Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (1998) – DVD

Blood, Guts, Bullets and Octane
*/**** Image B+ Sound A-
starring Joe Carnahan, Dan Leis, Ken Rudolph, Dan Harlan
written and directed by Joe Carnahan

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It’s not the band I hate, it’s their fans. The celebrated (if overrated) efforts of both David Mamet and Quentin Tarantino spawned a lot of half-baked imitators in their heyday in the ’90s, people who didn’t understand the masters’ cruel ironies or obsessive cinephilia, respectively, but sure thought that it was cool wear a suit while pointing a gun and saying “fuck.” Few of them, however, made films as dire and unpleasant as Joe Carnahan’s Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane (hereafter Octane), which takes the male territorial-pissing formula of scores of Mamet-tino flicks and pushes it to an astonishingly crude extreme. There’s no wit to the dialogue, no style to the imagery and no grace in the performances–just eff this and eff that and oh-God-I’m-shot. If you needed a reason for the Nineties to end, here it is; the passing of this kind of cinema is ample incentive to enter the new century.

This is the saga of Sid (Carnahan) and Bob (Dan Leis), struggling used-car dealers who are at the end of their tether: $80,000 in the hole and deprived of the product they need to get out, they appear to be headed for Chapter 11 insolvency with no hope of reprieve. But their prayers seem to be answered–assuming they prayed to Satan–when they are approached to babysit a ’63 Pontiac LeMans convertible for a cool $250,000. They don’t know exactly why it’s worth that much–they haven’t seen the prologue and interludes that have shown various thugs and mercenaries killing each other for its cargo–but they do manage to figure out that there’s something in the trunk, which is wired to blow. This being a hard-boiled movie, they foolishly ransom the car for a higher price, leading, as the genre requires, to a predictably dire fate.

The borrowings are obvious to anyone with a cursory familiarity with Cult. The car dealers are relatives to the real estate men in Glengarry Glen Ross; their line about how “they don’t want salesmen, they want hit men” strikes the right pose between Mamet’s economics of terror and Tarantino’s armed posturing. The mysterious what’s-in-the-trunk question is Pulp Fiction‘s briefcase by way of Repo Man‘s similarly lethal auto, and the various suited-up thugs come straight from the world of Tarantino cool. There’s even a homophobic “pop culture” discussion about Johnny Cash and prison inmates that wishes, in its naïve way, that it were in the Fiction. The rest is either rote (occasional villains from spy and action movies) or ludicrous (the exposition of the trunk’s contents is one for the books). Scratch a moment in Octane and you’ll find an appropriation, or at least a rickety structure about to collapse.

Compounding the insult is Carnahan’s aggressive mean-spiritedness, offering non-stop screaming and brutality in the aid of a slaughterhouse atmosphere. With their inability to do anything but bark manly obscenities, Sid and Bob are a thoroughly unappealing screen duo, and their frustrated dialogues about women and money are revealing of nothing other than their misogyny and impotence. But they’re a pair of sweethearts compared to the thugs vying for the fabled LeMans, whose implementation makes Carnahan seem cousin to the family from The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. With zero time to leave a screen impression, they register mostly as pieces of meat, and their brutal approaches are complemented by brutal deaths, littering the highway with corpses with as little dignity as possible. In case we fail to get the idea, Carnahan has thoughtfully consented to flash a wide array of gritty intertitles that trumpet tough-guy slogans, rubbing your nose in the already callous display on hand and beating you down until you plead for mercy.

I will concede that Octane makes naked what most of the ’90s crime-and-gangster cycle made only subtextual–that is, the cruel nature of work and getting paid. It’s obvious that the real villain of the picture is capital, and that the only way to beat the system is through capitulating to its criminal nature (as the owner of the LeMans knows all too well). But like most of the films in this genre, this is merely the price of being a man–and being a man is more important than conquering the norms of society. The violence is simply a trial by fire to make you know that you have a pair, and one would never want to transcend the system that makes you male and potent. And if you do see the futility of the situation, you’re all alone: collectivity is for the gangsters who hit you up for protection. If that’s your cup of tea–and in its day, it was for millions–you’re welcome to the pot.

THE DVD
Using the same elements as the OOP Universal disc, Lions Gate’s DVD reissue of Blood, Guts, Bullets & Octane is nothing short of miraculous. Despite the obvious cheapness of the production, the 1.85:1 image (non-anamorphic, alas) is razor sharp; print defects are nowhere to be found and definition is superb. While the film’s palette doesn’t have a wide chromatic range, it’s as vivid here as it’s ever going to be, with the open desert road revealing a multitude of tan hues. The stereo sound is almost as good, crystal-clear and free of noise, if blatantly showy with respect to channel separation. A super job for a film that doesn’t deserve its good luck.

86 minutes; R; 1.85:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 2.0 (Stereo); English, Spanish subtitles; DVD-5; Region One; Lions Gate