“I see you’ve found my trophy room, Dalton,” Brad Wesley cries into the darkness. “The only thing that’s missing…is your ass.”

There is much to consider here, much to ponder, much to weigh to a nicety in the scales of our wisdom. First there is the trophy room itself, a genuinely obscene spectacle of severed heads and often entire animals, stuffed and mounted for the amusement of the man who murdered them. Put more simply, that’s a buffalo, that’s multiple bears, that’s a whole-ass giraffe in there. Brad Wesley shot and killed a giraffe, then had it shipped back home from safari and loaded, perhaps by the very goons whose corpses now join it, into his basement-level rumpus room. Dalton’s entrance into this forbidden chamber offers him one last and true glimpse of Brad Wesley’s mind. This is what the contents of the man’s brain look like: victims, always victims, always made to suffer and die, added to his personal collection of victories over those weaker, or worse armed, than himself.

Second there is Brad Wesley’s choice of words. The “trophy room” bit is easy enough to parse, as we’ve seen: Brad Wesley collects the dead bodies of his vanquished foes as keepsakes. But “the only thing that’s missing—” dot dot dot “—is your ass”? That is a giraffe of a different color.

Brad Wesley would hardly be the first man, or even like the fifth man, to sexualize his violent intentions toward Dalton by mentioning his body in such a way. (Arguably Jimmy would still be alive, and Dalton dead, had Jimmy refrained from the whole “I used to fuck guys like you in prison” thing and just snapped Dalton’s neck or whatever.) But there’s not even a double-entendre involved here in the sense that Brad Wesley is literally saying he’d like to have Dalton’s ass stuffed and mounted.

Not that way, no, of course he can’t possibly mean that way, not Brad Wesley. It’s just a figure of speech. The look of glee on his face when he says it, eyes widening, mouth stretching into a broad smile despite having witnessed the slaughter of his entire entourage? Just spoiling for a fight, no doubt. A few minutes later when he tries to impale and then beat Dalton with a spear? Mere coincidence that this was the only weapon to hand, I’m sure, nothing more to it than that.

But these are the stakes as we move toward the climactic confrontation, the final battle, The End of the Story. Brad Wesley wants to complete his trophy collection by stuffing and mounting Dalton’s ass. He said so himself. Wrestle with that.

Brad Wesley doesn’t feel Dalton has much to complain about. “What’s this all about, anyway?” he asks as he descends the spiral staircase into his trophy room. “Your friend Wade? One old man? That’s what I call a mercy killing. I put him out of his misery. Now you’re not mad at me about that, are you?” C’mon, what’s the big deal? Wesley just ordered the murder of an old man, one who is younger than he is but whatever. Get over it!

But there’s another point Brad would like to make. “Hell, you took Jimmy,” he continues. “He was in better shape!” That should settle the matter—just a couple of murders between friends, no biggie, and Dalton clearly had the better of it.

And then he looks down and sees Tinker, trapped beneath a polar bear. For all we know in the audience, this has somehow killed him. That’s definitely what Wesley thinks: “Hell, you took all my boys!” he bellows good-naturedly, a broad smile on his face, arms outstretched in an aw-shucks wouldja believe it gesture. (And to be fair, how would you react to that?)

Jimmy, Morgan, O’Connor, Ketcham, Pat, Tinker—Brad Wesley’s lost boys are gone, to a man, all thanks to Dalton, and he reacts to this like he’s learned something no more significant than that they’ve decided not to participate in the company softball game. Is this where we see the practical limits of Wesley’s paternalism? When the worst happens, as it definitely has to his organization—who now to shake down auto parts stores, or to grease the wheels required to open a Dress Barn—he sees it as no more of a setback than a kid being a little bit too impish when you’re trying to get out the door to head to the supermarket. When everyone looks like a boy to you, a fatherly tut-tut-tut is your solution to everything.

Well, that, plus attempted murder, as we will soon see. Maybe that’s the key to Wesley’s downfall, which is only one or two minutes away from occurring: He could never integrate Brad Wesley, town father, with Brad Wesley, deathbringer. Those grins are like the soft patch in Smaug’s breast.

