Don’t give up that day job

STREETS OF FIRE —“Everywhere I go, there’s always an asshole.”  A concept movie, one that would’ve been okay as a long segment on an anthology series, but soon runs out of gas as a feature, even at a light 93 minutes.  Blending rock’n’ roll, quasi-50s settings, mod looks and violence circa 1984, director Walter Hill doesn’t have a cast with enough charisma to carry off his fantasy of a female rocker, kidnapped by bikers, saved by a lone avenger. He’s played by Michael Pare, who looks like a male model (he had been). Amy Madigan and Rick Moranis are irritating, Diane Lane is pretty (duh), she was all of eighteen at the time. Willem Dafoe went on to bigger & better.

The $14,500,000 experiment failed, making only $8,100,000 and earning a lot of critical brickbats. Good “ouch!” comment from Pare about Moranis: “Rick Moranis drove me out of my mind…here’s this weird-looking little guy who couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse with a fistful of fifties.”

Willem has designs