Walter Hill (1) (1942–)

Well-constructed and beautifully shot Vietnam allegory that sees a squad of National Guards heading out into the Louisiana swamps on a weekend exercise. A combination of ignorance and arrogance places them in a grim life-or-death struggle against a group of angry Cajuns as the inter-personal dynamics within the squad begin to break down. The 'Nam metaphor is pretty upfront and unavoidable but that doesn't distract from a well scripted and tense thriller. Writer (along with Michael Kane and show more David Giler) / director Walter Hill delivers some well-rounded characters and great dialogue, which plays out against a tense and violent background. Hill keeps the pace relentless and constructs some clever, unexpected action sequences, while Andrew Laszlo provides some excellent, poetic cinematography, capturing the grim beauty, isolation and cloying claustrophobia of the swamp to great effect. Ry Cooper's superb sliding Zydeco score is also first class. Keith Carradine, Powers Boothe and Fred Ward are all very good in the lead roles putting in powerful, dramatic, testosterone-fuelled performances. show less

“It’s what I do. I kill people. Whack them . Ice them . Murder them. Call it what you will.”

Pretty regular assassin story at the start, then an AWESOME twist on page 43! What the hell??? Now THAT is revenge! And then another "twist" at the end? Come on man! I very much enjoyed this unique take on an old assassin/revenge tale! Crazy!

Nearly forty years ago, in 1979, Walter Hill directed the cult classic The Warriors. Less than a decade later, amidst other gigs, he penned the story for Triggerman. In 2015, Rue de Sèvres releases the French language graphic novel Balles Perdues (translated 'Stray Bullets')

Lucky for those of us do not speak french, Hard Case Crime just released the first edition English graphic titled "Triggerman". It is 124 pages of gritty prohibition badass. Individual issues were released last year, but show more this collection soles the piecemeal problem many of us have with buying singles.

Machine Gun Roy Nash is dead. A fat bloated body attributed with his name was riddled with bullets inside a prison and cremated. Nash is delivered inside a pine box and on opening, Roy Parker is born.

Roy has a knack for locating people and extracting from them anything which requires extracting. Today, he is charged with locating three men who performed a job and then bolted before paying up. It isn't the money that is the problem, it is the disrespect.

Roy is personally invested in this job. Travelling with the three men was lovely Lena, the woman that makes his clock tick and his life meaningful. It doesn't hurt that any cash recovered will remain his, to the tune of half a million dollars.

The art in this novel is solid.. Like a brick rock through a window.
The writing is amazing, relying on the interplay with imagery, it drags you along at just the right pace.
The tommy guns frequently blurt out 'Budda-Budda-Budda' and everytime, you feel the lead to body 'conversation' is absolutely justified.

A couple things helped legitimize this story. First, Nash.. I kept making mental comparisons to the similar last name of Elliot Ness, a true life special agent who battled Al Capone. They are no where near mirrors of each other but I was in a prohibitionist state of mind and perhaps needed a beer while reading this. Second, the gangster in Chicago who is offended and pays for this adventure happens to be referred to as Al, regardless of any last name, it FEELs right when reading it.

Hard Case Crime has been releasing solid fiction for a few years now and looks to be continuing the trend.

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Disclosure: This was provided to me for review purposes. While I could choose to murder the reviewed work in it's sleep, I really did like it and will attempt to hide it from our mutual enemies to ensure it doesn't receive cement shoes. If I hated it, I would have written my review in emoticons that are not relevant to the era of the work and would have been a whole lot less fun. show less

This was very odd and not entirely successful. It’s a graphic novel of a movie I’d never heard of, directed by Walter Hill and starring Michelle Rodriguez and Sigourney Weaver. The concept is simple and reasonably offensive. A hitman wakes up after being kidnapped by an enemy to find that they’ve operated on him and given him a sex change. Cue a pretty standard revenge tale with lots of nudity and violence that never really grapples with the idea at its heart. It ends up feeling like show more the first book in an alternative universe trans-remake of the Executioner series. Odd, poorly conceived and basically pointless. show less