Now here’s something you don’t hear everyday, even if everyday you’re talking to villains. “Now c’mon Dalton,” Brad Wesley says as he prowls his trophy room. “This town is big enough for both of us.” He adds an entreaty to “let’s talk about this,” but I at least was stopped short by his assessment of the size of the town relative to the needs of himself and his enemy here. Frankly, I’ve never heard a villain say that this town is big enough for both of us. I mean, that kind of abrogates the need for villainy in the first place, does it not? Just as there are no ethical billionaires, there are no villains dedicated to properly apportioning a town, of any size, to themselves and their rivals.

It’s a particularly risible statement in the context of Road House, in which Brad Wesley has repeatedly told Dalton his presence wasn’t “working out,” and even asked his ex-wife Dr. Elizabeth Clay to get Dalton out of town for him, in between having his goons attempt to beat and kill him. For his part, Dalton has thwarted Brad Wesley’s machinations at every turn, and in the past 24 hours has murdered five of his men, so we know where he stands on the issue of the town’s bigness.

“This town is big enough for both of us” is a desperation play, is what it is. Wesley has every intention of plugging Dalton the moment he gets a clear shot, and simply needs to stall by keeping Dalton off-guard until that shot materializes. The weakness of the claim is perhaps our only outward indication that Wesley realizes he’s in a real jam here. It’s the statement of a man who’s not sure how big this town really is anymore.

I love writing about action filmmaking and cartooning, even if action is not my favorite genre in either art form. (Though I do like it a lot. Perhaps you’ve heard about my affection for a film called Road House?) Years ago now, one of my friends and colleagues at a comics-industry magazine I worked for said I was three critics in one: the horror guy, the fight scene guy, and the pervert. He was not wrong!

A sense of place, a sense of space, is what I look for above virtually anything else in an action scene. I want the fight to be rooted in its environment, making use of its unique advantages and obstacles. I want to be able to parse the spatial relationships between the combatants at all times, so I understand who is at risk and when and why. I want each movement to have tangible physical stakes and consequences I can parse against the spacial and environmental backdrop. From the “Duel of the Fates” sequence in The Phantom Menace to the alleyway slugfest in They Live to the beach fight right here in Road House, great fight scenes deliver in these criteria.

So I want to be clear about this: The beginning of Dalton and Wesley’s final battle makes no sense at all.

Wesley is walking through his trophy room, starting from base of the staircase. A POV shot reveals his surroundings: To his right is a living-room set, and to his left is a wall with a stuffed bear, a stuffed hyena, and a stuffed buffalo. There is a good deal of space between these animals. Behind them is a blank white wall.

Rather intelligently, considering that it’s the first place along Wesley’s route where Dalton could conceivably find cover, Wesley whips to his left and points his gun toward the wall immediately after passing the buffalo. There’s even a little sting from Michael Kamen’s score to dramatize the moment.

Unfortunately, Dalton is not there. Dalton is in fact behind the buffalo, as we can see when he slowly emerges after Wesley lets down his guard. Dalton kicks, Wesley shoots and grazes Dalton’s arm, and the game is afoot.

Do you see the problem here? Dalton was hiding in a place plainly visible throughout the course of Wesley’s patrol. Unless he quickly tiptoed from some unseen hidden recess behind that bear, taking care not to bump any of the animals or make any noise or emerge into the view of the gun-toting man about four feet away from him, it is literally impossible for Dalton to do what he does. Wesley would have seen him no matter what.

You know that part in Funny Games where the guy breaks the fourth wall and rewinds the action so that the outcome plays in his favor? Perhaps this is Road House anticipating that move years in advance. Perhaps the focused totality of Dalton’s bouncer powers enabled him to warp time and space around him so he could appear someplace he hadn’t been moments before, or rendered him invisible to Wesley’s eye until it came time to strike. Perhaps the invisible hand of Rowdy Herrington himself just plopped him there and let him loose so that the final battle could at last begin. Perhaps the three parking-lot scenes are designed to impress upon us the film’s almost ponderous understanding of physical space, so we don’t question it when it makes no sense at all.

