t go method when the going gets weird, unless you’re not as clever an actor as you think you are, Jared Leto.

As an added bonus for the “before they were stars” column, there’s a one-scene appearance of Jack Black as a Private who gets knocked out by an unarmed blind man. The stuff careers are made of, apparently.

Knight Moves (1992)

Chess grandmaster Peter Sanderson (Christopher Lambert), of the tragic genius asshole type, takes part in a chess tournament on a very rainy Canadian island. When a serial killer starts murdering blonde women and doing bad makeup jobs on their corpses, Peter quickly becomes the police’s main suspect, his case certainly not helped by the fact he was (casually, as he explains) sleeping with the first victim and lying to the cops about it.

But then, one of the cops, one Detective Wagner (Daniel Baldwin), is an even greater dick than Peter is, so telling the truth to that guy wouldn’t be anyone’s first impulse. The island’s new chief of police Frank Sedman (Tom Skerritt) is rather more competent, and is not so sure about Peter’s guilt. He’s calling in help in form of psychologist Kathy Sheppard (Diane Lane). As all psychologists in thrillers, Kathy will have her problems keeping away from having sex with the guy she’s supposed to help investigate.

Even once someone claiming to be the killer starts phoning Peter as part of a “game” whose rules the mystery caller doesn’t bother to explain, the cops still don’t quite believe in his innocence, while also involving him in their investigation as if he were their favourite amateur detective. Go figure.

German director Carl Schenkel’s Knight Moves regularly lands on lists of non-European giallos, and it’s not difficult to see why. Some might argue this to be rather more of a post-Silence of the Lambs serial killer thriller, but then, that genre’s DNA is certainly shared with that of the giallo, too – and in the case of the Demme film, that’s hardly by chance.

But let me count the film’s giallo ways: there’s the interest in dubious yet fun psychological trauma motivating the killer in a way which clearly comes down from 70s pop psychology more than those books in which former real FBI profilers lay out how awesome they believe they are; the plot that’s convoluted and delightfully nonsensical, preferring any good excuse to show a highly stylized murder scene to sensible plotting; the Lambert-shaped amateur detective trying to solve the case for reasons of his own (at the beginning, mostly Sheppard needling him) and because the police are either violent bullying idiots with even worse manners than he has (Wagner) or not allowed to do proper police work by the script (Stedman), dragging in the female lead one way or the other; the love for style as the most important kind of substance a movie can have, even when it makes as little sense as the half-flooded hotel foundations the police use as the case’s centre of telephone operations. Really, the only things missing are a dozen or so bottles of J&B’s, a pair of black gloves and more nudity, though the film does have more sex in it than most US or Canadian thrillers not carrying the word “Erotic” in front of the thriller.

This is of course not the kind of thriller anyone expecting logic or a sensible narrative will find terribly satisfying. As with the giallo, it’s best to adapt one’s expectations towards understanding the aesthetic pleasures at the film’s surface, enjoying the ways they entwine with themes and mood, while ignoring any ideas about proper narrative and plain sense one may or may not be cursed with. Schenkel is making this particularly easy, too, for he makes a good case for himself here as a director who might have played in the league of the better giallo second-stringers if he had been born a couple of decades earlier.

If this is the sort of thing you might enjoy, you’ll probably find this one very fun to watch. It also has a hell of a cast, Lambert doing the sort of pretty asshole role typical of the male giallo protagonist better than most anyone else (for better or for worse), Lane putting much more effort in than the character work in the script actually deserves, regularly turning into the actual protagonist of the movie; also looking rather incredible, which is of course par for the course, for Lane and the giallo-alike genre. Baldwin is so punchable he makes Lambert’s character more likeable than that guy deserves through his sheer testosterone dickishness, and Skerritt is Skerritt (that’s not a complaint).

Insert some check mate based joke, here, imaginary reader.

Cohen and Tate (1988)

After brutally executing his parents (and their FBI bodyguards) who were held in protective custody on a farm in the middle of nowhere professional killers Cohen (Roy Scheider) and Tate (Adam Baldwin) kidnap little Travis Knight (Harley Cross), tasked to bring him to their mob bosses in Houston on what will turn out to be a very bad night ride.

