For a cult film with such an exalted reputation, Road House winds up being surprisingly modest in scope or ambition when you watch it play out. As a young boy who hit his teenage years in the late 1980s, I’d of course seen the movie before, and more than once, but my last viewing was a very long time ago. It’s the type of thing that looms larger in memory than the real product itself could ever live up to. Somehow, that actually manages to add to its charm.
The phrase “guilty pleasure” gets tossed around a lot in relation to Road House, but the more time that passes, the less guilt I feel about enjoying a movie on exactly the terms it sets out to deliver. Road House was not a blockbuster hit during its 1989 theatrical release. It wasn’t an outright flop, either, mind you, but the movie was panned by most critics and had the misfortune to be released less than a week before Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade crushed everything around it at the box office. The picture didn’t find its true life until later cable TV syndication and home video, where it eventually built a huge cult audience of fans who appreciated it as a sly throwback B-movie that’s more fun than it has any right to be.
| Title: | Road House |
| Year of Release: | 1989 |
| Director: | Rowdy Herrington |
| Watched On: | 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray |
| Also Available On: | Blu-ray Amazon Prime Video Max |
In the two years following his star-making turn in Dirty Dancing, Patrick Swayze hadn’t yet found the right project to capitalize on that success. In fact, the next two features he made afterward (Steel Dawn and Tiger Warsaw) were both tremendous duds, each produced for peanuts and neither much noticed by anyone at the time. Road House was to be his next major push for stardom, a healthily-budgeted movie by a respectable studio scheduled for release right in the heat of the summer movie season.
The story premise is entirely ridiculous, in a most endearing way. Swayze stars as Dalton, a nightclub bouncer so revered for his skill at kicking drunken assholes out of the building that he’s attained an almost legendary superstar status within the bar and nightlife industry. When the owner of a seedy dive joint in Missouri looks to upgrade his business, he travels halfway across the country specifically to recruit Dalton to clean up the place, practically throwing money at him and agreeing to any terms the man puts in front of him. Surely, a bouncer of the stature and reputation that Dalton brings is worth any expense.
By the time he gets there, Dalton very unsurprisingly finds the Double Deuce to be a real scuzzy place, the type of shithole where the band in residence (fronted by real musician Jeff Healey) have to perform behind a cage because drunken rednecks keep tossing empty beer bottles at them (yeah, just like in The Blues Brothers). Undeterred, Dalton keeps a cool head and makes a number of staff and policy changes that quickly start to turn the establishment’s fortunes around, bringing in a more mainstream clientele. To help out, he enlists his best friend/mentor, Wade (Sam Elliott). An efficient multi-tasker, he also makes time for a romance with a pretty doctor (Kelly Lynch).
Unfortunately, all these changes run Dalton afoul of local rich prick Brad Wesley (a slumming Ben Gazzara), who maintains a tight-fisted extortion racket on all the businesses in town, including the Double Deuce. Before long, conflict between them will escalate, pitting Dalton and Wade against a horde of goons on Wesley’s payroll. Fists and feet will fly, buildings will burn, and lives may hang in the balance for control of this small town – all because a club bouncer couldn’t help but stir shit up.
For a summer action movie, Road House is strangely light on action. Its nearly two-hour run time is quite lackadaisically paced, and its big set-pieces are limited to a few bar brawls and a bunch of shirtless fistfights amusingly choreographed to take advantage of Swayze’s background in dancing. (He does quite a few elegant spin-kicks.) However, what it lacks in high-octane thrills, the film more than makes up for in attitude and atmosphere. This is an unrepentant B-movie that revels in the silliness of its plot and the sleaziness of its setting. The men have big muscles, the women have big hair and big tits, and all of them are gonna put everything out there on display.
Swayze was at the peak of his screen charisma here, matched effortlessly by Sam Elliott’s grizzled magnetism. They both seem to know what kind of material they’ve got and how to make it work, even when it shouldn’t.
Road House is also just about one of the movie quotable movies of all time: “Pain don’t hurt.” “Be nice, until it’s time to not be nice.” “I fucked guys like you in prison.” It’s almost as if the screenwriters had the foresight to write hilarious dialogue knowing that some day, decades in the future, all these lines would become memes on social media.
Sadly, it took a while for everyone to get what the movie was going for. After a solid second-place opening (beneath the second week of the Richard Pryor/Gene Wilder comedy See No Evil, Hear No Evil), the film got swallowed up by the summer competition and its domestic box office revenue petered out at around $30 million. As mentioned earlier, it didn’t really start to catch a second wind until much later on television and home video.
Critics couldn’t figure out whether Road House was “so bad it’s good” or just bad. The Razzie Awards, in all their notorious hypocrisy, nominated it for Worst Picture and Worst Actor (among others), yet later also listed it in a guide book as one of the “Top 100 Most Enjoyably Bad Movies Ever Made.”
I don’t believe Road House is a bad movie. I think it’s exactly the movie it wants to be, and to that end is executed just about as well as it could be. I find nothing shameful about that. I think the movie is still great fun and I’m happy to revisit it.
The 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray
Despite its lack of appreciation from critics and only modest box office success during its original theatrical release, Road House became a cult hit on cable TV and home video over the years. In the Blu-ray era, the film saw several releases starting in 2009, one of the more notable being a Collector’s Edition from Shout! Factory in 2016.
In November of 2022, boutique label Vinegar Syndrome licensed the movie for a 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray release, issued first in a Limited Edition box set with deluxe packaging and collectible book. A standard edition in a regular keepcase followed in early 2023, without the book or the box. That’s the version I opted for.
Vinegar Syndrome’s 4K transfer claims to be “newly restored from its 35mm original camera negative.” The 2.40:1 image is very sharp and nicely detailed, with a light but unobtrusive grain texture. The HDR grading is generally mild and doesn’t call too much attention to itself, but looks natural and not overblown for a movie of this vintage. However, colors on the 4K disc seem a little pushed, with flesh tones that frequently have too much red in them. That being said, Road House is a gaudy movie by nature, and the look doesn’t necessarily feel inappropriate.
I don’t have any earlier video editions available for comparison. The Shout! Factory Blu-ray boasted a transfer supervised by Director of Photography Dean Cundey, while this one does not. I’m not sure how much stock I’d put in a comparison between the two, though, as Cundey has a history of revising the look of his movies every time he supervises new video transfers for them.
In any case, if the red push really is a problem, it appears to be limited to the 4K disc. Color saturation is noticeably dialed back in comparison in the 1080p SDR transfer on the accompanying Blu-ray from the same master.
The movie’s soundtrack comes in DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 or 2.0 options. The disc defaults to the 5.1 track and so did I. In a few scenes, dialogue sounds a little muddy or buried in the mix, but that doesn’t happen too often. While this isn’t a powerhouse action movie, it has a handful of gunshots and a couple explosions, all competently delivered. The surround channels come to the life during the many bar brawl scenes, and the sound of the Ben Gazzara character’s helicopter even matrixes well to overhead speakers with Dolby Surround Upmixer enabled.
The only extras on the 4K disc are two audio commentaries recycled from older video releases, one by director Rowdy Herrington and another by fans Kevin Smith and Scott Mosier. Disc 2 (the first Blu-ray) adds five new interviews from 2022 with supporting actors and the film’s stunt coordinator – plus a trailer and a still gallery. The final disc then contains a host of archival features including a making-of documentary, a director interview, and several featurettes.
Related
- Remake
- Sam Elliott (star)
- Hilary Henkin (screenwriter)
- Other Awesome Movies of 1989
Note: All screenshots on this page were taken from the standard Blu-ray edition of the film and are used for illustration purposes only.
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