Road House is not quite the same as some of the other B-Movies we have talked about here. Road House is a veritable cult classic, celebrated pretty much since its release, and it has a higher budget than some of those crappy sci-fi flicks we've examined. That being said, Road House is known for being a little 'so bad and wild that it's good'. So let's take a look at the hot real story behind 1989's Road House.
Rowdy Herrington directed this movie about a bouncer who is hired to bounce a pretty wild bar. Patrick Swayze plays our beautiful bouncer, Dalton, who seems unphased by anything. This martial arts expert is hired to clean up The Double Deuce from some local ne'er-do-wells. He starts successfully doing this which doesn't make the town's local crooks happy. In fact, Dalton becomes their enemy. That's where the action comes into play!
The action in this movie was so wild that Patrick sustained multiple knee injuries while on set. As a result, he turned down two major action films after this movie and instead made Ghost simply because it was not as physically demanding. The movie as a whole was reportedly a pain to film because of Swayze's fame. He had just made Dirty Dancing and the original tagline to this movie was "The dancing's over. Now it gets dirty." Oh, hell yes. Fans kept crashing the set trying to meet him and even a female extra playing a waitress was so distracted by Swayze's good looks that she reportedly tripped and spilled drinks all over the set. Hey, we get it. This was PEAK Swayze.
He wasn't the only hot guy in the movie. Sam Elliott shows his pubes and Gary Hudson gives us a look at his tanned tush for shots that make me think that maybe, just maybe, this movie isn't the hetero action classic that so many bros want us to think it is. The movie spends A LOT of time looking at hot, bulky beefcakes.
Road House was NOT financially successful. Part of that was due to the poor marketing from the studio that tried to cash in on Patrick Swayze's female fans. They billed the movie as much more comedic and fun rather than being filled with bone-cracking action scenes. Its cult status started to gain momentum when fans of action and so-good-its-bad movies came flocking to the video store to take a look at these hyper-realistic stunts. According to Sam Elliott, all of the actors did their own stunts. To be fair, the original cut of this film was allegedly over three hours long - THREE HOURS - and many of the cut scenes were purely comedic (while being filled with plenty of ass-kicking). Unlike some other B-movies, Herrington claims that the humor in this movie is pretty intentional. He wanted the fights to feel over-the-top and goofy and for that we have to applaud him. Mission accomplished!
Watch the scene that really showcases Swayze's buns and you'll go appropriately crazy for Swayze:
