The Trouble With Tarantulas

Modesty, Klingons, receding hair and tarantulas – all them have been the enemy of William Shatner at one time or another. But it’s his epic battle against the last one that’s my favourite, in the 1977 nature run amok film Kingdom of the Spiders.

I’ve been fascinated with this movie since I was but a wee, bug-despising lad and caught a few minutes of it on television. Among the scenes that I watched was one freak-out featuring a dead guy in a truck who’s ghoulishly covered in webbing. It scared the hell out of me for years later, as I was sure tarantulas would come crawling out of my closet and from under my bed to cocoon me during the night. But, when, as slightly less spider-shocked adult, I tracked the movie down on video, I discovered one of the most fun killer creepy-crawly movies ever made.

Shatner stars as country veterinarian Robert “Rack” Hansen, who loves ridin’ the range as much as romancing the ladies, and the only thing he wears better than a cowboy hat and tight pants is a mischievous smirk. When a local farmer – played by beloved character actor Woody Strode – discovers his livestock are being preyed on by legions of tarantulas that have built gigantic mounds in his field, Rack tries to make sense of the normally solitary creatures’ behaviour. To help his unravel the mystery, and eventually give in to his inescapable charm, is lady scientist Diane Ashley (Tiffany Bolling). Together they discover each other… oh yeah, and that the mass tarantula attacks are caused by pesticides, making or a nice environmental message. Before they can stem the attacks, though, the eight-legged invasion is on. Along with a handful of others, our heroes board up the doors and windows of a motel – Night of the Living Dead-style – as a sea of spiders attacks the town. (Naturally, Shatner handles the situation, after all, he did have practice during the Star Trek “Trouble With Tribbles” episode.)

Few, if any, B-movies are this ambitious. The filmmakers used what must’ve been dozens and dozens of real tarantulas in certain scenes to give the proper invasion effect, and it’ll make your skin crawl. Plus, the actors really go for it, letting themselves get covered from head to toe in real arachnids; even Shatner has one on his face at one point!

You can also see some of them get squished, which hasn’t exactly made the movie a PETA must-watch. It does make it a very unique, they-don’t-make-‘em-like-they-used-to kinda film, however. Director John “Bud” Cardos, who made a bunch of well-known drive-in flicks, including Satan’s Sadists, Nightmare in Wax and Hell’s Angels on Wheels, wasn’t afraid to terrorize child actors with the critters, stage elaborate stunt sequences (including a bi-plane crash caused by the creatures!) or even glue a live one on to the back of a live rat! The ‘70s duds, some cheezoid plastic spiders and the campy performance of Bill S. only make Kingdom of the Spiders more outrageously likable, of course.

Now, if you owned the previous cheap-o pan and scan version, you’ll definitely need to upgrade to Shout! Factory’s just released special edition, which has a cleaned up print, vintage poster art on the cover (which on first glance seems to depict Shatner holding his burning, erect manhood… snicker, snicker), audio commentary from Cardos and others, and featurettes, including a new interview with El Shatareeno about the film. He talks about how he loved the chance to ride a horse in the movie, how it was difficult to find actors willing to work with spiders, and then, well, he just kinda rambles on about stuff that doesn’t make a lotta sense but is great for laugh – you can’t help but love the guy.

Kingdom of the Spiders just ain’t one of his best movies, I’d say it’s the best killer spider movie ever made. So step inside Shatner’s web, if ya got the guts.

 

-Dave Alexander

Jackie Earle Haley Checks in From Vancouver

He may be building a career playing guys you wouldn’t wanna be locked in a room with, but Jackie Earle Haley, a.k.a. Kelly Leak in the original Bad News Bears films, a.k.a. Rorschach in The Watchmen, a.k.a. the new Freddy Kruger in the upcoming remake of Nightmare on Elm Street, a.k.a. a criminally insane inmate in Shutter Island, is a very likable dude, at least on the phone. I did a quick interview with him this past Friday, for which he called from Vancouver to explain just how friggin’ cool it is to be in Martin Scorsese’s latest movie, the aforementioned Shutter Island.

 

For starters, what are you doing in Vancouver? Checking out the games?