Anyway, the psychotic JC Penney developer gets attacked by a bloodthirsty bouncer who was hiding behind his stuffed buffalo. And that’s all you need to know, son.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned over three hundred forty-one days of writing about Road House, it’s that “Famous bouncer impaled to death by spear thrown by deranged Fotomat enthusiast” would be a fitting end to Road House. Alas for Brad Wesley, it is not meant to be. The spear he grabs from his extensive spear collection and throws at Dalton sails leisurely past the target, gliding by as if suspended on some kind of wire before crashing into something in the background.

But there’s more where that came from, fortunately for Wesley, and he spends the bulk of this fight scene alternately trying to batter and stab Dalton with another spear. It’s a surprisingly effective tactic, as we should perhaps have guessed: It’s not like Dalton got a lot of experience defending himself against spears during his career as a bouncer. The fact that he gets out of this alive at all is a testament to his adherence to the First Rule: “Never underestimate your opponent; expect the unexpected.” A duel to the death with a spear-wielding 58-year-old Chamber of Commerce guy is the unexpected alright.

In the middle of whipping the shit out of Dalton with a spear, Brad Wesley makes this face. His eyes all but bug right out of his head. His mouth is set in some sort of weird battle rictus. His usually impeccably coiffed hair is just wild enough to look upsetting in context. All in all it’s probably the right way to look if you are Ben Gazzara, age 58, and you’re supposed to be a convincingly formidable adversary to a trained dancer/fighter/stuntman/actor 22 years your junior. Fortunately for us, director Rowdy Herrington agreed, and a lingering shot of this absurd face made the cut when this fight scene was put into its final form. It goes a long way toward selling Wesley’s end of the bargain.

For his part, Patrick Swayze spends a long time just dodging rather than striking, rolling around on the furniture, avoiding Gazzara’s swipes and stabs with the spear. When he finally gets back on his feet he’s hunched over, his bullet-wounded left arm pulled in toward his body, a posture that conveys the fact that he’s badly injured and possibly also just worn down from murdering four other guys in the past three or four minutes. After seeing Dalton go toe to toe with the likes of Jimmy and emerge victorious, Road House had yeoman’s work to do in order to convince us that Dalton’s battle against Brad Wesley would be anything other than an embarrassing squash, and by god the film almost pulls it off.

Discipline—that’s what you’re seeing on display here. Remarkably, Dalton has found himself on the losing end of a battle with a Korean War veteran wielding a spear. He’s been shot, he’s been mollywhopped, he’s exhausted from dodging each new swing and thrust. But never do his cooler instincts depart him, and why is that? Because he’s dedicated his entire life to being, in Frank Tilghman’s immortal words, the best damn cooler in the business. (Technically second-best—oh, wait, not anymore.) He is following his own rules. He is taking the threat presented by Brad Wesley, 7-Eleven impresario, very seriously. (“Never underestimate your opponent. Expect the unexpected.”) He has taken the fight to the man instead of waiting for the man to come to him. (“Take it outside. Never start anything inside the bar unless it’s absolutely necessary.”) He is aware of what time it is. (“Be nice…until it’s time to not be nice.”) And he is making use of one of the tricks of the trade—“Give me the biggest guy in the world: You smash his knee, he’ll drop like a stone.”

That is what it takes to lay Brad Wesley low: a blow to the knee, the same thing that enabled Dalton to make short work of Ketcham and allowed Wade Garrett to defeat Mountain. (Dalton may even have injured the knee of Jimmy against that tree during their fight to the death, though the angle makes it unclear.) A lesser man, having just incurred a gunshot wound after murdering four men and now finding himself being chased around a coffee table by a berserk mall developer in the taxidermy wing of his mansion, might forget that sort of thing in the heat of the moment. But when you’re a cooler, there’s no such thing as “the heat of the moment.” The cool is all there is.

“I thought it would be fun to fight you, Dalton,” says Brad Wesley. “I really did.” He says this right after getting his knee smashed, which presumably made him reevaluate the relative fun-ness of fighting Dalton. “But now,” he adds, pulling his very small backup gun, “I just don’t have the time.”

Does this exchange sound familiar? It should: Jimmy pulled off a very similar conversational gambit at the end of his own fight with Dalton. “I’m gonna kill you the old-fashioned way,” he said, pulling his gun, before Dalton disarmed and murdered him.

