Bad/Awesome Flixxx Review: Judgement Night (1993)

"Attention, food shoppers. We have a special over at the frozen food department, dead meat!" - Fallon

"Calm down? This stuff's gonna cost me a fortune! I'm now the proud owner of this piece of shit! We're stuck in this piece of shit which I NOW OWN!" - Ray

"Let me tell you something, Ray. You don't understand shit, OK? Nothing. Guys like you check to see if they got a dick. I got one. You and your friends are the kind of spoon-fed fucking fruit bait that I fucking HATE! Shut the fuck up. You speak when fucking spoken to, okay. This is not fucking high school, motherfucker. I'll eat your fucking friends for fucking lunch. You know who we are? You got no fucking idea, do you? No. Jerks like you sail through life, reading about people like me in the newspaper. HEY! You're in a different place now, motherfucker! $100,000 might buy you out of North Shore. Here, that means shit. This is my fucking world." - Fallon

Who remembers this? This is a great example of the music industry and the film industry tying in with magazine subscription record clubs and pumping out soundtracks to hype kids up to see a film. I was simultaneously in BMG and Columbia House, so I was getting pumped from both sides. "You HAVE to get this soundtrack!", "You HAVE to see this movie!" And it wasn't so bad. The soundtrack was awesome, it teamed up hip hop artists with current rock artists. So you got: Sonic Youth AND Cypress Hill, Helmut AND House of Pain, Biohazard AND Onyx, Slayer AND Ice-T. Pretty rad. And then the flick drops and of course after all that hype, I went to see it, and it was pretty awesome. Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr, Stephen Dorff, Jeremy Piven, Denis Leary, One of the dudes from House of Pain, Zed from PULP FICTION, and Crump's brother from THE STONED AGE all star in JUDGEMENT NIGHT!!!

Emilio is Frank, a dude who lives in suburban Chicago and is completely whipped by his wife who guilt trips the shit out of him and won't let him hang with his buds. So Jeremy Piven is Ray and he gets Frank and Cuba Gooding Jr tix to see a boxing match. Frank invites his younger brother Steven Dorff to come hang and everyone is a little iffy on the whole thing because he's supposedly a prick. But in all honesty, its Ray who is really the biggest prick. So Frank finally escapes his wife who guilt trips him all the way to the edge of the driveway and they split to downtown to see the fight. Problem is Ray has rented this HUGE RV and it looks like they're gonna miss the whole damn fight because they get stuck in traffic. 
 

Tentions rise quickly when Ray tries to ride the median and squeeze in another lane in traffic and some cowboy won't let them in and then dudes jump out of their cars and someone gets decked. They finally get back into their cars and Ray, not wanting to miss the fights, backs out again on the shoulder and exits off the highway. They drive without the benefit of GPS and soon find themselves very lost in a completely desolate part of Chicago. Suddenly they hit something in the road. Ray comes to a stop and the other guys jump out to see what they hit. Ray had hit some kid and they bring it into the rented RV against Ray's wishes. Ray starts cleaning up all the evidence of them drinking because it looks like he's about to be up shit creek. Upon examination it looks like the kid they hit has been shot and he has a bag full of bloody money. He starts screaming that they need to get outta there and Frank yells for Ray to drive. He declines and Frank sees a squad car go by and he jumps in the driver's seat and pursues the cops. The cops get farther and farther away and then all of a sudden a car slams into their side and the RV turns sideways and drives into a narrow alley getting stuck and smashed all to hell. While they're gathering themselves together and Ray is whining that he is now completely fucked, someone shoots out the back window and drags the kid into the street. 
 

Here's where it gets good. In the 90s, Denis Leary was cast as a villain in a ton of flicks, THE REF, DEMOLITION MAN, and his most sinister role here as Fallon the leader of the gang that the kid owes money to. Fallon shoots the kid dead while the four friends look on and then he instructs his gang to kill the witnesses. So they kick out the front windshield and bail, and Frank sets the RV on fire. They begin to run like hell with the gang in pursuit. The guy I call Zed was in a ton of flicks playing shady bad guys too. PULP FICTION, THE USUAL SUSPECTS. They chase and chase the boys through this dark desolate seemingly abandoned part of the city. The boys hide in a rail car and are trying to keep quiet but a bunch of bums blackmail them by threatening to rat them out if they don't hand over their wallets and valuables. They do, but one of the drunks starts yelling and alerts the bad guys. They come over shooting and the boys get away and escape to an apartment building. 
 

Now over at the apartment building they go up in the top and you think, these have to be the unluckiest motherfuckers ever. Because how in the hell were these thugs going to find them- but they do. Over and over and over again they keep finding them. They hide in an apartment but the thugs begin harassing the neighbors and shooting them and fucking them up, so they don't want any harm to come to the ladies who let them in. They escape to the roof and try to go across to another roof by some ladders. Ray is chicken and throws the ladders off the roof trapping himself. He tries to talk his way out of the situation, but they throw his ass off the roof killing him. The other guys escape into a sewer but can't keep their mouths shut for five minutes and the gang comes after down there. They kill Red and then Fallon drowns Crump's brother for annoying him and then it went from 4 on 4 to 3 on 2. I won't spoil the ending for this one so that you can find a copy of the soundtrack on tape to hype yourself up and then search for yourself a VHS copy of this so you can relive 1993 in full effect! YES you should!

Saturday, February 23, 2013