Trespass *** (1992, Bill Paxton, Ice-T, William Sadler, Art Evans, Ice Cube) – Classic Movie Review 5348

Bill Paxton and William Sadler star as Arkansas firemen Vince and Don, who are given a treasure map by a hysterical old man in a burning building. It turns out he stole a large amount of gold valuables from a church and hid them. That discovery leads them to an abandoned warehouse n a building in East St Louis, Illinois, where a fortune in gold church ornaments has supposedly been stashed as hidden treasure since back in 1940.

There they find a corpse hanging from the ceiling, an old tramp whom they tie up, and King James (Ice-T)’s street gang of vicious drug sellers, who target them. How can Paxton and Sadler get out of the building alive with the gold – if indeed it exists?

With its simple but effective set-up and extremely robust film-making style, director Walter Hill’s 1992 B-movie style action crime thriller is a welcome return to his old form. ‘I wanted to make a down-and-dirty thriller. I wanted to shoot it in a fast, hard style,’ said Hill. And that’s exactly what he does.

Hill films this self-consciously preposterous reworking of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948) with relentless dynamism and energy. His movie is violent, foul-mouthed and probably racially unsound with the white heroes and the black tramp and black drug-sellers going after them. But otherwise it is strong, simple-minded boys’ own action entertainment that looks and sounds great, with Lloyd Aheru’s flashy cinematography and Ry Cooder’s music bashing it excitingly along.

Every now and again something classier seems to be threatening to get out from Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis’s screenplay, but Hill soon puts a stop to that. Gale and Zemeckis wrote it years earlier back in the Seventies before Back to the Future (1985). ‘I thought it was enormously primal, elemental, brutal,’ Hill said. ‘I don’t think the script changed all that much’, although it was ‘rewritten many times’.

Also in the cast are Art Evans, Ice Cube, De’voreaux White, Bruce A Young and Glenn Plummer.

The film’s 3 July 1992 release was delayed because of the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and then it was given a new title (changed from Looters) and a new ending after test screenings. Hill disliked the studio using Trespass, as it sounded like a Fifties era title of an RKO movie starring Robert Mitchum and Jane Russell.

After all that, the film did poorly, grossing just $13.7 million in North America (it cost $14 million. ‘Somehow the riots tainted the movie,’ said Hill.

© Derek Winnert 2017 Classic Movie Review 5348

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