And guess what happens to Brad Wesley next? Dalton disarms and…well, we’ll get to that, though observant readers already know what’s about to happen. But the salient point here is that he roundhouse kicks Wesley’s gun right out of his hand. Whatever time Wesley thought he was gonna save, I’m afraid he’ll have to spend after all.

Do you see the problem here, in terms of villainy and goonsmanship? Both Jimmy and Brad Wesley (his natural father in the parlance of A Song of Ice and Fire and in my own imagination) waste breath and time talking about how they’re gonna shoot Dalton to death when they probably would have been better served just, you know, shooting him to death. It can be convincingly argued that talking about it is precisely what prevents it from happening, in both cases. If only being a bad guy had its own set of three simple rules: “Be concise” might have been one of them, and it would have saved both men a world of hurt.

It’s finally happened. Dalton has gotten the drop on Brad Wesley, for good and all. He’s disarmed him, he’s kicked him into a chair, he’s pinning him down by the chest with his knee, and he’s left him with no place to move or hide. Instinctively, Dalton’s right arm pulls back, his fingers in a claw-grip position. You know what’s coming next—you’ve known it since you saw what happened to Jimmy, or heard about what happened in Memphis, or even when you saw Hank the bouncer tell Horny Steve the legend when Dalton first arrived at the Double Deuce. Brad Wesley is about to get his throat ripped out.

But this never happens. On the verge of a final, total, horrible victory, Dalton hesitates. He finds he cannot pull the throat out of a man who’s unarmed and helpless before him. He’s murdered five of the man’s minions and fought a pitched battle to get to this very moment, but when he gets there, there’s no Frodo claiming the Ring as his own for Dalton. He resists the temptation. He stays his hand.

Which, hey, good for him. One less murder to worry about!

But…look, I don’t want to come across as endorsing the act of ripping an unarmed man’s throat out to punish him for his crimes against auto shops and dive bars. That would be wrong. Still, I can’t help but feel that Dalton’s gotten this a bit backwards. Jimmy, Morgan, O’Connor, Ketcham, Pat McGurn: They were just following orders. Brad Wesley was giving those orders. He didn’t wield the knife that killed Wade Garrett, but it was his coin toss that decided the cooler’s fate. He didn’t plant the explosives at Red’s Auto Parts or Emmett’s cabin, he didn’t drive the monster truck over Strodenmire Ford, he didn’t personally start several vicious barfights, but he was the architect of it all, just as surely as he was the architect for the coming of the JC Penney.

And here Dalton hesitates? Here he develops doubt about the act of ripping a guy’s throat out? Is it truly a moral victory to slaughter five men but spare the one who put them in harm’s way to begin with?

The first of several unexpected visitors to the Wesley estate this fine morning—second if you count Dalton, but the goons were clearly expecting him—is Dr. Elizabeth Clay. This raises some questions. How did she know to come here? Did she know what she would find? Was she directed here by some staff member at the Double Deuce who put two and two together vis a vis the corpse on the bar? If so, why didn’t any of them come with her? Did Jack and Hank and Younger have better things to do? Were they just not on duty yet? Or did word spread through the town grapevine? How would that work, given that Dalton’s assault on the compound takes six minutes from start to finish? Did she arrive with the four village elders who will, a few seconds from this moment, murder Brad Wesley with shotguns? If so, why do they all enter the room from different directions? And how did they find out what was going on at the mansion? Was there a disturbance in the old-coot Force? Back to Doc for a second, what has she come to do? Stop Dalton? Stop Wesley? Stop them both? Did she blow right past the four dead bodies on the ground floor of the house, or did she stop to attempt triage and treatment before realizing she was too late? What is she feeling right here, right now, at this moment? Is she glad Dalton decided not to rip Wesley’s throat out, a decision he makes just before she arrives and thus without the need for her opprobrium to convince him? Is she worried Brad will take advantage of this lull in the action? Is she concerned, at all, for herself? If so, which man is she worried about? “You’re gonna save these people? Well who’s gonna save them from you?” Remember that? Remember her telling Dalton where to shove it when he attempted to convince her to leave town with him, earlier this very morning? What changed? What does Dalton feel when he sees her? Relief? Guilt? Gratitude? Shame? Vindication? And Wesley, what about him? Is he solely concerned with exploiting how Dalton has let down his guard? Does he wonder if Elizabeth came there to save him? Would he care if she did? Does he harbor hopes of a reunion once Dalton is out of the way? What are we to take from the fact that he only looks at Dalton in this moment, not at Elizabeth? Does he have his eyes on the prize, or is the real prize the one person he can’t bring himself to look at?

