Extreme violence as art…

Apparently there was some kind of football game on TV last night, blocking out what we regularly watch, so Elly and I watched a movie instead.

Christopher Walken

Since we replaced Dish with Comcast six months ago, we have access to their xfinity channel which is loaded with movies and catch-up shows that you missed during the week (wow… allows us to keep up with our favorite comedy, Big Bang Theory). Running over the free movies we discovered King Of New York  on the IFC Channel which we had never seen before.

This was a 1990 film with Christopher Walken, David Caruso, Wesley Snipes and

Larence Fishburne

Lawrence Fishburne, which IMDB said would be a “stylish and ultra violent modern twist on Robin Hood.” When they said violent, they were not kidding.

This was the bloodiest, most violent movie I have ever seen…and all the main characters (and most of the stringers) were dead by the end of the film, having been shredded by machine guns or blown up in their cars, etc.

The problem was, we couldn’t keep our eyes off of it. This was a remarkably well-made film (Rotten Tomatoes gave it a 71%, which is not bad – 10% above the average rating). Part of their description:

The gritty underbelly of New York’s complex, ethnically divided criminal world is exposed in this dark drama from director Abel Ferrara. Christopher Walken stars as Frank White, a drug lord who’s just been released from a long stint in prison. Aware that feeding off of society’s depravity has made him a wealthy man, Frank has become determined to give something back to the city, and he hatches a scheme to build a multimillion-dollar public hospital in one of Brooklyn’s worst ghettos …

So it’s a kill all the drug competition and give the millions you make selling illegal drugs to the poor. The New York locations brought my 7 years there back to mind (a particularly nasty sequence on the Flushing Line, which I used to ride home on, made me feel like I was there.)

If you can take extremely bloody conflict, endless bad language, sexual and drug manipulation and not a good guy in sight, police or criminal, take a look at this one. But don’t say you haven’t been warned.