The Man Who Killed Hitler and Then The Bigfoot (2018)

Elderly World War II veteran Calvin Barr (Sam Elliott) lives a sad, lonely life with his dog, clearly having taken some sort of wrong turn earlier in his life he now can’t correct anymore. In flashbacks (where Calvin is portrayed by Aidan Turner who looks nothing whatsoever like young Sam Elliott, but what the hey) we learn that he was some sort of secret mythic American hero, indeed killing Hitler and most probably getting up to other things of the sort too. But at least to his mind, his deeds never actually changed anything for the better and cost him the love of his life (Caitlin FitzGerald). His isolation even makes it difficult to connect to his younger brother Ed (Larry Miller) - although there is clearly love between the two men.

Now, he is visited by two gentlemen of the Canadian and US governments. They need his help in hunting down and killing the Bigfoot, who is carrying a virus so deadly, it is threatening the world. A virus Calvin just happens to be immune against.

While Robert D. Krzykowski’s film does indeed have an awesome title, I’m not too sure it does itself much of a service with it, for the title – as well as some of the marketing material - surely suggests the film to be either a campy comedy or a two-fisted pulp tale, not exactly roping in the ideal audience for what turns out to be a film about the travails of age and loneliness. It’s not that the title is lying to the audience, mind you, this is indeed a film about the man who killed Hitler and the Bigfoot (and also not one of these “it only happened in his mind” numbers I loathe with a passion); there are even some jokes in it, too. It’s just that his killing of Hitler and the Bigfoot are not really what’s important to the film; in fact, them not being important for Calvin’s life, and being detrimental to his happiness is part of the point of the film. Or rather, part of its point is to show that these heroic achievements aren’t really what would keep one from ending up sad, alone and full of regret. To Calvin, they don’t even feel like achievements anymore, if they ever truly did.

And that’s where the film rightly puts its emphasis, slowly revealing how exactly it happened Calvin didn’t marry the love of his life, how little moments that at the time seemed to just postpone important things to some later date were actually last chances, and how Calvin’s mixed inabilities to make the important steps in his life, to really face the consequences of not making them, and to then be unable to connect to the actual world around him, left him at the bad place we find him now in the last part of his life.

Elliott’s great at this, to no one’s surprise I would hope, not just simply archetypically embodying a type of American maleness for the film to criticize as well as to admire, and absolutely being a guy you’d believe to have killed Hitler and tussle with the Bigfoot, but putting a lot of nuance into the less larger than life parts of Calvin, portraying his loneliness, his orneriness and his difficulty to connect without any melodramatic outbursts but with small gestures, glances and shifts of posture, as something natural and organic to the character.


Despite the elegiac tone of the film, it’s not a hopeless affair either, Calvin eventually taking small steps to show his connection to the world around him. They are only small steps, but then that’s how life goes.

Road House (1989)

Dalton (Patrick Swayze), a legendary bouncer with a tragic past that clearly has taught him the art of bouncer Zen, is hired on by Tilghman (Kevin Tighe) to clean up the small town road house he has acquired a short time ago. Right now, it’s the kind of place where drugs are sold pretty much openly, and where things are so rowdy, the house band (The Jeff Healy Band, whose leader is actually as pleasant a natural amateur actor as you can find) has to play in a cage to protect them from an audience that throws glass bottles at blind singer/guitarists. With his legendary reputation (yes, this film takes place in a world where bouncers can become legends), his insistence on being nice first and only hitting when that doesn’t work out, and his air of calm, Dalton actually does make great strides towards cleaning up the place, even finding time in his schedule for a romance with local doctor Doc (Kelly Lynch) he initiates by bringing his medical records and the explanation that “pain don’t hurt”.

Unfortunately, pain hurting or not, he soon comes into conflict with the town’s very own Big Bad, Brad Wesley (Ben Gazzara) and his gang. Wesley controls the place with the verve of a Bond villain – and has the appropriate kind of underlings, too. So eventually, Dalton has to get back to the old ways of his tragic past again and do what 80s action heroes do. Though most action heroes don’t have a mentor played by Sam Elliott at his most Sam Elliott-ish they can call in.