Oh Brad, when will you learn. In the time it takes for Wesley to grab his fallen gun and turn it on Dalton while Dalton is distracted by Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s arrival, Doc has the chance to scream “No!” and Wesley himself gilds the lily by shouting “It’s over!” Which it is, but not in the way he intends.

It’s over because Red Webster, Dr. Elizabeth Clay’s uncle, has mortally wounded her ex-husband in order to save her (ex?-)boyfriend. That’s one more thing Wesley allows to happen because he’s too busy bantering to pull the goddamn trigger. It’s one thing to be chatty when you’re roughing up one of your own hapless employees; O’Connor isn’t going to put up a fight while you call him a messy bleeder, and none of your other goons is going to come to his aid.

But Dalton is a different story—a story of kindness, of friendship, of being the best damn cooler in the business. He’s made friends in this town. And though perhaps Brad Wesley can be forgiven for not expecting five of them to suddenly materialize in his basement, four of them carrying shooting irons, why take a chance?

It’s hard to describe the cocktail of conflicting emotions Dr. Elizabeth Clay must be experiencing in this moment—the moment when her uncle, Red Webster, shoots her ex-husband, Brad Wesley, to save the life of her boyfriend, James Dalton. Just re-read that sentence and imagine yourself in your shoes. Here’s the kindly old man who raised you, and whom you moved back to Jasper after leaving the place so you could take care of him in his old age. He’s got a gun, and he’s just used it to shoot the man who—this is conjecture, but justified conjecture—you used to love, until you saw his ugly side. I’d imagine, given what we see of his treatment of Denise, that physical abuse was involved, since I doubt Denise was his first victim and since it would explain why the Doc skipped town instead of merely divorcing him. This man, with whom you once envisioned your future, has used your appearance on the scene to pull a gun with which he intends to shoot your current love interest. Only he’s not quite your current love interest at the moment, is he? The night before you watched him murder a man, tearing his throat out with his bare hands. Earlier today he tried to physically drag you out of town with him before you broke free and told him you had no intention of going anywhere with him. You’ve arrived just in time to watch him decide not to repeat this act, this time tearing the throat out of your ex-husband. Maybe you felt relief in that moment, but only briefly. Brad ruined it by pulling that gun, and Uncle Red ruined it by firing his. Three of the most important men in your life, locked in a dance of death.

And of course, it’s not over yet, no matter what Brad said. Three more men will put bullets in his body before he finally collapses through a glass table and dies. They include your boyfriend’s nominal boss—the reason this feud started—and his nominal landlord—who provided him with the place where you and he first made love. They also include a Ford dealer whose dealership you watched Brad Wesley demolish. Afterwards you and he had a talk, during which you attempted to appeal to the better angels of his nature, to no avail. The last thing he said to you was a threat against your boyfriend, right there near the rubble of Strodenmire Ford. The last thing he’ll ever say to you was that threat against your boyfriend, thanks in part to Strodenmire, who is participating in Brad’s murder before your very eyes.

And you abhor violence, don’t forget that. You’ve mocked Dalton’s tough-guy posturing to his face, on your first date no less. You broke up with him, kind of, because of the murder he committed last night. So you’re watching your own worst nightmare play out, again, involving men you’ve cared deeply about.

If you were Dr. Elizabeth Clay, could you ever recover?

Red Webster, Emmett, Pete Strodenmire, and Frank Tilghman have had enough of Brad Wesley. I mean, to put it mildly. Together they shoot him to death, though not before Tilghman turns Wesley’s “This is my town—don’t you forget it” back at him. The two men exchange a sort of slight smile after that. It’s the smile of men with secrets, if you ask me, though it would pass for an expression of resignation on one hand and triumph on the other to the layman.

