Year: 1996
Runtime: 101 min
Director: Shimon Dotan
Starring: Michael Pare, Peter Greene, Macha Grenon, Michel Perron, Ian MacDonald
I love finding a little known, direct-to-video action movie because it’s always an exciting game to see if I’ve stumbled upon some hidden treasure, or just an errant pile of dog doo. I get to play Indiana Jones and unearth some forgotten relic of an era when VHS rental stores were in every town and the weekly trek to their musty shelves hinted at great promises unfulfilled.
Coyote Run, also known as Sworn Enemies, is one of those movies that would have sat, gleaming at you in the late 90s. It lacks the punchy, painted coverart of those 80s shlock-fests, but do not be fooled; under its unassuming exterior lies one heck of a wild trip.
From first glance, this movie looks like it could literally be anything. Two men staring at each other, a plane doing a…flip under a waterfall? Under bad floodlights? I really don’t know. But I had a good feeling about this one because it starred Michael Pare from when he was still young-ish and attractive, and because of this fellow here.
Peter Greene.
I don’t know a heck of a lot about Mr. Greene, pretty much what the internet has told me (character actor who struggled with drugs). But I remember seeing him dozens of times as the villain in The Mask as a kid and his performance in that film always stuck with me. I know I’ve seen him in a bunch of other small roles (exclusively villains if I recall), including a couple episodes of the criminally underrated American version of Life on Mars.
Either way, I wanted to see this character-actor take on a lead role.
And the trailer promised me enough gunfights and low-budget explosions to keep me awake.
The general plot is that Pare plays either a small town deputy or some random alcoholic the sheriff gets to fill in for him, it’s never really explained. Although the idea that any job market could be so bad that “Alcoholic ex-mercenary with anger issues” would make for a fitting part-time cop is positively dystopian.
When a bunch of crime bosses get whacked in his little town, Pare discovers that the man doing the whacking is none other than his former partner in the merc business. Both men assumed the other had died years ago but the revelation that they are both alive and well is not cause for celebration. See, they tried to kill each other over a tiny disagreement regarding war crimes.
So Pare hops a crop duster to Canada (not a joke) to hunt down his former comrade in arms, meeting up with a mostly clothed and be-wigged stripper played by Macha Grenon.
And this is where things start getting weird.
Now, the movie is billed as an action flick, but despite some decent shootouts, what we really have here is a strange little slice of neo-noir. In fact, the absolute best description of the movie is as a neo-noir crime story hastily translated into English. I say translated because of the alien atmosphere of the film. It just feels “off”, as though it occupies a space that resembles our Earth, but does not follow the same rules of logic.
Not once did I feel like I had a total grasp on what is happening. Just when we start to nod our heads and get ready to label it a revenge picture, that’s when the movie shifts tone and focus once again.
At around the mid-way point, Greene is captured by Pare, and we get the entire gist of the story upended in quite the spectacular fashion. It turns out that all Greene wants is his old friend back, to rule his criminal empire side-by-side. Kind of a twisted way to get your buddy back, you know, trying to kill him and all, but I guess they do things differently in Montreal.
It sounds like bad writing (and probably is) but Peter Greene absolutely sells his performance, transforming from a cold crime lord to a figure of pity as he falls apart (mentally, not physically) in an abandoned barn-but-also-church (again, not a joke). Watching him chew the scenery is mesmerizing, and unlike the other characters, I could never predict just what the hell he was going to do next. This uncertainty in a direct-to-video Canadian action movie was refreshing.
The entire thing is filmed with a stylistic noir bent, like director Shimon Dotan had been provided a copy of Blue Velvet to watch on repeat for the entire duration of filming. It’s not up to the standards of that piece of classic cinema, but the strange atmosphere is there. Really, the only film I feel accurately compares to the oddity that is Coyote Run is the Jean Claude Van Damme flick Desert Heat released a couple years later.
I say this because both films are low-budget action movies on the surface, but under that veneer lies a world of weirdness. Both movies have similar moments of skewed humor bookended with totally strange set pieces. It’s a comparison I can make comfortably knowing that only five other people have ever seen Desert Heat (aka Inferno). You’ll just have to trust me on it.
Some highlights include: A brief shootout in a clothing factory filled with mannequins, two brothers who work in a local funeral parlor and double as rather ineffective hitmen, a showdown in a cemetery in broad daylight, Greene caressing and kissing the snake he carries around in his pocket, a cop who only shows up to speak in noir-drenched riddles but seems to know everything that is going on, and the cherry on top is the dysfunctional relationship between Pare and Greene, which morphs into a desperate partnership by the end.
I cannot stress how weird this movie was. I mean, we have so many unnecessary scenes that seem to imply deeper meaning with no explanation.
Exhibit A: The killers hired to catch Pare and Greene in the cemetery are shown to be very clearly homosexual. They share longing glances with each other and the camera lingers as they stroke one another’s hand. Why? It’s a small touch that means literally nothing. It’s just…there.
Exhibit B: Wigs. All the female characters…er, all two of them…wear wigs despite not being used as a method to conceal their identity. And again, why?
Exhibit C: Can I just repeat that the movie ends in a dilapidated barn/church? Not a barn converted to a church, just a barn and church combo, with pews and straw and probably way more chicken poop than your average, run-of-the-mill church is supposed to have.
By the end, we have experienced a movie that is both formulaic and anarchic at the same time. We have a few solid, if unmemorable action sequences, a scene-stealing performance from Peter Greene, and the sense that this is one tick above your usual fare from a straight-to-video 90s film.
So is Coyote Run a good movie? No. But is it fascinating? I think so. It kept glued to my seat just to see what madness was going to unfold next.
