Word: peckinpah
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...punishing consequences of a series of failed escape attempts. The movie's dialogue consists largely of grunts and ughs, to which sensible viewers may want to add a kind of choral effect of their own. Needless to say, the picture ends in a bloodbath that might startle Sam Peckinpah...
...Horse, is full of brash challenge, like the best punk. Even his acoustic songs-sometimes witty, often wildly romantic-have the kind of recklessness and daring that punk stands for but only fitfully delivers. There are other specters and influences hovering around this record, from Mark Twain to Sam Peckinpah to Johnny Rotten, and it is one mark of Young's achievement that he can sit them all down around the fire and make them seem like brothers...
...much as in the way it attracts crowds like a lightning rod. It is not particularly violent, and what violence there is is curiously abstract and unemotional. More gore can often be seen on the television screen, and any number of films-Marathon Man, Death Wish, just about any Peckinpah film and certainly A Clockwork Orange-have contained far more stomach-churning brutality. Indeed, The Warriors' director, Walter Hill, goes out of his way to expunge any feeling of genuine menace or racial animosity. The gang called the Warriors is integrated; there are no scenes of sexual assault...
...ugliest sadomasochistic trips, with heavy homosexual overtones, that our thoroughly nasty movie age has yet produced. Indeed, if the film has any redeeming social value at all, it is to prove that you don't have to be a hairy-chested director of the Sam Peckinpah school to get your kicks on blood and gore. It may also indicate that there are some virtues in the straightforward approach of someone like Peckinpah to violent material. In Midnight Express one imagines the director peering through the viewfinder and murmuring, "Goyaesque," or worse, "Ken Russell." Anyway, the continual aestheticizing of squalor...
...subliterate. We never understand why Rubber Duck's nemesis (the congenitally irate Ernest Borgnine) is after him or what the truckers' grievances are. What's worse, we don't care. Next to this muddleheaded film, F.I.S.T. starts to look like a dynamic political manifesto. Peckinpah tries to enliven the nonsense with slow-motion automotive stunts and barroom brawls, but these signature sequences just do not have the energy of the director's best work (The Wild Bunch, The Ballad of Cable Hogue) or even his worst (The Killer Elite, Bring Me the Head...