ROLLING STONE JUDGMENT NIGHT SOUNDTRACK MOVIE
Chicago itself just happens to be an amazing urban landscape 90% of the movie is shot at nighttime. It’s more about that, and what these guys have going on, than the reality of gangs and Chicago. For all that swagger and machismo, now it’s a real thing. So when Jeremy Piven’s character pulls out a gun, everything changes. When you have a loaded gun on the table, it kind of changes the atmosphere of the room, you know? It changes how you feel about a lot of things, unlike in films, where you don’t have to take it seriously – it’s sort of fun, and not realistic. And suddenly, one of them just pulls out a gun on the table while we’re chatting. I remember when doing Predator 2, we hired the Crips to guard us when we were downtown, because we had to do deals with the gangs. I don’t think we were avoiding it it just wasn’t written that way to be a commentary about race. We didn’t necessarily want the movie to be about race, or at least at the center of the story. In Chicago at the time, there were definitely Irish gangs, there were Italian gangs, African-American gangs, Latino gangs, different territories run by different people. We didn’t want to go quite that far, but in that film they had to delineate territories. I think one of Barry Gordon’s first films with Walter Hill was The Warriors – there’s a slightly heightened version of reality there. On Navigating Race and Crime, and Denis Leary’s Villain For us, these yuppies running around thinking we were tough, it was quite an eye-opening experience. The next day, the Army came in and shut the place down. The crew ran down, and they caught this sixteen-year-old kid who had to shoot someone to get into a gang. We were shooting, and a shot rang out a schoolkid had just had his head blown off from someone who was in our building. When we were shooting the project, there’s that scene where we kill Jeremy Piven, which is one of the first scenes we did. We wanted to work hard to get it right, and not make it about something that wasn’t just about rape – a lot of these urban stories are about that.Īs it turns out, Chicago was really primed for that sentiment then. I was given a lot of scripts, and it was quite a long process. They’d actually been wanting to make this film for a long time, and there were all sorts of scripts, from people like John Carpenter and Gary Cunningham – different versions that involved bikers in the desert of LA, and things like that.
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Barry Gordon started his own production company called Largo, and I think was the first film to come out of that. I’d done Predator 2 with Barry Gordon and Joel Silver, who were partners at the time shortly afterward, they had a very bitter split. In anticipation of this hallowed night of metal, mayhem and E-milio, CoS sat down for a phone interview with Hopkins to discuss the film’s intriguing cult legacy, its soundtrack, and its relationship to the ‘real’ Chicago. This weekend, Judgment Night returns to the city of its setting for its 25 th anniversary, for the Music Box Theatre’s annual festival of genre delights, Cinepocalypse – with Hopkins in attendance. Here, it feels like an album that has kept an underrated genre gem in the cult consciousness, long past its expected shelf life. Sometimes it’s a shame when a movie’s soundtrack eclipses the legacy of the movie that spawned it. Throw a stone at a group of white ’90s kids who grew up in the suburbs, and chances are you’ll hit someone who considers that album Their Jam.
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ROLLING STONE JUDGMENT NIGHT SOUNDTRACK SERIES
The real catalyst for its rediscovery, however, is usually the film’s chart-making rap-rock soundtrack album, which featured an innovative series of collabs between some of the biggest hip-hop and metal artists of the time (Living Colour and Run DMC, Slayer and Ice-T, and so on). In the case of Judgment Night, that cult appeal is twofold: one, Hopkins directs the hell out of it, injecting a pretty boilerplate chase thriller with seas of ink-black Gothic cinematography and exciting moments of suspense. It’s a grimy depiction of Chicago as an apocalyptic hellscape, with the cinnamon-roll boys at its center struggling to ‘man up’ to survive the bloody night ahead of them.īut cult films are a curious thing – movies can resonate with people long after their initial theatrical run, often for the strangest reasons. A harrowing, stripped-down actioner following a group of Evanston suburbanites ( Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Stephen Dorff, and Jeremy Piven) running afoul of a crime lord ( Denis Leary) one dark night in the big, bad city of Chicago, the film treads similar territory as Walter Hill’s The Warriors and John Boorman’s Deliverance. When director Stephen Hopkins’ gritty urban thriller Judgment Night came out in 1993, it was released to mixed reviews and a modest box office take ($21 million on a $12 million budget).