When it came out, Rowdy Herrington’s Road House wasn’t terribly well-loved (I certainly remember being nonplussed by it myself when I first saw it when I was sixteen or so) but by now the film has grown quite the cult following. It’s a properly deserved cult following too, for when it comes to 80s action films taking place in the kind of strange parallel world where Brad Wesley runs a town by doing evil deeds like destroying the place of a car-salesman who gets uppity with a monster truck, and where a bouncer can be a lot like a western hero who comes to town trying to find peace only to have to fall back into violent ways, this one’s actually as brilliant as that description sounds.

A lot of the film’s impact certainly has to do with Swayze. The guy’s speciality when appearing in action movies was being the soft tough guy – someone who can be just as violent as your typical macho but usually chooses not to because he’s above proving his manliness by breaking your face, but over the lines he draws you certainly shouldn’t step; yet also one of those action heroes who is believable in the romantic moments because he can actually act like a guy in proper love. Basically, Swayze’s the anti-Seagal, is what I’m saying, believably projecting being a guy who may know one thing or the other about ripping throats out with his bare hands (in what I assume to be a pretty wonderful nod to what Sonny Chiba does as a much less nice hero in The Streetfighter and its sequels) but who also knows that actually doing that is wrong. Swayze is also simply genuinely great at physical acting and screen fighting, and while he may have a comparatively small range as an actor, the things he does well, he does well.

Of course, Swayze’s not the only wonderful actor on screen. Gazzara chews the scenery with insane enthusiasm, gripping the opportunity to be a completely self-centred asshole with a bad case of megalomania and a complete lack of a sense of proportion with both hands (and probably also digging his teeth in), so that a guy with a handful of goons lording it over a small town becomes some kind of supervillain. If you want to read something into the film, you may want to take a look at the difference in the performance of manliness between Wesley and Dalton. The former is all about “alpha male” dominance, abusing (and weaponizing) his girlfriend, kicking his men when they are down, and clearly having never encountered a situation in his life that isn’t a dick measuring contest. Whereas Dalton clearly couldn’t care less about “dominance”, obviously wants his sexual partners to have an orgasm (it’s impossible to read the emphasis in the film’s sex scene any other way), treats everyone he meets as an equal, and only resorts to violence as a last measure against the violent. The film even acknowledges that Dalton’s way is still not good enough when it still ends in a bloodbath.

Apart from that, Road House is just incredibly well constructed, with any given scene taking care of the needs of characters, plot, and theme and usually throwing in some action too, with everything going on making total sense if you are willing to accept the film’s set-up, and flowing wonderfully. Herrington’s a very fine action director, too, certainly never trying to be an 80s Hong Kong action filmmaker, but really doing wonders with the classic American punch-up style of action.


Road House is just a completely wonderful film, as flawless as any you’ll encounter, unless you don’t like fun, or road houses, or Patrick Swayze ripping a guy’s throat out.

Shakedown (1988)

aka Blue Jean Cop

New York. Just one week before he’s going to leave his legal aid career behind and start a job in the Wall Street law firm of his rich girl fiancée's rich daddy, once idealistic - now pretty cynical but not completely hopeless - Roland Dalton (Peter Weller) gets quite the case dropped in his lap. Low level drug dealer Michael Jones (Richard Brooks) has apparently shot an undercover cop during an arrest attempt, but Michael says the guy tried to shoot him and steal his money and drugs without ever identifying himself as a police officer instead of a common robber. After all, if a cop would have wanted to shake Michael down, he would have let him take whatever he wanted and let his own bosses sort things out with the dirty cops. Roland believes Michael.

A friendly chat with his cop buddy Richie Marks (Sam Elliott), suggests a course of investigation to Roland that will lead to a bit of hornet’s nest of a group of corrupt cops – whose corruption is of course ignored by the rest of the force for the usual corps spirit bullshit reasons – trying to get a bit more involved in the business of a local crack kingpin (Antonio Fargas).

To add more complications, the assistant district attorney prosecuting the case is the love of Roland’s life (Patricia Charbonneau) – not to be confused with his fiancée.

I am not as a great an expert on the body of work of James Glickenhaus as some other writers roaming the movie blog and podcast world are, so I just accept their received wisdom that this on paper somewhat bizarre combination of 80s action movie and courtroom drama is indeed Glickenhaus’s magnum opus. At the very least, it’s pretty damn great, avoiding he drabness of most films about people shouting “OBJECTION!” – Ace Attorney excepted – by replacing the boring bits with stuff like scenes of Sam Elliott chasing some skinny idiot through what I assume is Coney Island, and ending up on a roller coaster, or with a pretty fantastic trike versus car chase with Weller riding handgun, and a finale where Elliott solves the age old grudge match between action hero and small plane once and for all.

