Take a moment, won’t you, to appreciate the faces pulled by Marshall Teague as Jimmy dances his last lethal dance. He’s marvelously expressive, isn’t he? His face contorts like a noh demon mask when he’s preparing to strike, and his eyes twinkle with malice and delight when in repose.

And this elasticity, this reactivity, tells us something about the face’s bearer. This is a man who loves what he does, and that love is written all over his face. The professional is personal with Jimmy as a rule, whereas for Dalton this kind of fury and passion is the exception. Perhaps you need to form murderous intent in advance to channel this kind of rubber-faced self-expression. Perhaps malice aforethought has a transformative effect on the jaw and the flesh. Viewed through this lens, what Dalton does to Jimmy can almost be seen as simply pulling the plug and turning this beautiful and terrible face off.

At any rate we were robbed of a Marshall Teague/Bruce Campbell fight when both men were in their prime, and someone should go to jail for it.

Collins: Perhaps we’ll never know the why of the throat rip. [Editor’s note: Herrington “got the idea for Jimmy’s death from a story he’d heard back in college about a martial artist tearing out an enemy’s trachea,” according to the Ringer.] It does recur throughout the film as something [Swayze] is struggling with. It’s a lapse on his part. Ripping people’s throats out is something he has to move past in his life.

And who hasn’t felt that way? All of us have been ripping people’s throats out in our own way, and we all deal with it in our own way.

Amazingly, AMAZINGLY, I am quoted as an expert in Quinn Myers’s oral history of the throat-ripping scene from Road House for Mel Magazine. Like, it’s me and then it’s Mike Nelson. Do I reference A Hard Day’s Night and America’s Next Top Model in a single quote? You bet I do. But that’s beside the point—this is a tremendously informative look at what went into making that whole incredible fight scene, featuring actor Marshall Teague, the stunt coordinators/fight choreographers, and the Foley artist, as well as me and Mike freaking Nelson.