Be that as it may.

The thing that strikes me about Brad Wesley’s death today is how quickly it follows the murder of his goons. The bodies of Morgan, O’Connor, Ketchum, and Pat McGurn are still warm, and Jimmy is probably just a few miles downstream, and blam blam blam blam, no more Brad Wesley. They were the iron fist with which Wesley ruled Jasper, from JC Penney to shining Fotomat. Take them away and the man is revealed as a paper tiger, albeit one capable of nearly murdering the best damn cooler in the business.

To put it another way, Brad Wesley fell when his goon squad was supplanted with another. Had Red, Emmet, Pete, and Tilghman joined forces earlier, perhaps they could have out-muscled Wesley’s muscle, or at the very least outgunned them. All they lacked was a fighting spirit, and Dalton gave that to them. It already was their town. All they had to do was rise up and claim it.

Here lies Brad Wesley.

Some thoughts:

• “Look how they massacred my boy.”
• The way the ruins of the coffee table frame his body, like a portrait in a picture frame, reminds me of his exchange with Dalton over the picture of his grandfather: “Looks like an important man.” “He was an asshole.” The apple doesn’t die far from the tree.
• I don’t think we’ve adequately discussed how willfully bizarre it is to have this little living-room set right in the middle of dozens, possibly hundreds, of stuffed and mounted animals killed on safari. Can you imagine coming over to Wesley’s house for, I don’t know, a Christmas party or a football game, and he invites you to sit amid the carcasses and make merry with him? “I see you’ve found my trophy room. The only thing that’s missing…is your ass…on my sofa! Have a seat, make yourself at home. You want anything? Have a bloody mary? Some breakfast? At least let me get you some coffee. Oh, that? That’s a water buffalo I shot to death. Milk and sugar? You take it black?”
• The good news is that the blood should come right off of that naugahyde.
• Next to Wesley’s right leg you can see one of the magazines he had on his coffee table before he was shot four times and sent flying through it. I can’t stop thinking about it. Did he while away an afternoon flipping through it earlier that week, not knowing it would one day soon rest beneath his corpse? Or was it just for show, or for company? Do you think Brad Wesley was much of a reader?
• Ben Gazzara was a hell of a sport, getting wired with that many squibs. If they’d gone off all at once he’d have exploded like a smashed watermelon.
• The question of Brad Wesley’s will was not one I’d entertained until this very moment. With most of his close associates, including his sister-son Pat McGurn and his bastard son (never officially acknowledged or legitimated) Jimmy Reno, dead, who would his worldly belongings and fortune go to? Could his “Jasper Improvement Society” protection racket now become a legit fund for civic development?
• His battered girlfriend Denise deserves the money, that much I can say. In my mind I’ve written a happy ending for her where she tricked the old bastard into signing a document leaving everything to her without reading it over, like she said it was a release form for her Jazzercise class or something, and she gets to take over his mansion and his money and his interest in the 7-Eleven and live happily ever after. The dead animals would be the first things to go.
• Goodbye, Brad Wesley. You were a truly demented person and a one-in-a-million movie villain. I’ll miss you, and I hope they have JC Penneys in hell.

“He’s got the sheriff and the whole police department in his pocket!” This brief statement by Red Webster, the day after Brad Wesley blew up his place of business, is pretty much the only word we hear regarding law enforcement in the town of Jasper, Missouri. No big news here: cops love rich authoritarians, film at eleven. But this isn’t even the Frank Wilhoit statement regarding conservatism, that “There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect,” in action. In Jasper, there is no one whom the law either protects or binds. It’s fucking Mad Max out there. This is how a jumped-up bouncer and a mall developer can go at each other in roving gangs for weeks without anyone lifting a finger to stop them.

But apparently word has reached the sheriff and his deputies that their patron is in trouble—big trouble this time, the kind of trouble that goons can’t be relied upon to stop. Again, how news of a five-minute fracas in a mansion can spread across town so quickly that half a dozen outsiders can get there in time for the climax is beyond me. But there they are, and they want to know where “Brad” is (when I said Elizabeth is the only person in the film to call him “Brad,” I neglected his pet cop) and what the hell happened here.

