Love & a .45 (1994) – DVD

Love and a .45
ZERO STARS/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras A-
starring Gil Bellows, Renee Zellweger, Rory Cochrane, Jeffrey Combs
written and directed by C.M. Talkington

by Bill Chambers Call it Naturally Boring Killers. Scaredy-cat, white-trash lovers Watty (Gil Bellows) and Starlene (Renee Zellweger) are so devoid of personality that, while on the lam, they keep talking about the exploits of other famous outlaw couples (Bonnie and Clyde, for instance). A pop detachment datestamps the piece: In 1999, 1994’s alternately violent and ironic Love and a .45 seems quaint. It’s also intolerable.

The “I Ching”-obsessed Watty Watts (dig that comic-book alliteration) is a convenience-store stick-up man by trade. His earnings of late have been reserved for girlfriend Star’s diamond engagement ring. But he still doesn’t have the money to fully pay off the stone, bought for him on credit by the proverbial Big Boss, and so Watty accepts a typical ‘big-score’ job alongside the hysteria-prone, de rigueur loose cannon Billy Mack Black (Rory Cochrane). The robbery’s botched, natch, and in no time Watty, in a fit of self-preservation, has ditched Billy, killed a couple of cops, and hit the road with Star in search of the Promised Land. Hot on their trail, natch again, are a scorned Billy–think The Getaway, minus cool–and several hitmen who remind us of Reservoir Dogs, Foghorn Leghorn division. (On that note, Love and a .45 actually contains a moment in which one of these slim necktie baddies lies bleeding to death in the backseat of a speeding car!)

True to her moniker, Star covets fame; it’s her only real character trait. Everywhere the couple stops, Star, with fingers crossed they’ll wind up in the press, boasts of their status as criminals to anyone who’ll listen. As an aside, I worry an aneurysm might’ve formed in my brain from hearing Zellweger utter in her squeaky and gravelly Southern pitch, “Wee’re gonna be lyke moooovee staurrrs” over and over and over again. I hear it in my sleep.

Watty and Star take plenty of road-movie detours into Desperate Celebrity Cameo-ville. There’s the late, great Jack Nance as a preacher bound and gagged in recompense for marrying them. There’s Ann Wedgeworth, one-time object of Mr. Furley’s affection, perfectly cast as Star’s gun-toting mother. (Her pistol is the colour of rainbows.) There’s a pre-Ulee’s Gold Peter Fonda as Star’s father, a hippie who took so many drugs in the Sixties that he’s paralyzed from the waist down and unable to speak without the assistance of a throat amplifier. (Indie movies of this ilk have by and large become sideshows of quirk, though to be fair to Fonda, he has Love and a .45‘s best line, one that does resonate with his persona: “I’m down with time.”) Watty narrates these proceedings with all the nuance of SAP voiceovers for the blind.

Tarantino’s films (including but not limited to True Romance and Natural Born Killers) crackle because they charge headlong into clichée and then subvert it. (They also possess a pious centre, all.) True Romance, for instance, is not content to ape Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde, two of its more obvious sources: Crooked lovers Clarence and Alabama are not seeking fame and fortune, yet the road they travel leads to Hollywood! The “hillbilly” sequence in Pulp Fiction references Deliverance, samurai movies, and The Wild One, in that order, yet it’s a set-piece ultimately without precedent or peer.

Meanwhile, the work of Tarantino’s disciples is frequently an amoral (and sometimes immoral) copy of a copy, striving no farther for cool than through the imitation of better pictures and a winking acknowledgement of the conventions on display. They make new clichés out of Tarantino’s subversions. (This type of laziness has also marred Scream scribe Kevin Williamson’s self-parodying work of late.) Writer-director Clement McCarty Talkington could be a poster boy for the Miramax offspring, even in the way that, like Tarantino, if not Orson Welles, he keeps one foot in acting. His Love and a .45–a glibly precious Gen-X title if there ever was one–is an indolent, smug, ultra-derivative bomb and inexcusable prostitution of talent. Talkington’s filmography on the Internet Movie Database identifies his latest work as something called Killer’s Head, starring Emilio Estevez and Fairuza Balk. “Well, my next one will be better,” as Ed Wood said.

THE DVD
Strangely, Love and a .45 has received the deluxe treatment on DVD. The film’s extras rival those of many high-profile Special Edition studio releases. First, a discussion of the video and audio quality. This is a non-anamorphic transfer, albeit a good one. Sometimes the 1.85:1 image appears overmatted (the tops of heads hug the frameline), and it’s wanting for contrast and sharpness. Flesh tones ring true, however, and saturation is evenhanded. One or two exterior camera pans reveal motion artifacts. The audio is Dolby Surround and contains a fair amount of bass. Surround effects are not abundant, but the music, supervised by soundtrack guru Happy Walters (Kingpin, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead), sounds clear and full.

From the menu, one can access a wealth of supplements, starting with a feature-length commentary from Talkington, Bellows, and producer Darin Scott. To be fair, their camaraderie is fairly entertaining and informative, although the trio continually heaps unworthy praise on each other’s efforts. (Too, the commentary’s mix is shoddy, with Love and a .45‘s sound effects and music often drowning them out.) Next for the sampling are four (highly-compressed) deleted scenes titled “Car Sex,” “Speed Lab,” “Interview,” and “Club soda”–pretty self-explanatory designations, that last one excepted. It’s a stupid, stupid, stupid scene.

The disc’s best bonus feature compares two storyboarded sequences to their filmed and edited counterparts. The thumbnail sketches reveal a student’s ambition (lots of Hitchcockian close-ups, gratuitous camera movements) while the finished products demonstrate the realities of shooting a low-budget movie: just get it in the can. The only thing I disliked about this section is that its menu is inescapable: one has to stop the DVD and relaunch in order to return to the main screen. A section appropriately called “Additional Junk” houses three more intriguing, if wholly useless, extras: “Father Pecro”; “Horton Heat”; and “Crime Channel”–in layman’s terms, footage that is seen in snippets in Love and a .45, presented in full for your enjoyment. (Talkington mentions having submitted Bellows’s audition tape for the DVD, and I would have appreciated that more than “Father Pecro,” especially.) Rounding out the package is a theatrical trailer–turns out Love and a .45 was marketed deceptively well.

101 minutes; R; 1.85:1; English Dolby Surround; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Trimark