 

“I’m out here working on a TV show called Human Target. I’m having a blast out here; I really thought I was going to avoid the Olympics at all costs because I’m living downtown, but I’ve really been sucked into the entire mood. It’s really infectious, it’s really fun. I’ve been walking downtown in the throngs of people from all over the place. I went and looked at the Olympic flame and I’ve been taking a bunch of pictures.”

 

What the best part of it all?

 

“What’s really exciting is watching this stuff on TV in the city where it’s going on at. The view from my window looks just like the view from behind all the TV anchors. It’s fun when you can see a plane land on TV and I can hear it through my window. This is one of the most beautiful places on the planet, and I’ve been all over.”

 

Well, the Olympics are great ‘n’ all, but holy crap, man, you got to make a movie with Martin Scorsese! Do tell.

 

“I can’t even get my head around it, and I just went to the premiere! Dude, it was so incredibly exciting and… wow! It was just unreal. I got to go out there and spend a couple weeks working with Marty and Leo [DiCaprio] and Michelle [Williams]. It was this unreal experience, working with the master.”

 

And you even get to call to him “Marty.”

 

“Isn’t that cool?!?”

 

What is he like on set?

 

“He’s a super sweet guy and he really knows what he’s doing, he knows what he wants. He’s got such cinematic and storytelling ability; he just understands every single aspect of filmmaking, and it was just a joy to work for the guy, to sit there and listen to him ramble on about historical film knowledge. I remember Leo’s doing this shot where he’s reacting to sounds that are off-camera, and Marty leans over and says, [affecting Scorsese’s New York accent] ‘Y’know the first guy that did this – y’know, with sounds off-camera – was in 1928 and the guy’s name was such-‘n’-such, and then about eight years later this other guy took it a little further.’ He literally went through seven decades of history to the bit that got us the shot. It was brilliant.”

 

I haven’t seen the film yet, so tell me a bit about your character.

 

“I play a character named George Noyce [pictured], and he’s a patient – or an inmate, depending on how you wanna look at it – in the psychiatric ward on this island. I play the pivotal scene with Leo’s character, Teddy, in the movie. It’s this cool scene, and it’s a really cool movie.”

 

He’s frightening looking in the trailer. Is this another character where you underwent a physical transformation? Are you buried under makeup?

 

“There’s some bruises and stuff, but not too much, not as much as Elias Koteas’ character [Laeddis – a hideously scarred inmate]. Not that bad.”

 

So, how did you get involved with the film in the first place?

 

“That’s an easy one to answer: Marty called my agent and said, ‘I’ve chosen Jackie to play George Noyce,’ and our response was, ‘That’s awesome, where would you like us, sir? [laughs] Where do we report?”

 

Had Scorsese cast you after seeing Watchmen?

 

“No, I…. [pause] I almost forgot – I made him an audition tape for The Departed! My audition tape was too late in the process by the time they got it, though. The response was that Marty said, ‘This guy is awesome, we wanna put him in the movie, but we already cast all the parts.’”

 

You’re becoming quite a sought-after character actor. Are there any iconic roles that you’d love to play in the future?

 

“Santa Claus. Then we could have a double feature of Nightmare on Elm Street and Santa Clause 8, or whatever.”

 

Um, Santa Clause? Really?

 

“Naw, there’s nothing sitting on the table where I wish I could play that character in that thing.”

 

So right now you’re just happy to go with the flow. How would you describe your sudden burst in popularity so many years after starting out as a child actor in the Bad News Bears movies?

 

“It’s just been a rollercoaster ride and I’m on it with my hands in the air, going, ‘Whooo-whooo!’”

 

-Dave Alexander

Lamentations of a Blu-ray Outcast

For a movie geek, I’m surprisingly slow at adapting to the latest, greatest movie-watching technology. I stuck with VHS longer than most of the folks I knew, finally giving in – or “upgrading,” and some non-Luddites say – when I got a Mac laptop with a DVD player. Or maybe it was because I’m such a movie lover that I held out, not wanting to re-buy that extensive collection on another format. Or perhaps I just don’t handle change well – after all, VHS was all I’d ever known for many years. (At least I dodged the laser disc bullet.)

