Dan, "Road House" received all of that visual fol-de-rol so that one of Fox' art directors could retool some lavishly designed sets for a totally different film featuring a ultra-snazzy mountain lodge, but the prospective film (whose title escapes me) hit a series of terminal snags just before shooting and was never made.

So they apparently retooled the sound stage, revamped certain aspects of the "Road House" script to accommodate it, and created a "noir-in-the-woods" fantasy that Jake Hinkson drooled over in his recent NC e-zine article about noir art directors/production designers. But just as correlation doesn't prove causation, an overwrought production design doth not guarantee a quality film...

I think many of us find "Road House" to be overstuffed, overheated, and overrated (primarily by fans of Lupino and Widmark, who seem to have come to the collextive view that these two can do no wrong...) so be warned that these (and yours) might well be fighting words for the FNF brain trust, who've now shown it three times at the Bay Area editions of NC.

Just out of curiosity, what are they charging as the single-film admission price? Sounds as though there's a bit of "cha-ching" going on in Chi-town this weekend...