Bizarre twisted psycho thriller. Layered with jokes and hip pop culture references. Happy ending. Two thumbs up. Ignore all those negative reviews by girly men and other wimps. They can all go to hell. If you like to laugh and love action pics you'll enjoy this. Otherwise perhaps not.If you liked Denis Hopper in Blue Velvet you'll like this movie. If you liked Madsen in Reservoir Dogs, you'll like this too. Even though I'm still very angry at that little jerk for waking me up in the middle of the night when he was looking for Johnboy.Any more questions?I give this film a 9/10. It would be a 10, but it wasn't in Panavision.
... View More**SPOILERS*** Finding her boyfriend, Bradley Armstrong, in the arms of another girl Kate, Tamara Cholakian,Gena, Chelsy Reynolds, gets so drunk to the point where go gets in her car and visually impaired, by the bottle of booze, and runs down and kills law student Pete Farmer, Robert Baugh. Even worse leaves the scene of the accident.Getting in touch with her dad Henry Clark (Dennis Hooper), a big time real-estate business man, he tells Gena to hold still until he can come up with something to get her off the hook. Henry had been having a big fight with his partner Ron Sloan, Roy Tate, over his unsavory business practices. Henry tells Ron to take a hike out to the Death Valley Desert for the summer and forget to come back.Ron picking up the outside extension phone, as Gena called her father, heard the trouble that she's in and started to use that to get back in with Henry by blackmailing him over his daughter's action. Going to the Clark home and finding Gena alone Ron gives her this cock & bull story about him working for her dad in helping her out with the accident that she had that night. Ron then takes the incriminating evidence, the damaged car with blood stains of the dead Pete Farmer, away from the police to find. When Henry find this out from Gena what Ron did he blows his top. And gets in touch with Ron at the company cafeteria to talk things over. Going into the bathroom to get away from anyone listening in, there was a couple of cops sitting at one the tables having a snack,Henry grabs Ron by the throat and squeezes it until he passes out. Waiting outside for Ron to recover and leave the bathroom Henry notices that he's not leaving and when he goes in he finds him on the floor dead. Panic-stricken Henry throws Ron's body out of the bathroom window, in broad daylight, and waits outside for the coast to be clear to dispose the corpse that was hidden under some brush. This sets off a bizarre encounter with Will, Michael Madsen, who seems to know everything that happened between Henry and Ron. Even the fact that Ron was laying dead in the bushes.Will has a problem of his own he has a dead hooker in the trunk of his car that he's trying to get rid of. Talking Henry into helping him by driving his, Will's, very distinctive looking car through the local hooker's strip in town while he gets rid of the two bodies, Ron and the dead hooker Christianne De Marco, some miles away. Will wants Henry to seen by the locals thus giving him an alibi to Christanne's murder.By now you and those in the movie "Choke" forgot about Gena's hit and run accident but it later comes to the surface with explosive results. It comes out end of the movie with an ending that came right out of left field with the force of ship load full of Cruise Missiles. Weird is the word for "Choke" that keeps you guessing to what's happening in the movie and just what that deranged cuckoo bird Will is up to until the last frame. Michael Madsen's Will is so strange and obnoxious in this movie that at one point he actually invites a cop, Gino Dentie, to tow away his car. The car that had two murder victims in it's trunk? this after the cop warned him over and over to move out of a parking space reserved for the disabled.Michael Madsen, who seemed to be doing a John Deere commercial throughout the entire movie, was so nuts and off-the-wall that for a moment I thought that he may have well had a disable sticker on his car fender due to the mentally unstable condition that he was in.
... View MoreI just can't imagine any possible reasons why Madsen and Hopper wanted to be in this movie after reading the script. They got blackmailed maybe? Or are they that badly out of money? The main problem with the movie is that it's boring. The conversations between Madsen's and Hopper's character are pointless, just like the bored chatting between two buddies while drinking beer on a saturday night. You never feel for any of the characters (although Madsen's psycho killer is very likeable, comparing to the other characters). Hopper always was a good actor, and Madsen does a fine job as the serial killer, otherwise the acting is almost laughable. There are about three scenes in the whole movie where something is actually happening, each of them last about three minutes. Although the "talking and thinking about murder and the nature of murderers" scenes would have been interesting, if they were scenes in a book. The whole concept would've been interesting for a novel, but a movie just can't bare with a story with that much inner thinking and so little action.
... View More***SPOILERS*** What would otherwise have been a teaming in heaven, this Hopper-Madsen teaming is little more than a waste of film roll. Not surprising I suppose considering the recent track record of the actors, both have never been in a worthy theatrical release for a number of years."Choke" starts out promising. A Wealthy businessman (Hopper) discovers his daughter was the culprit in a hit and run accident. Rather than report it, they decide to stay quiet, because she was drinking at the time. Little does he know, someone overheard. Blackmailing into taking a job he didn't at first want to, Hopper then decides it's easier if he just knocks off the man - and before you can say "cover up" - a body is pushed out a second story window. Enter, Madsen, as a strange man, who drives up in a classic car, claiming to have seen Hopper's act. Instead of turning him into the authorities though - Madsen asks Hopper into his car and together they go cruising on the highways, stopping (constantly) to talk about their evil deeds. It's this "stopping and starting", that causes "Choke" to crumble. At times, it's as if we are watching a home video of a couple of actors talking (most of the time about nothing in particular), forgetting that they are supposed to be entertaining the audience. For Madsen and Hopper fans only.
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