Things really don’t go well at all for the killers, even before you realize that these two aren’t actually partners, but Tate’s someone the veteran mobster Cohen has very suddenly been ordered to partner up with, reminding the old man about the kind of pension plan you get as a mafia killer - that is, a bullet in the back of your head by your replacement. But even leaving this out, the two are the odd buddy movie couple from hell: Cohen’s the classic movie killer (he even dresses the part), loving things neat, clean and with exactly as much violence as needed, while Tate is an actual psychopath who exults in inflicting all kinds of suffering, and who would be the sort of serial killer the FBI grabs after his third victim because he’s just too sloppy. One’s a horrible human being; the other’s a monster.

There are other problems than just the extremely incompatible character types, though. For one, they soon enough learn from the radio (remember those?) that they may have killed little Travis’s mother and the FBI agents, but their main target, the father, somehow managed to survive. That’s not something their bosses will be happy about. Then there’s the matter of Travis. While he’s a child and certainly not a mastermind, he does his utmost to outwit the killers, using all his powers of dubious psychology and the kid superpower of being super annoying to drive an even greater wedge between the two killers.

At this stage in his career, before the stuff happened I don’t actually feel comfortable writing about here for various reasons (and which anyone can look up with a simple Google), writer/director Eric Red could do no – or at least very little - wrong, at this stage having scripted The Hitcher and Near Dark, and a bit later Blue Steel.

This is Red’s debut as a director, and by far his best film in that capacity. In a couple of scenes that are excised in quite a few versions of the film, it’s a shockingly brutal film too, yet this brutality is not just a director trying out how bloody he can get when killing off characters, it’s also establishing its characters as not the nice, clean kind of Hollywood killers but something probably closer to the real kind - nasty people doing terrible things to the innocent, something an audience needs to be reminded about because we are quite used to tragic, noble killers obsessed with guilt and blind women.

Here nothing and nobody’s so nice. Sure, compared with the horrible Tate, Cohen is the more sympathetic character, but the film never lets its audience forget he’s a better man only in comparison. In this context, it’s interesting to look at the way the film treats Travis, the theoretically innocent child, and certainly the character here a viewer is bound to sympathize with. Travis, as we encounter him, starts out as threatened and afraid, but the longer we spend time with him, the more he seems to be not as far away from Cohen and Tate as he should be, manipulating the men and often finding just as much joy in the effects of his needling and wheedling as Tate has when he drives over an animal. There is, I believe, a suggestion here that the difference between him and the killers is again only one of degrees, and that there might be something dark, destructive and violent lurking in even the picture of innocence, as if there’s something wrong with humanity itself. And here I wonder why the film wasn’t a success.

Which is nearly a crime, for apart from the quite brilliant characterisation carried by equally brilliant performances by Scheider (who is always as brilliant as a film lets him be), Baldwin (who realizes that even an unsubtle guy like Tate needs to be portrayed with subtlety) and Cross (who is that most curious of things, a child actor who seems to understand the dark undercurrents of what he’s tasked to play), the philosophical questions it throws at its audience, and the dark joy of watching a film that often plays like a buddy action movie gone very, very dark, the film is also simply brilliant at being a thriller and a suspense movie.

There are at least half a dozen suspense scenes in the traditional style – starting with the set-up to the murders of Travis’s parents, continuing through the tour de force that happens after he first escapes, and never truly stopping – that are text book effective, but much, much more exciting than the text book would suggest, turning this into a nail biter that for once actually deserves bringing up the ghost of old, terrible Mr Hitchcock. There’s a sense of drive and purpose to every shot, every movement of the actors, every line of dialogue, and the impression of watching the work of a director putting all he knows and understands and thinks about filmmaking and about life on screen in the best way possible for him.


It’s really quite the film, and it deserves to stand next to the two Red wrote for Kathryn Bigelow and The Hitcher, as one of the great achievements of genre filmmaking of its era.