Halloween Countdown: October 24 – I’ll be there when you wake up screaming

Take the director, screenwriter, and several cast members from Repo Man, toss in a bunch of punk and new wave musicians (including the Pogues, Joe Strummer, Grace Jones, Edward Tudor-Pole, Courtney Love, and Elvis Costello), then add an incomprehensible screenplay cribbed from various spaghetti westerns. Bake under the Mediterranean sun for a few weeks and - voilà – you’ve got 1987’s cinematic mess-terpiece, Straight To Hell.

After director Alex Cox original plans for a concert movie fell through due to lack of funding, Cox managed to secure financing for a feature film and flew a small army of friends, musicians, and hangers-on over to Spain to make one of the most frustratingly entertaining movie misfires ever committed to film. An odd mash-up of Touch of Evil and A Fistful of Dollars, Straight to Hell attempts to follow up on the surreal quirkiness of Cox’s Repo Man (and several re-used bits and gags could be used to argue that both films happen in a shared universe), but lacks the earlier film’s goofy enthusiasm. The most inspired parts of the movie (The Pogues as a clan of caffeine-addicted, pickup truck-driving banditos) are too mired in its overall incoherence to achieve escape velocity. It’s a case of ten tenths failing to equal a whole, and one’s viewing experience ends up becoming eighty-six minutes of celebrity cameo-spotting.

The Straight to Hell soundtrack is pretty damn fine, though, and features several otherwise unavailable tracks by Joe Strummer and The Pogues. Most of the material consists of bizarre Morricone-meets Big Audio Dynamite instrumentals. The standout tracks come from The Pogues, who dabbled around with a zydeco-influenced sound on an alternate version of “If I Should Fall From Grace With God” and today’s selection, “Rake at the Gates of Hell.”

The Pogues – Rake at the Gates of Hell (from the Straight to Hell OST, 1987) – The CD reissue added some more incidental tracks and dialogue clips, but dropped a couple tracks from the vinyl release, most notably The Pogues’ sample-heavy version of The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly theme. I know it probably had to do with some licensing and royalties hassle, but part of me is always going to suspect record company execs who like fucking with collectors’ heads.