Not quite the outright remake of The Wild Bunch it's often written up as, but still by some distance Walter Hill's most explicit homage to Sam Peckinpah. Based on a story by John Milius, 1987's Extreme Prejudice pitches upright Texas Ranger Jack Benteen (a suitably monolithic Nick Nolte) against old buddy Cash Bailey (a colourfully demented Powers Boothe), a former DEA enforcer turned major drug baron who's flooding the US with massive amounts of cocaine from his Mexican fortress, where he's surrounded by a small army of heavily-armed desperadoes.
The fundamental tension here isn't whether bipolar salesman Barry (Adam Sandler) will end up with doe-eyed English executive Lena (Emily Watson). No, the question here is one of authorship. At a snappy 97 minutes, detailing Sandler's eccentric but essentially loveable dufus, his explosive temper and wacky air-miles scam, it fits neatly into the Sandler lineage. Yet, with Sandler's broader antics leavened by long tracking shots and static arthouse takes, the film is recognisably the work of pop-auteur Paul Thomas Anderson.
"The night has its price," mysterious blonde Jenny Wright tells Adrian Pasdar's hapless Oklahoma farm boy before giving him a love bite and dragging him off on the road with her Mansonesque 'family' of white-trash serial-killer vampires—headed by a fantastic, dead-eyed Lance Henriksen. Kathryn Bigelow's genre-bending mix of horror, western and Southern gothic drags blood sucking into the modern world. One of the best horror movies of the last 20 years.
