Protect me from ever seeing this again

 BACKTRACK AKA CATCHFIRE (1989)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Dennis Hopper's directing career has had its ups and downs. "Out of the Blue" and "Easy Rider" are amazing, intense, sometimes poetic films of startling beauty. I am not one of the defenders of the fascinating, beautiful bore "The Last Movie." "Colors" is an entertaining and tough-minded cop movie, considering the caliber of actors like Sean Penn and Robert Duvall. "Backtrack," a 1989 film that is the director's cut of a film also known as "Catchfire," the latter being a film Hopper disowned and is thus credited as an Alan Smithee project, is a completely repetitive, choppy, highly disorganized mess. It seems to be pulpy material that is designed as a black comedy though at times it borders on parody. You can't be a black comedy bordering on parody - either you are one or the other. If it is black comedy, it isn't blackly funny enough. If it is intended as parody, it doesn't reach far enough into absurdity for laughs. The film is an infrequently (and unintentionally) funny movie because nothing in it rings of the tone needed to make it work.

This is the old cliched story of a witness to a mob hit and now the witness is being hunted down by a professional assassin. Nothing new except execution, performances and tone always makes the difference. Not here. Jodie Foster is completely miscast as Anne, an artist whose concepts are making electronic banner signs. While driving home, she gets a flat, looks for help and witnesses the mob hit perpetrated by none other than an uncredited Joe Pesci as the Boss! Her boyfriend is played by Charlie Sheen in a mercifully short part - he is killed by the mob hit men who are looking for her. Enter Dennis Hopper as Milo, the professional hit man who falls in love with Anne as soon as he sees her picture. He tries to enter her mind, reads about conceptual art, plays the saxophone as if he's trying to telepathically communicate with her, wait, what? Oh, yeah, he is falling in love. Some lovely couple they make - when he finds her, he spares her life. Milo forces her to wear lingerie and heels, rapes her, makes love to her, and they drive from town to town staying at one hotel after another. The mob is after them, and so are the police. And there's the kingpin I gather played by, and I am laughing while writing this, a wheelchaired Vincent Price! We also got John Turturro as a cackling hit man, Dean Stockwell who looks bored stiff as Pesci's lawyer, Bob Dylan as a chainsaw artist and an early performance by Catherine Keener!

That's all folks. Some will get a kick out of seeing Jodie Foster nude in a couple of scenes, others will get a kick out of seeing an incomprehensible Dennis Hopper with an accent I can't quite make head or tail of. The Taos location where Anne hides out at one point has some pulse because the location is so breathtaking (having visited Taos on a couple of occasions, I heartily agree). Hopper seems to be reaching for the black comedy stylings of what Tarantino accomplished a few years later so thrillingly yet it falls apart too easily. The ending is too bizarre to contemplate (Foster and Hopper wear fire proximity suits!), and just as stupid and inconclusive as the rest of the film. Geez, I'd rather watch "The Last Movie" again over seeing "Backtrack" any day.