Movie Details
| Title: | Kill Castro | |
| Director: | Chuck Workan | |
| Year: | 1980 | |
| Genre: | Pulp | |
| Times Seen: | 1 | |
| Last Seen: | 07.04.07 |
Other Movies Seen By This Director (0)
| Date Viewed | Venue | Note |
| 07.04.07 | Weird Wednesday | First Weird Wednesday at South Lamar. For some reason Terror Thursday shows here didn't seem quite as weird as this did. Plus they didn't show the "Wednesday Night Special" reel (was last week's split the last straw or are they saving it for WW's triumphant return to the Ritz?? who knows. I probably think too much about this stuff), just trailers for Killer Elite and Filler Force and boom we're in. I can see how some felt this movie was a bit long and slow in parts and I think Lars gave the movie a pretty soft sell (but still mentioning the best parts like Robert Vaughn's seeming indifference to being in the movie and every frame Michael Gazzo's in and the kinda cool early 80s electronic Tangerine Dream-esque score (aside from the horrendous calypso steel drum theme song)) and while it was pretty short on action, damn if it wasn't jam-packed with man-pulp. I eat that shit up so I really liked this movie. I love how the main guy (described by Lars as Gregory Peck meets a pile of dirty laundry) has a blatant disregard for those he supposedly cares about. He didn't know that his woman was Cuban and not Spanish (nor did he care), he seemed intent on rubbing his sidekick's stereotype of having 7 kids in a 3-room shack in his face, and I'm not even sure he knew the name of the kid he was trying to save. I guess he can be that way if all it takes to bed a lady is a 5-second montage of him dancing with them. I guess that's not even a montage, it's just two dissolves. I mean when you own a dingy transvestite-infested ("now that right there is what I call a real slut") bar down in Key West, I guess you can be like that... and that is how part of me really really wants to be. Of course until you get involved with mob dude Gazzo and his CIA cohort Vaughn. He should be glad he wasn't there for the awesome "I'll teach you all about coconuts" scene where a couple snipers shoot... a coconut. It starts off pretty cool but eventually becomes awesome when, like an hour later, we cut back twice to see the snipers shoot two more coconuts. I guess on their budget that was the punch-it-up action scenes. Part of me thinks Vaughn spent the entire movie thinking about what he'd do in Key West after they finished shooting that night but another part of me thinks he was just so into this grizzled seen-it-all operative that it was all work behind those awesome sunglasses. I guess whichever way it actually happened the outcome looked the same. Where every other character in this movie chose to be "tough" by acting macho, Vaughn's toughness came from not even caring. He's like 'yeah say whatever you want i don't care because i'm such a salty bastard.' It's pretty awesome to see his "choice" coe up against the haggard machismo of main guy Stuart Whitman and especially when he plays against the greaseball manic energy of Gazzo. I know there wasn't a lot of explosions or car chases but just seeing these guys try to chew on each other was more than enough for me to dig every little bit. And I really love how the movie's called Kill Castro but most of the movie has nothing to do with that and after someone explicitly says so and another character's like "hey, you named the goddamn movie Kill Castro so I want to kill Castro!" he dies and the movie ends. Clever use of stock footage of Castro seals the deal and they even use a quick clip of Carter reminding you that it's 1980 and Cuba and Castro and Bay of Pigs has absolutely nothing to do with anything anymore. And even if it did and the movie was actually about it, it still makes no sense! Throw in some cockfighting, near-nude oiled black men wrestling to the death, sharks and snapping turtles and you've got yourself a pulp sandwhich, mister. Love it! |
