‘Road House’ on Netflix: A Guide to the Greatest Bad Movie of All-Time

Road House is the story of one bouncer’s quest to free a small town from the iron fist of the guy who is on the verge of opening the area’s first JC Penney. Over half a dozen men will die for this.

There—now the story of the crown jewel in Netflix’s latest round of movie acquisitions is out there in the open for all to see. I’m sure I could come up with less goofy ways to summarize the plot of the 1989 Patrick Swayze movie often touted as the best bad movie of all-time, but that defeats the purpose. If you’re going to watch Road House, you’ve got to stare its sublime ridiculousness square in the face. It’s what makes watching this crazy thing so much fun.

Directed by Rowdy Herrington—and no, I’m not making that name up—Road House stars Patrick Swayze, fresh from his Dirty Dancing superstardom, as a street-fighting man named Dalton. Dalton is a bouncer by trade, but he’s not just any bouncer. For one thing, he has a philosophy degree from NYU. Here’s how he describes his major: “Man’s search for faith, that sort of shit.”

For another, he’s more than a mere bouncer. Dalton is a “cooler,” aka the HBIC (Head Bouncer In Charge). It’s his job to oversee the other bouncers at the bars in which he works, devising their strategies like a general. A general with extremely good hair.

Finally, and most importantly, Dalton is a famous bouncer. Yes, Road House takes place in a world much like our own, but with one key difference: Bouncers can get so good at their jobs that bartenders and waitresses and club owners from thousands of miles away know their names like movie stars. It’s kind of like True Blood, only instead of “real life but with vampires” it’s “real life but people will fly across the country to hire a guy who’s really good at punching drunk dudes in the face.”

Based in New York when we first meet him, Dalton gets scooped up by a bar owner from Jasper, Missouri named Frank Tilghman, played by the inexplicably creepy Kevin Tighe. He was Locke’s grifter dad on Lost, he spends the entire film leering at Dalton while saying shit like “I thought you’d be…bigger,” and somehow he is not the bad guy in the movie.

That would be Brad Wesley, the area’s aforementioned tyrannical chain-store franchisee and low-key organized crime boss. He’s portrayed by Ben Gazzara, the acclaimed actor who counted collaborations with Tennessee Williams, John Cassavetes, and the Coen Brothers among his accomplishments. Let’s just say he’s a long, long way from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or The Killing of a Chinese Bookie here, though this character and Jackie Treehorn from The Big Lebowski have a lot in common.

Dalton’s top priority upon his arrival in Jasper—besides finding a room to rent and a jalopy to drive from among the town’s bizarrely extensive supply of weird old men who rent rooms and sell cars—is cleaning up the Double Deuce, Tilghman’s Mos Eisley Cantina of a dive bar. Unfortunately for Dalton, Brad Wesley has a vested interest in keeping the Double Deuce a godforsaken hellhole, since he’s forced all local businesses to pay him protection money.

In short order, Dalton fires the bar’s in-house Brad Wesley goons, played by wrestling legend Terry Funk and punk legend John Doe. He institutes bouncing rules for the staff like “Be nice…until it’s time to not be nice.” And he slams the occasional guy’s head through a table, in what I’m guessing is the “time to not be nice” portion of the evening.

A stab wound or two later and Dalton meets Dr. Elizabeth Clay, a local MD played by Kelly Lynch. Dalton takes a shine to her after she staples his latest knife gash shut—with no anesthesia, at his insistence, because “Pain don’t hurt.” Sparks fly, mostly from stand-up sex friction.

But Elizabeth and Wesley used to be a thing, which makes the deranged old McMansion owner even more determined to take Dalton down. Only the intervention of Dalton’s grizzled, preposterously sexy bouncing mentor Wade Garrett—played by Gazzara’s fellow future Lebowski alum Sam Elliott—can stem the tide.

By now, some of Road House‘s charms should be obvious. The wackadoo plot. The crazy cast. The advancement of the plot exclusively through Dalton’s faux-zen wisdom (“Nobody ever wins a fight”) and people getting punched in the face and thrown through furniture.

But the key to Road House‘s addictive watchability, and the reason it deserves to become a staple of everyone’s Netflix rotation, is that it isn’t just so bad it’s good. In its own bad way, it really is good!

Like, sure, it’s a movie directed by a guy named “Rowdy.” But some truly seasoned pros in the art of Hollywood action helped put this thing together. It’s produced by Joel Silver, of the Matrix and Lethal Weapon series. The crew includes cinematographer Dean Cundey (Jurassic Park, Back to the Future, Escape from New York, The Thing) and editors John F. Link (Die Hard, Predator, Commando,The Hand That Rocks the Cradle) and Frank J. Uribe (RoboCop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Tombstone). In other words, the people who were action cinema in the ’80s and ’90s made this goofy thing sing.

And the performances leave nothing on the table, whether it’s been shattered by a human skull or not. Lynch is steely and sexy as the Doc, and she and Swayze have real chemistry. (Maybe that’s why Bill Murray calls her husband to harass him every time the film’s big sex scene comes on TV.) Gazzara acts like he’s having the time of his life playing such a textbook villain. Sam Elliott radiates so much animal magnetism that when he unbuttons his jeans to show Dalton and Elizabeth one of his more intimate scars, you feel like you should be using protection.

Patrick Swayze, though? Swayze is next level. Only he has the right set of tools to make a character as odd as Dalton feel like a character rather than a bunch of thrown-together quirks.

He has the physical grace—and stunning physique—of a trained dancer. He’s got the down-home charm of a native Texan with no small experience in the barfight business. He’s got the hair of an angel…and the ass of a devil. (Seriously, when one of his coworkers at the Double Deuce sees him naked, she reacts like she just looked into the Erotic Ark of the Covenant.) He has a commitment to the fight scenes so intense that he and fellow performer Marshall Teague had to lay off after their first night rehearsing their climactic fight scene because they were in danger of actually beating the shit out of each other. He’s amazing.

And so is Road House. I mean, I would know: I’m writing a short essay about Road House every day this year, and I’m nearly 200 entries in. (If you dig it, please swing by my Patreon; writing about Road House 365 times in a row doesn’t pay for itself!)

Since I first saw the movie with a bunch of drunk, high, hooting and hollering friends over a decade ago, I’ve watched it dozens of times with dozens of people. I never get tired of the bone-crunching action, the sweaty neo-western sex appeal, the cockamamie dialogue (“Are you gonna fight, dickless?” “I sure ain’t gonna show you my dick!”), the peculiar performances, and the overall vibe that anything can happen at any moment. I always find new things I never noticed, or old things I never fully appreciated.

In other words, this great bad movie functions, in a lot of ways, like a great great movie. I’ll never stop watching it. Now, thanks to its presence on that big red streaming service, you never have to stop watching it either.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.

Where to stream Road House