Hello Neighbor!
I don’t know your name, but we often give each other awkward half-smiles when I run into you in the hallway. I’ve probably seen you at your worst, greasy haired in your wrinkled pajamas as you shamefully trudge up the stairs with a bag of Uber Eats. I’ve heard your mucus filled coughs and hacks through the walls, and even smelled your cigarette smoke daily outside of my door. I don’t mind. I’d never judge you, but I do have a very important request: please stop playing the film Road House every night on max volume.
Listen, I totally understand why you love it. Patrick Swayze’s a badass, Kelly Lynch is super hot, and Sam Elliot is a great villain. But It’s been keeping my roommate and I up for weeks, and more importantly, it’s making me realize how ridiculous the movie actually is.
Patrick Swayze was always my biggest crush growing up. I loved him as the hot older brother in The Outsiders and Johnny in Dirty Dancing, but Road House always took the cake for his hottest movie. Watching him rip some dudes throat out with his bare hands was basically my sexual awakening. Yet, after being forced to listen to his nauseatingly broody lines for weeks through the wall, I’m beginning to be turned off.
Honestly, the entire concept of the film is absurd. Swayze plays a bouncer but he acts like he’s seen combat. In one scene he literally stitches himself up in the bathroom to prove what a “tough guy” he is. He acts like being a bouncer is equivalent to being some sort of ancient warrior and people treat him like a celebrity. I can’t be the only one thinking it’s crazy right?
The goofiness is truly never-ending: The bar is literally called the “Double Deuce,” The villain of the movie has thugs who call him “Boss,” The villain also does needlessly over-the-top evil stuff like demolishing people’s businesses with monster trucks. But the coup de grace of the absurd behavior in this film is a line delivered by one of Sam Elliot’s thugs in the middle of a fight with Swayze where he literally says “I used to fuck guys like you in prison.” What? Why would you ever make your villain say that? It’s not threatening, it’s just weird. Swayze’s character must have thought so too because he subsequently ripped his throat out…with his bare hand.
Anyways I’m beginning to think this movie was some sort of ironic response to the homoerotic-over-the-top-badass films of the eighties because if it’s not, it just sucks. So could you please stop watching it every night? Find another shitty eighties movie to binge, maybe Footloose.
Thanks,
Sophie (the girl from Apartment 42)