Of course, as much as I disliked having to rebuild my movie collection, my greedy side craved all those extras, my snooty cineaste side needed the correct aspect ratio, and from a practical standpoint, a smaller package meant more shelf space for an even larger collect. OK, those reasons, and there’s obvious selling point of improved image quality, but that was never a priority. I watch a lot of older films and a lot of genre B-movies, and often they didn’t look that great to begin with. I love that warm, organic quality of celluloid, and some movies simply don’t benefit from clarity (case in point: the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which is meant to be muddy-looking; it adds the documentary realism that makes it so damn frightening). I’m the type who would rather watch a scratchy film than a pristine digital projection. A film snob? Maybe.

So, Blu-ray doesn’t hold the same appeal as DVD did because the main selling point is the image quality – and you lose some of those DVD extras to precious disc space needed for all those bytes. Hmm… then again, the packages are even thinner, so additional shelf means an even larger collection! But, then again, because there’s been such a push-on for Blu-ray, DVDs have been dropping in price, and I’ve been buying up cheap movies. I could stop buying now and still have enough to watch for the better part of a year. Oh yeah, and if you’re gonna get a Blu-ray player, you gotta have a hi-def TV, which I can’t afford right now. And so on and so forth…

This is the discussion I’ve been having with myself about this whole leap to Blu-ray situation. Yet I suspect none of it will influence my decision as much as the Blu-ray Mafia. No, I’m not talking about consumer strong-arm tactics.

The Blu-ray Mafia is comprised of my movie-lovin’ friends who treat their Blu-ray players like memberships in an exclusive club and take much joy in my exclusion from the hi-def party. They don’t even call it “Blu-ray” but simply “the ray,” and without one, I’ve become a veritable pixel peasant. My cries of not wanting to re-buy my movies is met with derision and explanations about how Blu-ray “up-converts” regular – pfft – DVDs, so I still hang on to the silly antiques.

I hear all about how once I start watching on Blu-ray, I won’t even be able to watch regular old DVDs anymore, how I’ll just have a very large collection of drink coasters, makeshift Christmas tree ornaments and plastic mirrors that I can take with me hiking in case I get lost and have to signal a plane. And, the ultimate insult: the bastards refer to my DVDs as “Brown-rays.” Brown-rays! So harsh.

The Blu-ray Mafia is leaning hard on me, but for now I’m holding out. One day soon, I may even join the analogue Amish and start trolling the flea markets for Beta-Max.

[above image from here]

 

-Dave Alexander

A Story About a Song About The Story of Anvil

If you love great documentaries, rock music, underdog stories or Canadian pop culture, you’ve probably seen Anvil!: The Story of Anvil. If not, I assume you’re in prison and you’re not reading this anyhow – there’s just no other excuse for not seeing one of the greatest music docs/Canadian films ever made. Sacha Gervasi’s award-winning tale of the 30-year-old lovable but Spinal Tap-like hoser metal band Anvil has been getting a lot of love everywhere to the point where it’s becoming a genuine pop culture phenomenon.

I heard proof of this tonight while listening to Alan Cross’ Explore Music show on the radio (essential listening if you’re a music lover). He talked about a new song by Toronto hip hop artist D-Sisive (pictured in the mask), based on Anvil!: The Story of Anvil. On the show, which is archived on the Explore Music site, D-sisive talks about how he watched the film and fell in love with it. He even recognized some of the locations and figured out that he basically lives in the same neighbourhood as Anvil singer Rob “Lips” Kudlow, and even started driving by the singer’s house.

Eventually this minor “stalking” resulted in the song “Anvil.” It uses samples from the documentary, opening with a clip of Lips saying, “The way I look at it, really, is that it can never get any worse, so even if it never gets better, that’s the way it is” and ending with musing that “The reality of it is, we’re not getting any younger” so you gotta play music while you can. “Anvil” is a reflective song, in which D-Sisive raps about his own career and how he works hard but still doesn’t have that much to show for himself.

In the interview he admits to laughing at the band at first, but then professes respect for them; you get the sense that he sees the group as both a kindred spirit and a warning.

One line compares D-Sisive (real name: Derek Christoff) and his collaborator Rob Baker to Lips and Lips’ childhood best friend/Anvil drummer Robb Reiner: “I mean it when I say, ‘Derek Christoff and Rob-o Baker will never be Lips and Rob-o,’catering kindergarten kids in Scarborough, trying to living the dream, depending on tomorrow.” It’s not quite clear if he’s rapping that he’ll never live up to Lips’ hard working, never-give-up nature, or if he’s saying that he’ll never let himself become a musician who has to work a blue collar day job to get by. I’d say a bit of both.