What follows either exposes a gaping hole in American jurisprudence or explains why the cops have been so superfluous in this movie. One after another, the people who just murdered Brad Wesley—and who’ve given their guns to Red Webster to hide, which takes him all of about ten seconds if you’re wondering how hard he worked to do so—simply say that they didn’t see anything.

With no eyewitnesses, how could the sheriff possibly hope to bring charges against the five men standing around a bullet-ridden corpse in said corpse’s own basement? Need I remind you? No one saw anything! And if they say they didn’t see anything, well, stop the investigation right there and file this one under “unsolved mysteries.” Forget it, Sheriff. It’s Jaspertown.

There’s one chink in the armor of Frank Tilghman’s “everyone murder Brad Wesley together and then lie about it” plan. And yes, I’m assuming it was his plant. He delivers the killshot. He drops the one-liner. When Emmet and Strodenmire and Red Webster all ask each other if they saw what happened, per the sheriff’s request, they fail to ask Tilghman too; they know, without being told, that the Double Deuce owner’s role in the downfall of Brad Wesley must go unspoken.

Who do they ask instead? Who gets the final “You see anything?” The fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench, the pain in the ass: Tinker.

Tinker is Brad Wesley’s sole surviving core goon. He is the only man in the Wesley organization present at his house on that day not to be brutally murdered by Dalton and his accomplices. No one knows better than he how the balance of power has shifted. No one knows better than he whose town this now is. Despite the fact that he came closer than any other goon to killing Dalton, way back in that fight in Tilghman’s office when he knifed the cooler’s side, Tinker is reconsidering his loyalties, and reconsidering them fast.

But he’s still been asked by Red Webster if he’d seen anything. Like Red and Emmet and Pete, he needs to say something to answer the question. The police want to know. What can he say that will allay the suspicions not just of the cops regarding his complicity, but of Dalton and the town worthies regarding his newfound allegiance to their cause? What are the magic words?

“A polar bear fell on me.”

That’s it. That’s his reply.

“A polar bear fell on me.”

That’s the final word on the death of Brad Wesley and the triumph of Dalton and his friends.

“A polar bear fell on me.”

That’s Tinker coming to terms with Dalton sparing him the fate of all his fellow goons by toppling a taxidermied animal on top of him.

“A polar bear fell on me.”

That’s…that’s…that’s the final line of dialogue in the film. That’s the note on which the filmmakers wish to leave us. That’s the last word, the summary statement. That’s “And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make.” That’s Road House beating on, corpses against the current, borne ceaselessly into the JC Penney.

“A polar bear fell on me.”

Fin.

Pete Strodenmire and Red Webster can hardly contain their levity. And who could blame them? Tinker just said “A polar bear fell on me”! That’s objectively hilarious. Oh, sure, they just shot to death their nemesis of many years and are standing just feet away from his bullet-ridden corpse, one of five dead bodies currently festooning the property. And if they hadn’t opened fire, that man would likely have killed their friend Dalton, and quite possibly Dalton’s girlfriend and the dead man’s ex-wife Dr. Elizabeth Clay as well. And had that happened, it’s hard to imagine the blood-dimmed tide that would have swallowed Jasper, Missouri, as Brad Wesley used the fortune amassed from his commercial ventures to hire a new army of goons and seek vengeance on all those who aligned themselves against him. Pete and Red stood on a knife’s edge of carnage and did what needed to be done to prevent from tilting over into oblivion. This happened about ninety seconds ago. But now? Tinker said “A polar bear fell on me.” Ya gotta laugh!

When the time comes for Tinker to get with the program, to fish or cut bait, to shit or get off the pot, to come on in for the big win, he first looks around for inspiration. An eyeline match cut reveals what he’s looking at: a troop of stuffed monkeys, posed in the familiar “See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil” manner.

Only…only that’s not all, is it? There’s a fourth monkey, isn’t there? And what part of his body is this furry fellow covering? What evil is he intended to instruct us not to do?

The monkey’s covering his dick, that’s what I’m trying to point out here. He’s covering his monkey penis. See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil, and last but most definitely not least, Fuck No Evil.

