Known to cult-film buffs as the man behind 2008’s amazing grindhouse tribute book, Shock Festival (and its accompanying gotta-get DVD companion set), Stephen Romano recently made the move into novelist with such well-received works as the thriller Resurrection Express, the supernatural Black Light and now, Metro.
My new novel, Metro, is about a group of young pop-culture bloggers and film nerds who find out that someone among them is actually a ruthless hitman, trained from birth to blend into his environment, ready to be activated at any moment. And when that person finally goes rogue to protect his friends in a night of bloody horror, nothing will ever be the same for any of them. It’s a story that asks the loaded questions: Are your friends who they seem to be? How many endemic spies and assassins walk among us? And when the cloak reveals the dagger, what would it take to break the conditioning of such an assassin?
In the end, Metro is a story of obsession, love, false identity and revolution against the bad guys we never see. Plus, lots of sex, drugs and comic books. As a screenwriter-novelist hyphenate, I read a lot and I watch a lot of movies that trade in similar themes. Here are 10 you should check out.
1. The Ninth Configuration (1980)
William Peter Blatty, creator of The Exorcist, writes and directs his quirky and moving masterpiece (aka Twinkle, Twinkle, Killer Kane) about a covert special ops wet work operative with a terrifying kill record sent to run a nuthouse. Kane’s bloody secret explodes in one of cinema’s most arresting and gripping scenes of violence and leads to one man’s discovery of the power of God. Quite simply, one of the greatest movies ever made.
2. La Femme Nikita (1990)
French action master Luc Besson’s early career milestone is still a sexy, unflinching tour de force about one haunted woman’s journey from suicidal street urchin to endemic super spook. Whom she is working for exactly is not important. The journey is. This is not Besson’s masterpiece but it’s a close cousin to The Professional, my favorite of his films. Anne Parillaud is astonishing.
3. The American (2010)
Based on a great novel by Martin Booth called A Very Private Gentleman, this low-key and somewhat overlooked romantic paranoia thriller starring George Clooney is a textbook example of how this shit is done on a slow burn, depicting a retired secret agent’s final spiral into unredeemed obsession in a small Italian villa. Co-stars Violante Placido, one of the world’s most beautiful women, as a brothel girl who gets lucky. Their chemistry is tense and explosive.
4. Touch of Evil (1958)
You always need a classic on the list, and I would argue that this is Orson Welles’ command performance for the ages. I actually like this film better than Citizen Kane in certain ways. Orson’s Captain Quinlan is something to watch in action, a hulking soulless specter of two-faced evil and corruption, the dirtiest dirty cop of all time, still bracing, tragic and compelling almost 60 years after the film was made.
5. Deliverance (1972)
Another all-time classic that delves deep into what ordinary men will do to stay alive and the lengths to which they will go to protect their terrible secrets in the aftermath. I’m a big fan of this kind of raw honesty and it doesn’t get much rawer. It was here that guys like Tarantino picked up a lot of their act. The film’s most startling, infamous sequence came with a chilling afterburn that made actor Ned Beatty an overnight star. And speaking of stars …
6. The Stunt Man (1980)
Peter O’Toole delivers his second most career-defining performance as a maniac film director looking to hide a desperate escaped convict, who may or may not be guilty of murder. With a deadpan blend of fantasy and reality, comedy and horror, death and love, art and commerce, this is one of my favorite films — a richly rewarding thriller/drama about the alienation and duality of the human animal — with plenty of sex and violence in there, too.
7. Monkey Shines (1988)
A truly original dual identity science fiction thriller from the legendary George A. Romero, also based on a stellar novel of the same title. This is a gripping, tensely layered, brilliantly acted masterwork that asks us: Can a quadriplegic become a serial killer? The answer is a monkey. No kidding. My third favorite of Romero’s masterful body of work in the 1980s.
8. Darkman (1990)
Both a searing, ultraviolent comedic satire and a bold rumination on love, death, rebirth, murder, obsession, identity theft and comic book madness, this is director Sam Raimi’s all-time four-color classic about a mild-mannered scientist (Liam Neeson) who is burned alive and comes back madder than hell. It packs 10 times the emotional and thematic wallop of any superhero film you can currently name, managing also to be the most important over-the-top cartoon freakout you’ll ever see.
9. The Man from Nowhere (2010)
This Korean revenge epic shows what happens when an invincible hitman tries to bury his past as a pawn shop owner in a really shitty neighborhood infested with human scum. It’s only a matter of time before someone sets him off, and the explosion is incredible to behold. A post-modern gangster classic with jaw-dropping central performances, fantastic action filmmaking and a truly original sense of pace. Guaranteed to blow you away.
10. The Departed (2006)
I’m sticking this one on the end because it needs to be on any list like this, but I’m not sure I need to sell it to you. After a lifetime of giving us the very best in post-modern noir cinema, director Martin Scorsese finally won his much-deserved Oscar for this one. Not his best film, but a really ambitious one, packed with pyrotechnical moviemaking moves, terrifying and hilarious performances and a script which dares to ask us, at point-blank range: Who are your friends? Are they what they seem? Are the good guys really good? The bad guys really bad? And where do you run when the shit comes down hard? Think about it, chum. —Stephen Romano