COHEN & TATE (1989)

written and directed by Eric Red

starring: Roy Scheider and Adam Baldwin

As a child, every year, a few weeks before Christmas, I would make a list of the numerous gifts that I wanted to receive.  As an adult, every year, a few weeks before Christmas, I make a list of the numerous gifts that I would like to give.

This year I would like to give to every first-time independent filmmaker a video copy of COHEN & TATE, as it is the perfect primer for how to make a high-quality, low-budget feature film.  Despite the fact that this film bears the dubious distinction of holding the record for the lowest opening weekend box office gross in history - only $212.00, this is still a terrific film.

Eric Red (Body Parts and The Last Outlaw), who began his career in the movies as the screenwriter of The Hitcher and co-screenwriter of Near Dark, chose as his directorial debut a simple story that combines the necessary elements of any successful low budget film: a road movie and a high-octane thriller -- and it all takes place in less than twenty-four hours.

Roy Scheider (The Seven-Ups, Marathon Man, and Sorcerer) plays Cohen, an aging and ruthless hit man, with thirty years on the job, who, for the first time in his career, is assigned a "partner", Tate, played by Adam Baldwin (Full Metal Jacket), a young, cocky, hot-headed and trigger-happy shooter. They are employed by the Texas mob, and their assignment is to kidnap Travis Knight, a nine year-old boy who is an eyewitness to the murder of another Texan mobster, and bring him back to Houston to tell their boss who did the hit. 

Travis, along with his mother and father, are in hiding at a "safe house" - actually a deserted farmhouse, somewhere near Muskogee, Oklahoma, waiting to testify to the FBI.  However, the mob has their own brand of justice and they want to talk to Travis before the FBI does. 

Thanks to the efforts of one of the three FBI agents (who, in a scene we never see, obviously sold information to the Texas mob) assigned to protect Travis and his parents, Cohen and Tate are successful in their abduction.  And thus begins the body count - two FBI agents and Travis' parents - although, we later learn that Travis' father is still alive, albeit in critical condition.  But, he may as well be dead because his character never reappears in the film again anyway.

However, what should be a routine job, goes sour fast as Travis, riding alone in the back seat, quickly sizes up the weaknesses of the hired killers in the front seat and systematically begins to manipulate the quick-tempered Tate in an attempt to create conflict between the two hit men.  And it sure as hell works, as Tate is maniacally desperate to kill the kid, despite Cohen's admonishments and constant reminders that their job is to bring Travis back alive.

What follows, once Travis knows that he won't die before he is delivered to Houston, is a battle of wits, not only between Travis and Tate, and not only between Tate and Cohen, but between Travis and Cohen as well.  All of this tension leads to an escalation in the body count, with a bloody and satisfying climactic finale. 

Unlike the Roger Corman school of low-budget movie making, where the writers/directors attempt to remake a popular high-budget Hollywood film, which always results in embarrassingly disastrous results, Eric Red has created a film that satisfies the demands of a limited budget by writing a script that calls for a minimum number of characters, a minimum number of locations, and a minimum number of camera set-ups, without compromising the integrity of the story. 

This allowed him to spend his money on two known actors (Scheider and Baldwin) and to hire an experienced Director of Photography (Victor J. Kemper) who's cinematography defies the flat "look" that we have come to expect from low-budget films. 

Eric Red has also given the characters of Cohen and Tate enough personality to allow both Scheider, as the chain-smoking and hearing aid-wearing, stone-cold killer, and Baldwin, as the gum-chewing and sunglasses-wearing, psychotic killer, to humanize them.  You may not like who they are, but trust me, you will believe that they are killers.  Not because the script says they are, but because they say they are - not in dialogue, but in action.

Now, that's entertainment!

[originally published in VMag - December 1997]