Again, this is the very end of the film. This is energy with which Rowdy Herrington, director, wishes to leave us. Tinker looks at a monkey holding his dick and says “A polar bear fell on me” and two old codgers chuckle to themselves with a dead body on the floor nearby.

When I say things like “I could watch Road House a hundred times and still find new details I’d never noticed before,” this monkey is the kind of thing I’m talking about. This monkey, holding its monkey genitals.

Road House ends to the tune of “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” the Jeff Healey Band’s cover of a song from Bob Dylan’s 1985 album Empire Burlesque. As you might expect, Healey peels the song away from the sound of the Big 80s Arthur Baker–produced original and moves it comfortably back into the bar rock sound Dylan favored when playing the song live with Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers as his backup band. Healey’s version is a bit less hard-charging though. It takes you more slowly and steadily through the song, which exists in Dylan’s “talking about romance with the voice of a prophet of doom” mode. In point of fact its structure and sound are close enough to “All Along the Watchtower,” especially in Healey’s version, that Dylan could have wound up with one of a hideous “self-plagiarism” lawsuit, John Fogerty–style, if things had worked out differently than they did.

Fortunately that never happened, and we can consider the song on the merits. It’s a minor-key track, kind of a down note to end the movie on, especially so soon after the whole “a polar bear fell on me” thing. But it’s a smokin’ performance by Healey—and, more importantly, a fitting sendoff for the romance of Dalton and Doc, two people who are going to have to learn to accept one another for who they are if their relationship is to survive.

Dylan/Healey sing of returning from a journey of hundreds of miles at the end of a chase. They hint at past traumas, narrowly escaped disasters. They say they’ve got no easy answers and shouldn’t be expected to lie to make up for that. They talk of protecting someone, and of not asking one another to do something they’re not ready to do. They sing of finding one another “in the wasteland of your mind.” As a reflection on the final days of the film, the period that stretches from the fire at Red’s to the shootout in the trophy room, I think it displays the emotional stakes for our two lovers quite well. Can true love emerge from the tumult? We’ll find out…

I’m saying this in a voice that approximates that of Ash, the android—artificial person, excuse me—in Ridley Scott’s Alien when he says of the titular creature “I admire its purity”: I admire Road House‘s fecundity. Road House is a film deeply committed to giving and being more—more than you expect, more than it needs to be. It exists to run over the Ford dealerships of your mind with a monster truck, one in which it has balls big enough to come.

I can think of few clearer demonstrations of this than the way the film chooses to leave us with its protagonists, Dalton and Doc. How best to convey, as the film must, that they bridge their differences (perhaps with the corpse of Brad Wesley) and live happily ever after? Our friend Rowdy Herrington could have shown them dancing together at the Double Deuce, a choice that would have been all the easier to make given that the credits roll over, you guessed it, people dancing at the Double Deuce. That’s where Cody’s performing “When the Night Comes Falling from the Sky,” after all; couldn’t James and Elizabeth rock out into the sunset with him?

Ah, but they do! Our final image of our hero and his lover does indeed show them accompanied by Cody and his guitar. Only they’re not at the Double Deuce, they’re by the water outside of Emmet’s place. And Cody’s sitting on the grass, not on stage.

And they’re bare-ass naked.

Road House ends the story of Dalton by showing him skinny dipping with Dr. Elizabeth Clay. In fact it shows him running across the grass toward the water, cheeks to the wind, then doing a splendid high dive right into the water, at which point he and the good doctor make out, and make out enthusiastically. Like, you can imagine what’s going on beneath the surface of the water, that’s how enthusiastically. They’re young(ish) and in love and hanging out naked with their friend the blind white blues guitarist, and all is right with the world.

Always there is another trick up Road House‘s sleeve, always there is some new wonder to marvel at. This time it happens to be the main characters swimming around with their junk out with Jeff Healey in the background, and this time it happens to be the final chapter in the saga of Dalton, the best damn cooler in the business (as of that one morning when Brad Wesley flipped his coin and it came up tails). After all that death, after all those blows to the head, after determining whether a hobbyhorse has a wooden dick, after the three simple rules—love, wet and wriggling and real.

use, c