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The title is a raunchy jibe at invading Yanks during the Dominican Republic intervention, depicted in the opening credits as a grainy blur of newsreel and memory. The former paratrooper (Peter Weller) runs a two-bit Miami motel, laidback but for a recurring remembrance of the frizzy Caribbean angel who spared his life decades ago. There are neither coconuts nor palm trees at the Coconut Palm Resort, grouses the new guest (Frederic Forrest), a fellow veteran and part-time shamus. "Nothing like adultery committed in rented rooms in the afternoon to cure that clean, clear feeling." The estranged lover is a strapping blonde (Kelly McGillis) married to the exiled generalissimo (Tomas Milian), the free agent is an unscrupulous ex-cop embodied by Charles Durning as Sydney Greenstreet by way of Noo Yawk. "A little terrorist foreplay" courtesy of Abel Ferrara and Elmore Leonard, a fulfillingly debased Out of the Past. The formal gambit is a sense of torpor punctuated by a brutal stinger, a lazy swimming pool that will drown you. (Characters are pinned on an interior of shadowy grids and soft Latin music until an abrupt explosion in the distant background lights up the tableau.) Bodies stripped bare before erect gun barrels, a kissing couple short-circuiting the light bulb above them, a high-angled view of a man treading on the word "MUERTE" scribbled on a sidewalk. "It's funny how you can tell the truth and still feel guilty. I guess it has to do with sins committed in the mind being sins all the same." The studio's arbitrary abbreviation of the material certainly pushed Ferrara further away from the mainstream and toward the next decade's uncompromising masterpieces, "a small price to pay for enlightenment." With Juan Fernández, Kelly Jo Minter, Tony Bolano, and Phil Leeds.
--- Fernando F. Croce |