Educational Media Reviews Online

Alex Cox’s Straight to Hell Returns is the film which he continues to make over and over again. It may indeed be his life’s obsession. In a “making of” documentary shot in 2000 for the first release of Straight to Hell on DVD, many of the individuals in the cast and crew including Cox, Dennis Hopper, and others were enthusiastic about a remake or a sequel which they endearingly called Back to Hell but that title simply became the title of the documentary about the making of the film. Straight to Hell Returns may only be the next phase of this journey of paying homage to the spaghetti westerns he so loved as a youth.

Failing to find the money for the filming of a rock and roll tour, and having already signed up the musicians for the month of August 1986, it was easier to find one million dollars to finance a film than to find funding to film a concert series in Nicaragua. A script was quickly co-written by Cox and Dick Rude for the musicians already hired: Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, the Pogues; and the film began shooting in Almeria in Andalucía, Spain. Alex Cox returned to the location where ten years earlier he shot a student film, included on this DVD. He was then at the University of Bristol Drama Department and his 1976-77 short film project resulted in Black Hills, a series of beautifully composed images of the Almeria spaghetti western sets where directors like Sergio Leone shot numerous films. John Sturges’ Savage Cowboy with Charles Bronson (also known as Valdez, il mezzosangue, 1973) had been shot there. Enthusiastic references to other films abound: there is a nod to Cool Hand Luke (1967) by showing a scantily clad woman washing a motorcycle by hand. The homage to Point Blank (1967) with Lee Marvin is at the beginning of the film when Sy Richardson pointlessly shoots an empty bed. The opening titles are meant to reference For a Few Dollars More (1965). When a man is hit over the head and thrown over from the second floor, Cox copied the editing of the falling from The Good the Bad and the Ugly (1966) by having a dummy fall and the real actor on the ground slamming his legs down in the next shot. The coffee references are directly related to spaghetti western director Giulio Questi’s film, Django Kill (1967). Clearly this film is a film student’s love poem to a genre but, created after several commercial successes already under his belt, it feels more like a Proustian reminiscence than an adolescent crush.

Shot after Repo Man (1984) and Sid and Nancy (1986) with the film title emanating from a song by The Clash, the film stars Courtney Love as well as Joe Strummer, Sy Richardson, Dick Rude, and in smaller roles, Elvis Costello, Dennis Hopper, Jim Jarmusch and Grace Jones. Future director Sara Sugarman has a small part and The Pogues play the coffee-addicted MacMahon gang. Many of the supporting actors had also appeared in previous Cox films such as Sid and Nancy and Repo Man. Cox likes to use a repertory of actors, much like his spaghetti western directors did.

Although it is touted for its use of profanity, sex and senseless violence, the first two elements are not in the film. There are allusions to sex but nothing at all explicit, some minor sexual tension is the most it accomplishes; there is no profanity at all spoken in the film, rather unusual for its time and its subject matter, yet it works wonderfully on the level of satire. As for the violence, it is not as “senseless” as advertised on the packaging of the original DVD release by Anchor Bay in 2001. If it could be called senseless it is so only in terms of its comedic quasi-surrealist approach to the western genre. The film in 2011 may appear to be closer in spirit to Andy Warhol’s Lonesome Cowboys (1968), than to Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969), yet the adulation of the genre in terms of its compositions places it with the films it worships.

Straight to Hell Returns re-uses the audio commentary from the original DVD with the director and co-writer Dick Rude, but with added additional pertinent comments relating to the insertion of a handful of new shots and two very short scenes. The new comments are about digital color enhancement or correction, digital insertion of bullet holes, blood splatter, including one shot where it (digitally) hits the camera “lens”. There are subtle moving bodies on fire in their seats after a car wreck and animated skeletons in a couple shots to make the film appear more violent.

The insertion of the new material changes very little in the narrative arc but gives a tiny new scene to Elvis Costello, where he is beaten by the town’s women. The addition of the other shots and enhancements neither adds to nor takes away from the film, although, compared to the 2001 edition, this new edition looks cleaner and sharper. It also contains Black Hills, which was not on the earlier DVD, and Back to Hell, the making-of documentary, which was. The 5.1 stereo soundtrack also does not change the film into a newer version of itself.

Straight to Hell has had a cult following for years and this new version, which should be considered as a director’s cut 25 years after the fact rather than a reconstruction or re-editing, retains all of its former glory with a few filmic shots of Botox. Straight to Hell Returns is thus not a major facelift, just a slight rejuvenation of an ode to a film genre. Recommended for film studies and cultural studies.