These were areas that were destroyed in the MLK Riots, really close to downtown.
It was pretty dangerous, actually – I was sending dailies to Universal to show them what we were shooting in southwest Chicago, and they thought it was all matte paintings. , we stayed at the center of town, but we were only ten minutes away from Cabrini-Green, where we shot a big chunk of the project.
Especially American cities, like Chicago or LA, they’re designed a certain way where freeways circumvent all the scary areas – you just drive over the top. On Being Attracted to Urban Stories, And Painting Chicago As a HellscapeĬities bring a lot of people together, and are also scary to lots of people. It was interesting for me, because I’d only just made sci-fi movies at that point I wanted to try something more realistic. There were months and months of script meetings – there were rooftop motorcycle chases, but we ended up in a grittier vibe. We wanted to work hard to get it right, and not make it about something that wasn’t just about rape – a lot of these urban stories are about that. I was given a lot of scripts, and it was quite a long process. They’d actually been wanting to make this film for a long time, and there were all sorts of scripts, from people like John Carpenter and Gary Cunningham – different versions that involved bikers in the desert of LA, and things like that. Barry Gordon started his own production company called Largo, and I think was the first film to come out of that. I’d done Predator 2 with Barry Gordon and Joel Silver, who were partners at the time shortly afterward, they had a very bitter split. In anticipation of this hallowed night of metal, mayhem and E-milio, CoS sat down for a phone interview with Hopkins to discuss the film’s intriguing cult legacy, its soundtrack, and its relationship to the ‘real’ Chicago. This weekend, Judgment Night returns to the city of its setting for its 25 th anniversary, for the Music Box Theatre’s annual festival of genre delights, Cinepocalypse – with Hopkins in attendance. Here, it feels like an album that has kept an underrated genre gem in the cult consciousness, long past its expected shelf life.
JUDGMENT NIGHT SOUNDTRACK YOUTUBE MOVIE
Sometimes it’s a shame when a movie’s soundtrack eclipses the legacy of the movie that spawned it. Throw a stone at a group of white ’90s kids who grew up in the suburbs, and chances are you’ll hit someone who considers that album Their Jam.
JUDGMENT NIGHT SOUNDTRACK YOUTUBE SERIES
The real catalyst for its rediscovery, however, is usually the film’s chart-making rap-rock soundtrack album, which featured an innovative series of collabs between some of the biggest hip-hop and metal artists of the time (Living Colour and Run DMC, Slayer and Ice-T, and so on). In the case of Judgment Night, that cult appeal is twofold: one, Hopkins directs the hell out of it, injecting a pretty boilerplate chase thriller with seas of ink-black Gothic cinematography and exciting moments of suspense. It’s a grimy depiction of Chicago as an apocalyptic hellscape, with the cinnamon-roll boys at its center struggling to ‘man up’ to survive the bloody night ahead of them.īut cult films are a curious thing – movies can resonate with people long after their initial theatrical run, often for the strangest reasons. A harrowing, stripped-down actioner following a group of Evanston suburbanites ( Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Stephen Dorff, and Jeremy Piven) running afoul of a crime lord ( Denis Leary) one dark night in the big, bad city of Chicago, the film treads similar territory as Walter Hill’s The Warriors and John Boorman’s Deliverance. When director Stephen Hopkins’ gritty urban thriller Judgment Night came out in 1993, it was released to mixed reviews and a modest box office take ($21 million on a $12 million budget).
0 kommentar(er)
