When photo framer Richard Dane accidentally shoots a burglar during a late-night break in, everyone is content to write the incident off as an open and shut case of self-defence. However, it’s only after the dead man’s criminal father appears and begins tormenting Dane’s family and is subsequently arrested, that it transpires there is a lot more going on than the police are telling them.
1980s retro-pulp thrillers have almost become a sub-genre in themselves, as the filmmakers who grew up on them reach the stage where they’ve gained enough influence to make their own versions. As such, Cold In July follows recent fare like Blue Ruin and Bad Country in its themes of double-crossing and vengeance.
The film is based on a novel of the same name by Joe R. Lansdale, a ridiculously prolific genre author who wrote the novella upon which cult horror Bubba Ho-Tep was based and several comic book miniseries starring anti-hero bounty hunter Jonah Hex. His writing is often bound by excess, and his 1989 tale Cold In July incorporates a particularly unpleasant urban legend that was a sickening and far more dangerous cousin to the Video Nasty scare taking place across the Atlantic around the same time. The film hews close to its source material, highlighting the ultimate absurdity of the era’s prevalent swaggering machismo that despite the best efforts of Sylvester Stallone, is in no danger of being taken seriously any more.
Audiences are likely to be most familiar with Michael C Hall as friendly neighbourhood serial killer Dexter Morgan, but family man Richard is a far less at home than the Bay Harbour Butcher when facing down ruthless thugs, the local police chief even going as far to tell him that killing someone “must have been hard for a man like you. His vulnerability provides a counterpoint to the bluster of Don Johnson’s cowboy PI and the menace of Sam Sheperd’s sinister ex-con, imparting what little heart a violent noir mystery is capable of possessing.
Each layer of the mystery is peeled back at a measured pace, and it’s quite some time before everything is revealed and the abhorrent truth behind the lies fostered upon the protagonists is unveiled in all its morally reprehensible repugnancy, leaving only the question of what it is they’re prepared to do about it.
Overall Verdict: Director/writer team Jim Mickle and Nick Damici continue to defy categorisation, following a mutant rat-people horror, a Gothic western and a remake Mexican cannibal satire with an unapologetic throwback to a decade defined by overkill where real men are manly men, if only in the eyes of each other.
Reviewer: Andrew Marshall