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.

Steel Dawn (1987)

We’re in some kind of post-apocalyptic world, though, taking the handful of hints the film drops about the world before, perhaps not a post-apocalyptic Earth. So much is clear: there was some kind of war, and eternal winds have turned the world, or at least the part of it we get to see, into a windy wasteland.

Our protagonist is a nameless wanderer (Patrick Swayze) and former high-ranking soldier spending his time wandering the wastelands, meditating while standing on his head and fighting off the only mutants the film bothers with including; all to deal with his PTSD, one supposes. However, when he meets his old teacher (John Fujioka) only to witness him being murdered by professional assassin Sho (Christopher Neame wearing a very excited looking hairpiece), he ambles after the killers, eventually ending up on the farm of Kasha (Lisa Niemi), where he hires on as a farmhand.

He’s at exactly the right place, too, for Sho is the preferred hired assassin of local bad guy Damnil (Anthony Zerbe) who is in the classic bad guy business of trying to take over a small community with violence. And that’s without Damnil knowing Kasha’s secret: her lands include a secret underground source of clean water. Clean water, mind you, she plans to provide to the whole community for free soon enough. Looks like Shane, ahem, Swayze, will have to use his powers of violence for good while also falling for Kasha, and playing replacement dad for her son.

As post-apocalyptic westerns – and this really is a thinly veiled variation on Shane and other films where a violent stranger arrives in a little town, finds peace for a short time and then has to solve bad guy troubles with his old violent ways only to drift away again afterwards – go, Steel Dawn is a pretty good one. As a friend of the goofier side of the post-apocalyptic divide, one can be a little disappointed that the sand-digging mutants in the film’s prologue are the only truly Italian-apocalypse-style weird bit Steel Dawn delivers, but the film’s straighter soul works out fairly well for it. And hey, straighter doesn’t mean there’s anybody here not dressing either in weird rags or in weird rags with leather pauldrons and of course other assorted Duran Duran music video leather bits, nor do we have to miss men wearing mop-shaped things where we humans have hair (best in class here is obviously Neame’s hair-thing even the less imaginative will suspect of one day just packing up its bags and crawling away, leaving a bald man behind). In fact, the lack of mutants – as well as firearms and even bows for some reason – does clearly convince the film to replace other post-apocalyptic mainstays as well. So no dune buggies this time around but wind-powered dune buggies that move so slow you’d think people would rather walk – there’s still even a race of a sort – and suggestions of the rests of a bizarre warrior culture in this place’s military that has nothing whatsoever to do with the one in our world. Also, Brion James is playing a good guy.

Lance Hool’s direction isn’t anything to write home about, competently plugging away at Doug Lefler’s script without demonstrating much style but also showing himself to be just competent enough to handle things decently, as well as clever enough to understand that a good desert shot means instant atmosphere. The script is mostly competent too, with a couple of fun ideas, a couple genre standards executed well, and with some curious moments like the randomly appearing and disappearing dog Swayze befriends that has no function at all in the film except to suggest that our hero, probably, doesn’t eat dogs but shares his food with them. Or the fact that it can’t seem to decide if Sho is an honourable assassin or not, and so has him jumping merrily from honourable to dishonourable while Neame is chewing the scenery just as merrily.

The action scenes are fun, making good use of the fact that Swayze’s dancer background makes him a natural for screen fighting (I’d argue dancers are better basic material than many non-screen/stage trained martial artists for this). We’re not talking Hong Kong levels of choreography here, obviously, but the fights are much better than clean punch-ups.

At this point in his career, Swayze is in full sway of his soft macho persona, generally selling the softer parts of his character a bit better than the machismo. Though on the machismo side, he has a note-perfect scene where he encounters Damnil and his henchmen while bathing and very naked that gives extra tough guy points. Swayze certainly makes a more convincing romantic actor than most guys you’ll see playing the lead in action movies of any era, so the romance part of the film actually feels like more than a beat the plot has to hit. Throw Swayze into a pool of character actors for every other role like Steel Dawn does, and he certainly gets my seal of approval.


Honestly, what more could I ask of a post-apocalyptic western without guns?