If you only know Judd Nelson as the rebellious, soft-hearted criminal from The Breakfast Club, watching him in William Lustig's Relentless is going to give you some serious whiplash. He is still playing a guy with a bad attitude and a leather jacket, but this time around, there is no redemptive dance sequence at the end. Instead, he spends ninety minutes sweating, staring with massive dark circles under his eyes, and strangling random people he finds in the white pages.
Relentless came out in 1989, right at the tail end of a decade that was absolutely obsessed with gritty, sun-bleached Los Angeles crime thrillers. It sits in that comfortable, slightly greasy space between a theatrical police procedural and a straight-to-video slasher. It is not trying to reinvent the wheel, but it has a raw, mean energy that makes it incredibly easy to watch, even when the plot logic starts to stretch thin.
The movie follows two LAPD detectives who are trying to track down a killer the media has dubbed the Sunset Killer. We have Sam Dietz, played by Leo Rossi, who is a freshly transferred rookie from New York. He is the classic "neurotic East Coast guy who cannot get used to how laid-back everyone is in California" trope. His partner is Bill Malloy, played by the legendary Robert Loggia, who does his usual gravel-voiced, cynical veteran routine.
The dynamic between Rossi and Loggia is easily the best part of the movie. They have this easy, bickering chemistry that feels like it belongs in a much classier film. Loggia is particularly great, bringing a weary, old-school dignity to a character who has clearly seen too many dead bodies and drank too many cups of lukewarm precinct coffee. Rossi plays off him well as the outsider trying to make a name for himself without losing his sanity or his family in the process.
The film spends a surprising amount of time on Dietz's home life, showing his interactions with his wife Carol (played by Meg Foster) and their young son. In lesser thrillers, these scenes feel like pure filler, just waiting around for the next murder scene. Here, they actually give the story a grounded, human heart. You get the sense that Dietz genuinely loves his family, which makes the impending clash with a ruthless killer feel personal long before the two men ever cross paths in the climax.
Now, let's talk about Judd Nelson. His character, Buck Taylor, is a psychological trainwreck. His father was a legendary, abusive cop who basically trained Buck to be a weapon, beating him endlessly to "build character" and forcing him to run drills until his legs gave out. Buck wanted nothing more than to follow in his father's footsteps, only to get rejected from the police academy on psychological grounds. Naturally, he takes this rejection well and decides to prove how good a cop he would have been by using police tactics to murder civilians and taunt the homicide department.
Nelson's performance is incredibly strange, and honestly, that is what makes it so fascinating. He does not play Buck as a charismatic, calculating mastermind like Hannibal Lecter or John Doe. He plays him as an absolute freak who is constantly on the verge of a vibrating panic attack. He wears tiny black gloves, mumbles to himself in dirty alleyways, and has this wide-eyed, manic intensity that should make him stand out to literally anyone walking down the street. It is a wild, theatrical performance that occasionally crosses over into being completely ridiculous, but you cannot look away from it.
William Lustig, who directed horror cult classics like Maniac and Maniac Cop, brings a really solid, grimy visual style to the table. He knows how to make Los Angeles look less like a postcard and more like a giant, hostile concrete desert. The murder scenes have a cold, unpleasant tension to them. They are not stylized or fun; they are awkward, quiet, and uncomfortable. Lustig makes sure you feel the weight of every room, and the score keeps things perpetually uneasy with its harsh, rhythmic electronic pulses.
Lustig's background in low-budget horror works heavily in the film's favor here. He treats the killer's stalks like set pieces in a slasher movie, building suspense not through big explosions, but through the quiet terror of someone breaking into a target's house while they are asleep. The Los Angeles of Relentless feels dangerous, sunbaked, and deeply unglamorous. It is filled with dim apartments, fluorescent-lit police stations, and empty parking lots after midnight.
The second half of the movie shifts into a standard cat-and-mouse game once Buck realizes Dietz is getting close to him. Of course, this means Buck has to target Dietz's family, leading to a home invasion climax that feels a bit formulaic compared to the interesting build-up. The writing gets a little lazy here, relying on characters making classic horror-movie mistakes just to keep the suspense going, like stepping away from open doors or failing to check dark corners when they know a murderer is on the loose.
Even with those formulaic beat-by-beat thriller tropes, the tension rarely drops. The finale in the Dietz household is claustrophobic and dirty. It does not feel like an action movie standoff with clever quips; it feels like an ugly struggle for survival between two men who represent completely opposite outcomes of the same harsh world.
Still, Relentless holds up surprisingly well as a piece of late-eighties genre history. It is rough around the edges, the dialogue is occasionally clunky, and Judd Nelson's performance is an acquired taste, but it has a soul. It has that tactile, physical quality of pre-digital filmmaking where the streets actually look dirty, the sweat on the actors' faces is real, and the punches actually look like they hurt.
The bare bones Blu-ray release from Alliance as part of their retro VHS collection perfectly captures the feeling of a late 80s video store release. The slipcover art and faux-wear on the packaging hit that exact nostalgic sweet spot, making it feel like something you picked up off a dusty bottom shelf on a Friday night. It might not have a mountain of features to tear through, but it looks great on a shelf next to other physical media, and the film itself has not looked this clean since it was playing in theaters back in 1989.
The video transfer handles the film's heavy film grain and dark, shadow-drenched interior scenes impressively well, giving it a crisp high-definition presentation without stripping away that essential 35mm grit. It will be available on July 28th to own, and if you are a fan of old-school cop thrillers, physical media collecting, or just want to see Judd Nelson go completely off the rails, this one is definitely worth digging up for movie night.
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