These scenes are generally not filmed in the overly slick way one might perhaps expect but embedded in the Glickenhaus typical (so much do even I know about his films) eye for the grimiest bits of late 80s New York, grounding the adrenaline-driven absurdity of 80s action cinema in what feels like a totally real place. Indeed, one of the film’s great strengths is how leisurely and non-dramatic its plotting is, not because the writer/director doesn’t know how to make things tight (you can’t shoot action like this if you don’t know) but because Glickenhaus seems just as interested in portraying the world his characters inhabit – for better or worse – as in the action. So even something like the whole sub-plot in which Roland and his ex are falling back in love with each other and his struggle to tell his fiancée the truth about how he feels and really, who he truly is, do not feel like filler but rather are successful attempts at creating a world that may or may not be a heightened version of how the film and its director sees New York.

This gives a film that’s beholden to a gritty version of 80s pedal to the metal action, speechifying courtroom drama (wonderfully done by Weller, by the way), and some dubious plot ideas – Roland really breaks into a lot of places and likes to get into violent situations for the honest lawyer he’s supposed to be – an uncommon sense of earnestness, very much emphasizing the value of providing its characters with humanity and the world they live in with substance in genres where that sort of thing isn’t always par for the course. This also results in some very typical cliché situations and constellations actually feeling fitting and human, even though they are not actually all that different from the dozens of other times when they just annoyed me.


The cast obviously gets this, too, so there’s a complete lack of winking and being all ironic about being evil from large parts of the ensemble. Instead everyone plays things straight and puts actual effort into their roles. Weller is simply great, whereas Sam Elliott – complete with the facial hair we his fans demand of him – convinces through his typical Sam-Elliott-ness and much soulful and/or disgusted staring. But really, everyone here is completely on point.

In short: Frogs (1972)

Rich people are really disgusting. So thinks the animal population on the swamp island belonging to the rich Crockett family, and one fine 4th of July (well, actually, they begin the day before), they finally do something to clean the place up. Led by what oh so meaningful shots of adorable animals croaking suggest must be their frog generals (who, like all generals, don't dirty their hands themselves), the animals slowly kill off servants and family, mostly by betting on the natural horror film human tendency to fall down for no good reason, stumble into puddles full of leeches, or - in what might be the film's funniest scene - to step towards the smoking poison instead of away from it.

Accidental family guest Pickett Smith (a name that can only belong to a pre-facial-hair Sam Elliott, or a fence company) tries his best - it isn't much - to keep the family alive, but that's not easy with a family patriarch (Ray Milland really needing the money) who won't have his beautiful 4th of July/birthday be ruined by mere trifles like a few corpses.

In the realm of nature strikes back movies, there are mere films about nature striking back, and then there's the unfairly named - seeing as all other animals are doing all the work and the frogs just croak, unless they are controlling their peers by telepathy, an idea I wouldn't put past the writers - Frogs. Frogs, probably to nobody's surprise, is as bad as its plot suggests, and therefore awesome.

To understand the quality of the movie, just imagine the most boring members of the cast of a soap opera of your choice - let's say Dallas - transplanted to Florida where they are attacked by lots of adorable animals director George McCowan never manages to let look threatening for even a second. Which must be some kind of achievement in a film that does feature an alligator attack. Of course, it is quite difficult to imagine how the poor animals could look threatening in a film that insists on letting them kill off their victims in predominantly indirect ways that really rather suggest the true cause of the film's humans deaths isn't so much killer animals as a proclivity to drink too much alcohol and inborn stupidity.

Needless to say, an alcoholised viewer will find much to be entertained by here, starting with the film's effortlessly ridiculous attempts at doing Southern Melodrama (I imagine the filmmakers seeing themselves not as producing a horror movie Dallas but rather a cross of a horror film and a Tennessee Williams play), continuing through the utter absurdity of many of the deaths (obvious favourite: the glass house with the poison-bottle-throwing lizards, though there's something to be said for however it is Milland is supposed to die), and ending on little flourishes of random weirdness that must come quite natural to a film that dances to an electronic Les Baxter soundtrack that might have been composed by letting frogs jump all over a synthesizer.

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