This piece marks the debut of a new series surveying the movie landscape of the 1990s, when everyone in La-La-Wood and beyond tried to make their own Cool Crime Movie modeled on Pulp Fiction—a film they all loved yet did not seem to understand even a little bit. Come with me on a journey through a cinematic universe where everyone dresses like a rockabilly, drops non sequitur pop culture references, and holds their gun sideways: the world of Coattail Tarantino.
In preparation for my survey of the cinematic world Quentin Tarantino birthed written earlier this year, I watched a boatload of movies from the 1990s that owed something to Tarantino stylistically, spiritually, or temporally, films that could have only been made after his success altered the Hollywood landscape. I am often asked by people I’ve made up in my head, “How did you determine what films to watch?” The answer is that I jotted down the names of several movies that immediately came to mind, then looked up lists of year-by-year releases to make note of any others that looked Tarantino-esque—basically, any film that featured crime and/or large groups of similarly dressed Guys Being Dudes strutting down sidewalks. After additional research, the list was winnowed down using a complicated process known as Vibes. In the end, I watched a lot movies that had almost no relationship to Tarantino’s work, but this was only fair and correct. If I was going to make sweeping generalizations about the wave of Cool Bros Doing Crime Movies that littered multiplexes after the smash success of 1994’s Pulp Fiction, then science demanded I prove my theses with an ample amount of data.
It’s important to remember that Tarantino’s emergence as a cultural force created a Hollywood feeding frenzy similar to another phenomenon of this era: the flurry of major label band signings that followed “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” Just like Nirvana sent record labels scrambling to find any act that could be described as “punk” or “indie,” regardless of their musical resemblance to the original article, film production companies were desperate to release anything they could plausibly compare to Pulp Fiction. So even if a movie didn’t that film’s influence or sensibilities, it’s instructive to take note of what 1990s Hollywood thought they could get away with labeling as Tarantino-esque.
As stated in my original post, the overwhelming majority of the films, while often dated in ways that could make me cringe, were no better or worse than meh. It was rare to find a pleasant surprise among the bunch, a film that was genuinely good or at least enjoyable to watch, but it was also rare to find a truly dreadful movie. The real stinkers, though, boy did they stink. I would find myself watching these movies at at a slant or through my hands, unable and unwilling to view them in full, a la George C. Scott in Hardcore. My wife and kid would hear me groaning or exclaiming in anguish and ask if I was in pain, and I would have to admit yes I was in pain because I couldn’t take another minute of Suicide Kings.
The worst of the lot by a country mile was Boondock Saints, a reprehensible tradcath revenge fantasia that took a few years off my life in a single viewing. Were it not for Troy Duffy’s cinematic Chernobyl, however, the bottom spot would have gone to 1996’s Mad Dog Time. I had never heard of it before looking through lists of films from that year, but its cool gangster trappings were enough to land it on my shortlist, a decision I will rue until the day I die. This is one of those films from the era that has almost zero relationship to Tarantino’s films, yet could have only been made after his movies created a madness for anything where Cool Dudes Do Crime. And it is terrible. Beyond terrible. There is no singular word or phrase that can encapsulate how truly, deeply, irredeemably awful this movie is, or the feeling it will give you if forced to watch it.
I am not alone in this assessment; it was named Siskel & Ebert’s worst film of that year, while Ebert’s written review for the Chicago Sun-Times called it “the first movie I have seen that does not improve on the sight of a blank screen viewed for the same length of time.” Entertainment Weekly described it as “jaw-droppingly incoherent.”
You might think a film this bad would be remembered in some capacity, a fabled flop on par with Ishtar or Gigli, yet I’m certain the vast supermajority of people out in the world, even those who were alive for its debut, have never heard of it. The only evidence I have that anyone has watched it since its release is an episode of the Have You Seen This podcast with guest Matt Christman. (I was not aware of this episode until doing research for this post, but their assessment is along the lines of Ebert’s above and mine below.) This maintenance of obscurity is for the greater good of humanity, though, as it prevents more people from being exposed to its toxicity.
When I first decided to revisit this film for a longer review, I was hoping I could rely on the extensive notes I took during my first viewing. I soon discovered that my “extensive notes” were not at all helpful, full of questions the movie refused to answer (“who is that?” “why are they doing this?”) and howls in the dark over the torture I’d inflicted on myself (“OMG I DON’T FUCKING CARE ABOUT ANY OF THIS”). This meant a second viewing would be required if I wanted to be write anything of consequence about it. After contemplating if I really wanted to subject myself to Mad Dog Time again, and enduring a series of traumatic flashbacks that could only be outdone by those who’ve lived through combat, I soldiered forth on a second viewing, which is at least two times more than anyone should watch this thing.
The naive among you may peep the film’s cast and wonder how it could possibly be so bad. Jeff Goldblum! Gabriel Byrne! Richard Dreyfuss! Ellen Barkin! Diane Lane! You might believe these pieces don’t quite fit together yet puzzle over how Mad Dog Time could possibly be so unwatchable. I’m here to assure you it is as unwatchable as anything ever made by humans, and that includes videos of executions.
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