This is not a Road House. This is a woman’s ass. Other than a few moments that are so comically over-the-top they seem custom-built for people who use words like “bazongas” Road House does not really go in for random gratuitous objectification of women as a rule. In most instances where a man leers at a woman, that’s as sure a sign that bad shit is about to go down as the “DUNNNNNNN DUNN” string hit in John Williams’s score for Jaws. But this is where the title card devised by R/Greenberg Associates—the same company that designed the all-timer titles for Alien and Altered States—winds up.

This is normally the part where I come up with some deep-dive close-read no-prize explanation for the weird thing Road House just did. I’m hard pressed, however, to argue anything other than “they thought it would be fun to rile up the rubes by slapping the movie’s title across a woman’s butt.” I’ve seen this movie with enough people to know it usually succeeds in this aim. Not to mix the psycho-surrealist metaphor around which this post is constructed or anything, but sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

How then, to explain the following?

This is not Patrick Swayze. This is the same woman who will subsequently be labeled Road House. Her feet, anyway.

This is not Ben Gazzara. Not a single one of these guys is. This is Cruzados, the band that plays the opening song of the film. (Which is not the band that plays all of the other songs in the film.)

This is not Kelly Lynch. This is Kevin Tighe.

This is n—okay this is Kevin Tighe. CO-CO-CO-CO-COMBO BREAKER! Still, every rule needs an exception to prove it, as Dalton could no doubt tell us.

This is not Keith David. This is Kevin Tighe again. Moreover, Keith David is not an actor who has more than one line in this film.

This is not Kathleen Wilhoite. You know who it is.

While the three people here conceivably could be “Sunshine” Parker, Red West, and Julie Michaels—the names fit—they are not. They’re two extras and, wait, what was his name again?

This, as the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences could tell you this year, is not Sam Elliott. It’s Tito Larriva, lead singer of Cruzados. Interesting fella in his own right, but not a future Achiever.

While this could, and in fact should, be the Jeff Healey Band, it is not. It is still Cruzados.

The centered positioning of the credits, the lack of attention-demanding dialogue (it’s just the song and some bar chatter), the anomalous presence of one of the lead actors in the film who is himself usually centered in the frame: All of these factors make the viewer want to connect the name they’re reading to the person they’re seeing. No such luck.

Even the exception, Kevin Tighe, is less of one than he looks. When he appears, you are about to spend five minutes watching one of the most skin-crawlingly unctuous performances of the decade, and you will most likely spend much of your first viewing of the film believing him to be the villain of the piece. Naturally he’s the only actor billed in straightforward WYSIWYG fashion.

Again, I’ve seen this movie with enough people to know that in the right mindset these credits are disorienting, in a goofy, tipsy way. It makes people a bit rambunctious. “Wow, Kelly Lynch looks different!” “This is clearly not Sam Elliott.” That kind of thing. It’s like receiving an invitation to start talking back to the movie, written in purple Palatino. Stick that in your pipe and don’t smoke it.