Country: United States
Genre: Action
Director: Craig R. Baxley
Year: 1991
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
Stone Cold announces itself as trash within seconds. Three thugs hold up a grocery store, hooting and hollering like they’re on crank or something. There’s no attempt at realism. Hair-metal guitar thickens the air. Right away you know you’re in an 80s style action movie (even though Stone Cold came out in ‘91). Then hunk of meatloaf Brian Bosworth shows up sporting the ugliest set of black leather duds ever. The shoulder pads he’s wearing look like stubby wings. I think you can guess what happens next.
It seems that cop Joe Huff (Brian Bosworth) is on a three-week suspension for sassing a superior officer. The Eff-Bee-Eye makes him an offer: go undercover with a motorcycle gang and the suspension will be wiped out; otherwise, it becomes a six-month suspension without pay. Don’t you hate when that happens?
Does that scenario sound like crap, or what? You’ve got a no-talent cheeseball like Brian Bosworth as the star of your movie and the premise is the moldiest cliche you can muster.
But then Stone Cold surprises you. The first indication that the movie will be better than expected is the stunts, fights and chase scenes. There is no vamping. Every action beat is mapped out surgically and brilliantly filmed and performed. Secondly, aside from Bosworth, there are a lot of excellent character actors involved in the show.
The head of the biker gang is played by the invaluable Lance Henriksen. For once, he has a role worthy of his talent, and he tears into it like a starving tiger. Henriksen is a joy to watch. Henriksen’s trusted lieutenant is William Forsythe. Robert Winley plays a character called Mudfish. But you might miss all that because the filmmakers deliberately choose some actors for the cheese factor, such as Richard Gant.
Don’t be fooled by all the gratuitous T&A in the strip club scenes. It’s obvious (at least to me) that the filmmakers deliberately set out to make a broad cheesy movie (what choice did they have with Brian Bosworth as the star), but with the highest standards of professionalism.
The script by Walter Doniger is so tight you could bounce a quarter off of it. The sequence of events is logical, there are plenty of surprises, and instead of following the preordained path of the canned plot they started out with, they wind up with one of the most gonzo endings of all time. Doniger has gone to the trouble of writing memorable characters. Even the dialog has flavor.
What the heck is going on here?
Well, first off, the director is Craig R. Baxley, who was the stunt coordinator and second unit director on films like “Predator”, “Reds”, “The Long Riders” and “The Warriors.” The stunt coordinator on Stone Cold is Paul Baxley, another legendary stunt coordinator. That explains why the action is so damned good.
But who the heck is writer Walter Doniger? It turns out that Doniger had a fifty year career as a writer and director, with Stone Cold being his final credit. That explains the professionalism of the writing. This isn’t some hack sloughing off a cheap exploitation picture.
If every filmmaker took genre flicks as seriously as Walter Doniger and the Baxleys, we’d have a lot more classics on our hands.
Stone Cold is a rock solid drive-in flick, and a hellavu lot of fun, too.
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