You can hear for yourself, here, where you can download or stream the track, but be quick because it might not be up there long. Spinner just ran this article saying that the Anvil! camp was not impressed by the unsanctioned sampling (FYI: the song also uses chunks of the track “Werewolf Head” by Dead Man’s Bones, which is actor Ryan Gosling’s band). According to the article, D-Sisive “prepped a remix of the song, replacing the Anvil clips and references with content from classic hoser comedy FUBAR.” The new version of the song is embedded in the article, apparently, but it doesn’t seem to play.

For more on D-Sisive, go here; for more on Anvil! The Story of Anvil, go here, and for more on FUBAR, go here.

For a picture on an actual anvil, go here.

 

 

-Dave Alexander

Ha Ha Ha Ha Hackers

Let’s go back in time, to a year called 1995. The DVD was announced, eBay and Yahoo were founded, Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-animated film was released and a Hollywood movie about cyber culture hits theatres. The title: Hackers. The tagline: “Boot up or shut up.” The concept: “United Artists welcomes you to the new world.” The dialogue: “Hack the planet,” “It’s too much machine for you” and “You wanna be an elite? You gotta do a seriously righteous hack!” This was Hollywood taking a subculture and sexing it up while reducing it to a series of catchphrases. And a decade-and-a-half later, it’s utterly hilarious. After all, nothing dates a film worse than technology, so a film about new technology is going to retain all the hipness of pogs, Crystal Pepsi or Hypercolor T-shirts.

Johnny Lee Miller – still best known as Sick Boy in Trainspotting – stars as Dade Murphey, a hacker whose handle is “Crash Override” (which sounds a little too much like the Playstation game Crash Bandicoot, released the next year). We meet Dade when he’s an eleven-year-old on trial for – what else?!? – hacking, under the pseudonym “Zero Cool.”

We now know that this kid is a serious hotshot – awesome!

Flash forward and eighteen-year-old Dade is up to his old tricks, hacking into a television station and changing its programming for kicks. He’s also moved to New York City, where he meets a bunch of other hackers at his school who also like to rollerblade, play videogames (at a sort-of cyber café that looks like a cross between a video arcade, a funhouse and a Tron-themed flea market), pose with various Coke products and dress like they were kicked out of Oingo Boingo because they couldn’t “tone it down.” Among them is Kate (a.k.a. “Acid Burn”) a pouty girl hacker in a boy’s world played by a very fresh-faced Angelina Jolie, and Emmanual Goldstein (a.k.a. “Cereal Killer”), played by Mathew Lillard as one of the most irritating comic relief characters ever laid to film. He looks like a guy who’d get beat up at Burning Man Festival for drinking glow sticks, and he rattles off one liners such as, “This is a wake-up call to the Nintendo Generation!”)

When one of the hackers with something to prove because “I don’t have an identity because I don’t have a handle” breaks into a corporate computer and steals a “garbage” file that actually contains an incriminating virus meant to siphon money from the company, the entire group is pursued by “The Plague.” He’s the Jolt Cola drinkin’, skateboard ridin’, trenchcoat wearin’ bad guy, the hacker responsible for the malicious software – which will also cause oil tankers to spill, creating an ecological disaster. But, he’s also the company’s computer security guy and will stop at nothing to protect his secret, even sending the Feds after the group. Now the raver nerd Scooby gang must go on the run and unite other hackers in order to launch a group hack in order to clear their names. Group hack – yeah!

The movie was trying so, so very hard to be cool and cutting edge, including having characters drool over a 28bps modem, dig through reams of dot matrix printer paper while looking for evidence, and receive instructions such as, “Turn on your laptop; set it to receive a file.” But of all the hilariously dated cyber shenanigans cluttering this film’s desktop, the funniest is the way in which director Iain Softley (K-Pax, Inkheart) decided to visualize all this rogue computing. He actually shows flying numbers and spinning equations flying around in monitors, and even the past characters’ heads. While the current cliché is to show a scroll of green 1’s and 0’s, this was before The Matrix, so “hacking” in Hackers still consists of the good old spinning and flying digital digits. So nostalgic… . Makes you wonder what the future of cinematic “computing” will look like – personally, I’m hoping that abacus holograms catch on and become de rigeur.

