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Review by Ira Brooker ★★★★★ Liked

Irish mob enforcer Lee Marvin tries to bust up Gene Hackman's rural Kansas sex slave farm abetted by a frequently nude Sissy Spacek. If you need more than that, we're very different people.

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Lee Marvin as Nick Devlin; an aging Chicago mafia enforcer, sent to Kansas City to collect a high dollar debt from a ruthless cattle rancher played by Gene Hackman. Lee quickly finds out Hack is not only dealing with hamburgers, but he's selling sex slaves as a side business. Our hero, comes in with one of these slaves, (Sissy Spacek in her feature film debut) and like all knights in shining armor, he saves her like Mario saves the Princess. This act, leads to the ultimate showdown between Lee and his crew, vs Hack and his henchmen. Who will survive? What's really in that hotdog? Should I still eat meat after watching? Prime Cut, directed by Michael Ritchie, is…

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If you want to see a human being turned into a hot dog, watch Prime Cut.
If you want to see a thresher chew up a Buick, watch Prime Cut. 
If you want to watch an eighteen wheeler destroy a greenhouse, watch Prime Cut.
If you want to watch Lee Marvin kick ass, watch Prime Cut, or about sixty other movies. 😎

Review by Blair Russell ★★★★

RIP Gene Hackman

That family friend’s stay down here the past several days (they will return home on Monday) has been a fun time; on the other side of the coin, it’s not the best time for posting on Letterboxd or viewing any feature films.

One day later in the month I’ll tip my cap to the late Michelle Tractenberg; I never saw any of her TV shows and viewed just two (bad) movies she was in. Her age and the alleged “personal demons” she faced made her ing tragic. The circumstances behind the death of Hackman, his wife Betsy and one of their dogs—what in the world happened? No matter what it is, “tragic” is a word to use…

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Bullet Points #16

Bullet Points is an ongoing series of reviews on action cinema

“If you do real good, I’ll take you to the fair.”
 
Can we talk about the (for my money) oddest American action/crime film of the 70s — one loaded with established and up-and-coming movie stars — Micheal Ritchie’s Prime Cut? Despite my love for the film (which is substantial), I would be hard pressed to call it a long-forgotten classic, but it is a film more people need to catch up to, and now that Kino put out a beautiful 4K restoration, it’s the perfect time to revisit the mean-spirited and often times surreal film that defies easy categorization.
 
As Ritchie’s film opens, the…

Review by Justin LaLiberty ★★★★½ Liked

nothing more American than Gene Hackman playing a rural Kansas beef titan, dabbling in sex trafficking, facing off with the Chicago mob in our country’s heartland — more than a handful of should-be iconic scenes here but nothing tops Lee Marvin vs the combine harvester (shot in a way that mimics North By Northwest while also predicting Jaws)

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No one: 'How would you like a showdown between Lee Marvin and Gene Hackman, going down inside a barn as the unassuming mooing of the cows and the occasional grunting of the pigs fold the sound of gunshots into their embrace, while outside the rain continues its peaceful drizzle, lending the tableau a dreamy quality as the cows moo their last moos and the pigs grunt their last grunts...'

Me: 'Say no more, pal.'

(They really should have given Marvin a shotgun, though. That half-assed automatic was way too unsuitable.)

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Lee Marvin making his way through a field full of sunflowers armed with an SMG is such a cool visual and the shootout that follwers is pretty damn good too!

Lee Marvin is an enforcer for the Chicago mafia who is sent to Kansas to collect money owed by the owner of a slaughterhouse who not only deals in cattle but human flesh as well. This is where we are introduced to Poppy played by Sissy Spacek in a very early role - naked, drugged up, and being offered to the highest bidder. Marvin can't ignore her cries for help and ends up taking her out of this living nightmare. This is the point where we become aware of there…

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Imagine BULLHEAD with a sex trafficking B-plot and Gene Hackman as a beef kingpin named Mary Anne who speaks mostly in meat metaphors with Irish gangster Lee Marvin out for revenge and you have the recipe for this slab of Grade-A filet mignon. I'd say they don't make 'em like this anymore, but I'm not sure they ever made 'em like this in the first place.

Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★½ Liked

People are meat until they aren’t. Very funny tough crime thriller (a Kansas set cartoon version of Point Blank) which gets funnier the more violent and mean spirited its goons become. Robert Dillon script has more well-observed odd character detail than most Elmore Leonard novels and Michael Ritchie and his cast complement it with plenty of color as well. It can be too on the nose on spots, but I love how Marvin humanizing journey never gets too sentimental and his scenes with Spacek can keep an icky factor.

Review by Joe Lynch ★★★½ Liked

“You eat guts?”
This movie sure does. Gene Hackman is a GREAT villain without losing any of his signature gruff charm and stands toe to toe with Lee Marvin in this heartland thriller. Some WEIRD directorial choices and a hardly legal Sissy Spacek make this thriller a CUT above the rest (ugh).

Review by Dr. Ethan Lyon ★★★★

1st Michael Ritchie

Decided to do a deep cut to honour the ing of Gene Hackman, in the mode I him most for: slimy bastard. Prime Cut boasts one of the most shocking moments I've seen in an American film, where a bunch of drugged-up young girls sit in pigpens for male onlookers that leer over their flagons of beer at their potential purchase. It's an astonishingly graphic expression of how little men can care for women, to the point where they'll happily compare them to animals of consumption right down to the straw in the pens. Hackman is in charge of this horror show, a gleefully callous swine with a sadistic streak a mile wide and a smile…