I chose Patrick Swayze for this restrospetive for one particular reason : the way he was sold to men and women both fascinates me. During his rise to game in the late eighties, he was the tough guy, the warrior philosopher who lived by his own rules, yet he happened to be unspeakably handsome, so his characters always had a broken soul every women on Earth wanted to fix. Both ideas are super cliché on their own, but put together, they make one mean pulp hero. ROAD HOUSE was the Swayziest Swayze movie ever release and yet, it managed to be a lot more.
Dalton (Patrick Swayze) is the man. He's a living legend in the midwestern bar scene, his lack of family name. He is Dalton, the badass bouncer. He's hired to clean up the Double Deuce, in Jasper, where it's World War III on the dancefloor every given night. His job become complicated when he becomes the center of attention for firing a skimming barman, who happens to be the nephew of Jasper's resident wealthy asshole Brad Wesley (Ben ''What's his Face'' Gazzara). It also didn't help that Dalton fell in love with the resident doctor (Kelly Lynch) who Wesley has a sick infatuation with. He decides to wage war to Dalton for challenging his grip on Jasper and the entire town becomes one big battlefield.
I am born in a small, mining town, somewhere in the middle of the woods. This is a reason why I'm so fond of ROAD HOUSE. See, it's not a movie that speaks of the stark reality of small town. No, ROAD HOUSE is built from the epic local folklore of the stories that run through small, isolated places. It's one of the most fascinating, original examples of hyperreality. Its universe is seen through the deforming prism of a local storyteller's exaggerations. That's why I thought ROAD HOUSE was so badass when I was nine and that's why I find ROAD HOUSE to be so characteristic of small town folklore, or as Chuck Klosterman put it, rural mythologies. *
* Thanks to Brian Lindenmuth for the tip.
Pictured aboe, Dalton, eating a jailbird for breakfast.
It's the way ROAD HOUSE takes its own mythology that makes it so enjoyable. The way nobody questions why there's a bad guy rolling around town in a monster truck, for example. I've never seen that in another movie. I don't doubt the monster truck was brought in for its redneck potential, but the way its treated as part of the everyday life is hilarious. Also, in the first scene, Dalton gets stabbed by a client for no apparent reason. It's a pretty bad wound and a felony, yet nobody calls the police and Dalton stitches himself up in the office and blows it off as a scratch. This would never happen in real life, yet it happens in the alternate reality of ROAD HOUSE.
I would be unfair not to mention the terrific cast, who seems to be having a blast playing. Ben Gazarra is deliciously over-the-top as the supervillain, Kevin Tighe (another what's-his-face) is hilariously out of place as Dalton's boss and Sam Elliott blows through the screen as Dalton's mentor Wade Garrett. ROAD HOUSE is probably the most implausible movie of all-time, like Klosterman said, yet its depiction of the oral tradition of local folklore is so dead on, it's difficult not to love. ROAD HOUSE will forever stay in our heart because it's crazy and unwittingly smart.
* Thanks to Brian Lindenmuth for the tip.