Of course, in another fifteen years someone will be writing a similar article about a cyber culture movie that hilariously has characters using Blackberries and listening to “Mp3s” on – ha ha ha! – iPods. Therefore, it’s our job to laugh if up as much as possible in the meantime, while we still can.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to find a way to make my laptop computer interface with a phone line so I can hack into a bank machine and prove to everyone on the Information Superhighway who’s really elite.

 

-Dave Alexander

A Different Sorta Dude

Scraggly hair and beard: check. Smokes pot: check. Often seen with tumbler of favourite alcoholic beverage in hand: check. Has a nickname: check. Walks into a bowling alley and saddles up to the bar: check. Rocks a pair of aviator sunglasses: check. Sleeps around: check. Drives a beat up ‘70s-era vehicle: check. Dresses slovenly: check. Knows a Latino named Jesus: check. Is played by Jeff Bridges: check and check.

All of the above apply to both Jeff “The Dude” Lebowski and Bad Blake, the main character in Crazy Heart – though the latter is a Dude of different feather. When we meet Blake, he’s a 57-year-old, four time divorced, faded country star riding the remains of his own coattails. He drives himself across the U.S. in a ’78 Suburban, barely making ends meet by playing one small club (or in one case a bowling alley!) show after another. A disheveled mess of humanity, he’s drunk pretty much all the time on his signature bourbon, smokes almost as much as he breathes and beds the odd aging groupie. Although he’s rarely lugging around much more than a bottle and his guitar, he’s saddled with plenty of baggage to make him bitter and defeated (he hasn’t written a song in years and his former protégé is a big, wealthy country star), except for those couple hours a night when he’s onstage.

According to Wikipedia, writer-director Scott Cooper originally wanted to do a biopic of Merle Haggard but the rights to his life story were too hard to get, so instead he adapted Thomas Cobb’s 1988 novel, with a main character based on Haggard, Waylon Jennings and Kris Kristofferson – some of the baddest boys to ever pick up an acoustic guitar.

Blake finds salvation in the form a journalist named Jean (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a much younger single mother who falls in love with him. Things star looking up for Blake – he gets along famously with Jean’s young son, accepts a stadium-sized opening gig with the aforementioned protégé (played with surprising authenticity by Irishman Colin Farrell – he even sings!) and decides to track down the son he hasn’t seen for 25 years (noticing a theme here?). But things aren’t that easy when you’re a self-sabotaging alcoholic and screw-ups loom on the horizon.

Critics have decried a few questionable plot choices in Crazy Heart, and many of the secondary characters feel underdeveloped (e.g. Blake’s best – and maybe only – friend, played by Robert Duvall). But it’s way easy to overlook in light of Bridges’ stellar empathetic performance. In a lot of ways Blake is like a real version of the Dude, a man whose lax lifestyle defines him, but it’s caught up to this cowboy and he wants to change. (Also, there’s nary a soiled carpet, kidnapped trophy wife or lingonberry pancake-eating nihilist in sight.) Bridges owns the screen, making the character completely absorbing and adding amazing details, right down to the way he familiarly pushes on the power window of his Suburban to get it to close properly – a common problem with vehicles of that vintage.

But the movie is almost as equally held together with music. Bridges – who previously sang a version of “Ring of Fire” for the soundtrack of the 2000 movie The Contender – is absolutely natural as a bar-hardened country outlaw, and performs his own songs like a natural. Great goddamn songs, too. Not surprisingly, the man behind the soundtrack is writer-producer-singer T-Bone Burnett (Oh Brother, Where Art, Thou?, Cold Mountain, Walk the Line and, yes, he even worked on The Big Lebowski).

If you like old time country and roots music, the soundtrack is a must. There’s a sixteen-track and extended 23-track version, with plenty of classics, multiple versions of some songs, the Golden Globe-winning and Oscar-nominated Burnett-penned track “The Weary Kind (Theme From Crazy Heart),” and several tracks performed by Bridges, as well as two by Farrell and one by Duvall. If you don’t want to listen to decades-old country in a rundown tavern over some cheap beers, then, well, this just isn’t your kinda movie – go watch Avatar again.

This year’s Oscars sees Gyllenhaal nominated for Supporting Actress and Bridges nominated for Actor in a Leading Role, and bet your beard he deserves that semi-meaningful little trophy. If this dude don’t win, it’ll be a f**kin travesty, maaan.

