“I used to fuck guys like you in prison.” This much we know about Jimmy. Or do we? Picture growing up as Brad Wesley’s unacknowledged bastard son. Absent father, mother who doesn’t understand him. He starts hanging out with the wrong kind of kids, starts acting up, getting into trouble. A few scrapes with the law, a few misdemeanors, the specter of juvie on the horizon. Then it happens: he gets pinched for a big one, grand theft auto. He does time. And what happens to a handsome young man like Jimmy in prison? I don’t want to say it but I think we all know.

So. “I used to fuck guys like you in prison.” Is that a fact? Or is Jimmy identifying, in Dalton, the traits he grew to hate in himself, the traits he feels made him a victim, something he’s sworn he’ll never be again? The good looks, the great hair, the attitudinal softness, and most importantly the fact that he’s being beaten in this fight. He deserves what he’s gonna get, just like the old Jimmy deserved it, the Jimmy who existed before this new Jimmy emerged, harder and stronger and ready to dish out everything he’d been made to take.

“So, it’s come at last. At last, it’s come. The day I knew would come at last has come, at last.”

—“A Mother Doesn’t Matter Anymore,” Bye Bye Birdie

The most infamous line in Road House was not in the script. That much we can agree on. Marshall Teague, the actor who says it, claims it was improvised and given the seal of approval by on-set super-producer Joel Silver. Rowdy Herrington, the director, says it was Silver’s invention. Whoever the author, their work is not present in the basic-cable cut of the film, for obvious reasons. Few pleasures have I known greater than watching Road House in the company of men who considered themselves Road House superfans but who had never seen the uncut R-rated original article, only to arrive at this line. It’s a moment the phrases “Holy shit!” and “What the fuck?” were made for.

Why is that? Because it’s the moment when the band-aid gets ripped off, the pustule is pierced and drained, and the sexualized violence toward and involving Dalton is finally made manifest. No more talk about taking Dalton, no more innuendo about how we thought he’d be bigger, no more homosocial power-dynamic establishment with words like “son” or “boy” or “mijo“—this is just Dalton’s would-be nemesis stating outright that in other circumstances, fights like this ended with him raping the bested combatant.

Yet despite its awful—I was gonna say implications, but it’s not implying anything, is it? It’s coming right out and saying the awful thing. Yet despite that, the line does not short-circuit our enjoyment of the film, or even of just this fight scene, the way you might expect it to. In part that’s because our society does not take prison rape seriously and never has. In part it’s because Jimmy is about to get his in a way that’s even more spectacular and gruesome than the line itself. And in part it’s because Road House is a cavalcade of outrageousness from the start. Every yokel and goon who gets punched in the face, every gratuitous ass and boob shot, every ridiculous line reading by some weird old crank, every arrhythmic scene in which Brad Wesley does twelve contradictory things, every explosion, every monster truck, every mention of the concept of famous bouncers—all of it prepares us to weather virtually any storm to come our way. “I used to fuck guys like you in prison?” Okay, sure. What else ya got?