![]() Everything is heightened and exaggerated but not in the ways that Hill often does best he was aiming for a tone that was more mournful and melodramatic (he said that if he’d had his druthers he’d have shot the movie in black-and-white) but often comes across as flimsy and artificial. (More than one entertainment writer pointed out that Rourke circa The Wrestler looked like this version of the character.) Once he gets pretty, Rourke maintains the lisp for some reason and sets out on a doomed quest to get back at his former gang members (including a lithe Lance Henriksen and Ellen Barkin as the femme fatale). For the first half hour or so Rourke is encased in unconvincing, Elephant Man-ish make-up that impedes his speech and is just generally distracting and awful. Johnny Handsome, based on a novel by The Taking of Pelham 1-2-3 author John Godey, sees Mickey Rourke playing a disfigured small-time hood who is given a second chance on life (and a plum opportunity for revenge) thanks to a cutting-edge surgical procedure. Hill adopted a pseudonym (Thomas Lee) for the eventual release and it’s easy to see why he would want to distance himself from this mess.Ĭlosing out his incredibly prolific decade, Hill returned to a more stylized more after the decidedly more commercial Red Heat. The cast is great (including Robert Forster, Lou Diamond Phillips and an outrageously adorable Robin Tunney) but barely register. You can tell what Hill was going for with the little of his footage that remains in the film it’s meant to be about characters redeeming themselves at the edge of space and some of them literally losing their soul (although elaborate make-up effects were also jettisoned). And all of the friction and behind-the-scenes drama wouldn’t matter if the film was any good, which it was not. This led to two directors taking over the project once Hill left during post-production, including Francis Ford Coppola, who made a number of flabbergasting, borderline unethical decisions including digitally placing Angela Bassett and Spader’s heads on two other actors and then digitally “darkening” the actress’ skin to match Bassett’s (whew boy). Giger, was seemingly doomed at every turn – a production partnership with effects company Digital Domain dissolved, leading the production to incur significant cost overages (if they’d been working together, the effects costs would have lessened), MGM slashed the budget midway through production, and Hill was forced to screen the movie before the effects work had been properly finished. The production of Supernova, based on an old William Malone project he’d been working on with H.R. ![]() After two directors had been attached and then left the project, Hill signed on largely at the urging of star James Spader. Best accompanied by any one of Ry Cooder’s slide-guitar-filled soundtracks.įor years Hill had been offered sci-fi projects and for years he had turned those projects down, fearing that they would be too similar to his landmark work on Alien (by all accounts it was Hill’s draft of the script that Ridley Scott ultimately shot). I also highly recommend his comic book Triggerman if you need any more Walter Hill-y goodness.īuckle-up for a list full of tough guys, sassy broads, and a whole lot of punches thrown. And he had some of the best success in the later part of his career with the AMC miniseries Broken Trail, which won the Emmy for best miniseries and awards for both actors ( Thomas Hayden Church and Robert Duvall). He directed the first episode of Deadwood (and won an Emmy for it) but, despite a producer credit, left after the first episode because of disagreements with creator David Milch. ![]() Besides Tales from the Crypt, Hill tried to jump-start a number of tangentially related shows including the underappreciated sci-fi spin-off Perversions of Science (Hill directed the terrific first episode). His pilot for Dog and Cat, a thriller he had created for ABC that starred a young Kim Basinger, was said to have inspired Shane Black when he wrote Lethal Weapon. It was unselfconscious and seemingly effortless process, but his style and his thematic interests are so specific and so deeply saturated into each project that from the beginning of his career, you knew what you’d be in for if you chose to watch one of his movies.Īnd it’s worth noting that Hill had just as much impact on the small screen. What’s remarkable about Hill is that almost from the get-go, he had cultivated what a “Walter Hill film” meant. ![]()
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