 

-Dave Alexander

Beyond the Thin Blue Line

I’ll take a bad cop over a good cop any day. At least in the movies, where morally ambiguous lawmen make for some of the most memorable characters. There are plenty of films where bad cops are the villains, such as Gary Oldman’s baddie in The Professional, Orson Welles as the heavy (literally) in A Touch of Evil, and Hal Holbrook’s foil to Dirty Harry in Magnum Force. And there are the films where the good cop swims upstream against corruption, notably Cop Land, Serpico and The Departed. But I prefer the films that give you a lawman that’s difficult to both love and loathe. Usually these movies offer up a complex character that requires a very strong performance in order to work.

This weekend, on the recommendation of a friend, I watched a great example in the under-the-radar cop/crime drama Cement. The 1999 film features the late Chris Penn as Bill Holt, a cop who’s up to his eyeballs in graft money and kick-backs. The story starts with him at a construction site, where he’s slowly encasing a guy in a cement column. Told from the viewpoint of his drug-addled, equally dirty, but still more morally sound partner (played by Jeffrey Wright, who appeared in Casino Royale as Felix), the narrative unfolds in a series of flashbacks. We learn that Holt’s longstanding arrangement with local gangsters is in trouble because $75 000 has gone missing. We also find out that his wife (played by Sherilyn Fenn) is sleeping with one of the gangsters. A series of events, initiated by Holt, leads to bloody revenge all around.

The beefy Penn is frightening as a loose-cannon-with-a-hair-trigger, who drinks too much and jokes around  a lot but can turn on a dime – that unpredictable violence that characterizes Joe Pesci’s character in Goodfellas. He’s a sweaty, trigger-happy hulk full of self-loathing, and all it takes is him finding out the truth about his wife to push him over the edge.

It’s not a perfect film by any means – some of the gangster characters are overwrought, for example – but Penn’s performance anchors it. It’s well worth seeking out, if for no other reason than to see him rage across the screen.

If you’re looking for additional bad movie cops, here are my five fave movies in the same vein, with links to the trailers.

 

Bad Lieutenant (1992)

Harvey Keitel plays the baddest of bad cops in Abel Ferra’s bleak character study of what the tagline efficiently describes as a “Gambler. Thief. Junkie. Killer. Cop.” Plus, if you’ve always wanted to see some full frontal Keitel (and, gee, who hasn’t?), this film’s most notorious scene (after the one where he pleasures himself in front of a girl he’s pulled over) has him suffering a mental breakdown in the buff. The movie ultimately questions whether or not he’s beyond redemption.

 

Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (2009)

The Werner Herzog in-name-only sequel again centres around a train-wreck of a detective, but Nicholas Cage plays this less despicable cop for both pathos and laughs, making his downward spiral a lot more entertaining. Plus, Herzog’s wonderfully weird touches (random iguanas, break dancer hallucinations, etc.) make for a bad lieutenant who’s strange man in an even stranger land.

 

Insomnia (1997)

No, not the remake with Al Pacino – the original Norwegian crime thriller has Stellan Skarsgård playing a cop who’s way more morally compromised than his Hollywood counterpart. As his character investigates a murder in a small town way up north (during 24-hour daylight, making this a reverse film noir), he not only covers up his accidental killing of his partner, he gets creepy with an underage girl and fights against the guilt-ridden insomnia that’s wearing down his judgment as he pursues the killer. He’s the most complex dirty cop of the bunch here.

 

Narc (2002)

Henry Oak is the greatest name ever for a thick, violent snapcase like the one played by Ray Liotta in Narc. The guy is anger incarnate as he relentlessly pursues a cop killer, while his new partner – played by Jason Patric – discovers that he’s hiding a terrible secret. Patric is the star, but Liotta’s red-faced, vein-popping performance is goddamned scary.

 

Training Day (2001)

Similarly, although Ethan Hawke stars here, Denzel Washington steals the show as a veteran narcotics officer showing Hawke’s character the ropes on the frontline of the drug war. Washington’s Oscar-winning performance as the bombastic, narcissistic, line-crossing Alonzo is nearly Shakespearian (and, admittedly, close to self-parody). While the other dirty cops on this list are close to the edge or over it, Alonzo is frightening and fascinating because he cruises around like he’s invincible, and you kinda hope that he is.

 

-Dave Alexander