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Showing posts with the label Relentless

Blu-ray Review: Phone Books, Black Gloves, and Late-80s Sleaze in Relentless

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...