plug: Sorcerer (1977)
"When the money’s up, I’m just as good as any of you.”
Welcome to today’s plug, a quick recommendation of an oft-forgotten film, cult classic, or movie that is dying to be rewatched // We send plugs every Tuesday + Thursday //
So I’ve been watching Alone on Netflix. It’s a competition show where a bunch of contestants are dropped in a remote wilderness and whichever one of them goes the longest surviving out there wins $500,000. Like several of the people in the season I watched came close to dying because they were so desperate to stay out there and win the money. It’s some of the most blatant faux-gladiatorial late-stage capitalism Death Race 2000-type entertainment I’ve ever seen. And it got me thinking about this tweet I scrolled upon about “challenge horror” movies.
And that got me thinking about Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s recently-rediscovered 1977 masterpiece about four sad, grubby, desperate dudes who risk their lives transporting gallons of volatile nitroglycerin across 200 miles of South American jungle for a little taste of economic security.
Sorcerer is a steamy Indica joint with an epic slow burn. Half the runtime is spent meticulously setting up the Bosch-like journey to the heart of darkness that the film is known for. There’s a mini-prologue for each of the four outcasts, showing their different backgrounds and the various crimes that landed them in exile, and why they’ll do anything to get out of their bleak-ass situation. It’s meandering but also eerily propulsive, and it all makes for one fuckin’ shredder of a back half.
Friedkin is like the poster boy for ‘70s “bad boy” auteurs who treat actors like shit to get a good performance out of them. I’m pretty out on that whole shtick, don’t really think there’s ever an excuse to treat people badly in any working environment tbh. But there’s also no denying that Friedkin’s movies kick ass. Sorcerer’s insane central setpiece, where the group has to take their two monstrous trucks of nitroglycerin across a rotting bridge over a raging river in the middle of a violent thunderstorm, might be one of the greatest and most convincing special effects sequences ever put to film. And what makes it an effect is that it’s all done “practically,” in camera, and I still don’t know how they fuckin’ pulled it off.
Anyway, if you like doomed-treasure seeking adventure movies, dark ‘70s genre-bending, good acting under pressure, dank cinematography, and brain-splitting practical stunts, go nuts with Sorcerer.
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