LaRoy, Texas (2024)

I could be the dangerous one for all you know. Ray (John Magaro) operates his family-owned hardware store with his brother, handsome Junior (Matthews Del Negro) in a small Texas town. He gets several photographs from private investigator Skip Roche (Steve Zahn) taken during an uncommissioned stake-out at a local motel. They pictures indicate infidelity by Ray’s wife Stacy-Lynn (Megan Stevenson) a former child beauty queen. Distraught, Ray buys a revolver from a gun shop and drives to the same motel where he thinks about killing himself. While he’s sitting in his car a stranger (Vic Browder) gets into the vehicle. The stranger mistakes Ray for contract killer Harry (Dylan Baker), who is expected to meet him at the motel. The stranger hands Ray several thousand dollars as payment for a hit to be carried out the following day. He leaves an address on a piece of paper amongst the banknotes as the only clue as to the target’s identity. Harry arrives as Ray drives off. Still refusing to accept that there’s anything the matter with his marriage, Ray considers keeping the contract money for financing a beauty salon which Stacy-Lynn wants to open. Without a clear idea how to carry out a contract killing, he drives to the address and follows the man living there to a bar so clumsily that he’s immediately found out. The man forces Ray into his car, where they scuffle ending when Ray shoots the man. Ray dumps the corpse by the roadside, accidentally leaving one of Skip’s photographs of Stacy-Lynn next to the body. On his way home Ray finds out from Junior’s wife Angie (Galadriel Stineman) that Stacy-Lynn is having an affair with Junior but he can’t accept it. Police establish that the killed man is a local lawyer James Barlow. The photo of Stacy-Lynn discovered near Barlow’s body makes them suspect her involvement in the murder and they take her in for questioning. The stranger who hired Ray as a hitman finds him working in the hardware store. He tells Ray that he broke into Barlow’s office last night and there was no money in the safe. He accuses Ray of stealing money from Barlow’s safe and gives Ray one day to return it. Ray and Skip visit Barlow’s office and find out after killing his colleague Ben Finney (Bob Clendenin) twice by dunking him in his office toilet Barlow was engaged in a blackmailing case for his client Adam Ledoux (Brad Leland) who runs a large car dealership in the town where he’s supported by his wife Midge (Darcy Shean) an apparently sweet naive woman. Harry finds the bar where he was called on his mobile phone to arrange the hit on Barlow. There he finds a waitress to help him with his inquiries. Then Harry visits the waitress Kayla (Emily Pendergast) and discovers her boyfriend Tiller (Brannon Cross) put a contract on Barlow to get the payout money … My husband and your wife are having an affair. With a complicated corkscrew-like construction, this concludes in twist upon twist upon twist – and several dead bodies. Getting to that point involves a Coen-esque comedy-crime sensibility, dry as dust setting (in a fictional Texan town) and a cast of characters with ideas way beyond their capacity or station and galloping through a plot starring a hapless sad sack cuckold (Magaro, who produced), a ludicrous private eye (a Stetson-ed Zahn) and a cool as cucumber killer (Baker) who has a much larger and consequential role than at first appears. You can’t just go around drowning people. It’s the kind of town where so little happens that the police tow people’s cars for the hell of it. In a narrative with an awful lot of ends to tie up there are several funny scenes including when Ray decides to commit suicide and decides against a rifle – pointing it with difficulty against his head, he asks the store assistant for something shorter. Stacy-Lynn is tutoring a talentless child for a beauty pageant and declares winning her crown was the best thing that ever happened to her. She still carries it around twenty years later. And as for the toilet water torture! Effectively a tale of marital discord, this complex but well-managed mix of mistaken identity, money and murder hinges on a combination of well-tuned humour, irony and sheer silliness. There are some gems of performances especially by Baker as the man you definitely do not want to meet when your car breaks down. Written and directed by Shane Atkinson. It’s important to finish things once you start them

8 Million Ways to Die (1986)

I’m an ex-cop. Los Angeles. Matt Scudder (Jeff Bridges) is a part of LAPD’s Sheriff’s Department and he takes part in a drugs bust that goes badly wrong with his colleagues beaten to death. Six months after the internal investigation he’s in Alcoholics Anonymous celebrating his pin for sobriety but his marriage is gone, his daughter lives with his wife and he’s picking up private eye work from his meetings. A request from a call girl Sunny (Alexandra Paul) brings him back into contact with a drug dealer Willie ‘Chance’ Walker (Randy Brooks) he used to know from the streets who’s now running a flash gambling club where he has a business arrangement with Angel Maldonado (Andy Garcia) who himself has an ongoing interest in another one of the prostitutes, Sarah (Rosanna Arquette). When Sunny turns up at his home looking for help because she’s being threatened Matt agrees but she’s abducted and brutally murdered and he’s too late to help. He wakes up in a detox ward and signs himself out. When he finds evidence against one or other of the men at the club in Sunny’s Filofax, he embarks on a quest for vengeance aided by the discovery of a jewel and a mountain of cocaine while Sarah accompanies him and tries to seduce him before agreeing to help … You’re not a mindless lush after all. Adapted (somewhat) from Lawrence Block’s fantastic New York City-set novel, the fifth in the Matt Scudder series, this was a disappointment on several levels. Oliver Stone did the first pass (and more), with R. Lance Hill (writing as David Lee Henry) then went off to direct a film of his own, so Robert Towne was prevailed upon by director Hal Ashby to do a rewrite but took so long the production was already shooting and changes made on the hoof with improvisation by the cast by the time his pages started arriving. Unrelenting and cliched in ways and draggy in the second half, which is surprising given Ashby’s subtle way of controlling narrative, it retains some of the superficial interest that the cast and behind the scenes team accrues but takes too long to get where it’s going and is horribly violent in one scene. The plausibility of an alcoholic former cop being allowed back in the fold to exert a vigilante-type revenge seriously tests the saw suspension of disbelief. And yet this hovers on the edges of greatness which begs the question why it went wrong. The drift commences with the change in setting – which the opening voiceover does not assist in any way. It’s (obviously) set in New York City. Then, Matt Scudder is an NYC detective, cut from a very different cloth than any denizen of LA. All the performances feel a little too loose in a film that swings between character study and crime story. The contrasting styles of Sunny and Sarah seem off and Angel’s swagger is exaggerated. Bad writing, bad direction or both? I live in a world I didn’t make. Bridges had already done better in the era’s popular noir remake Against All Odds and the thriller Jagged Edge – so this was not his best performance although he has his moments as the lower depths of his addiction to the bottle are plumbed. The major problem appears to be the fact that the film was taken from Ashby and edited by someone else. Ashby, as we know, was one of the great film editors prior to directing so this made absolutely no sense albeit he had his own addiction issues and this was sadly his final feature. This is beautifully shot by Stephen H. Burum with a striking score by James Newton Howard but it fundamentally changes the intent of the book and the re-edit altered it completely. The final shootout is simply unbelievable and not in a good way. Novelist Lawrence Block was not happy (to say the least) with this first screen take on Matt Scudder, as he recounted to this author. You can read more about that and Robert Towne in Chinatowne: The Screenplays of Robert Towne, https://www.amazon.co.uk/ChinaTowne-Screenplays-Robert-Towne-1960-2000/dp/1695887409/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1MXGOF3HFVGNA&keywords=elaine+lennon+chinatowne&qid=1705759297&s=books&sprefix=el%2Cstripbooks%2C847&sr=1-1. Waking up is the hardest part. #600straightdaysofmondomovies