A League of Mullets Movie Review

Yo, we watched To Live and Die in LA and here is our review: Dr. Monkey saw this movie back in 1985 when it first came out and it holds up pretty well with a few glaring exceptions.

The movie is about a Secret Service Agent (William Peterson) who not only crosses the line in pursuing the counterfeiter (Willem Dafoe) who killed his three days away from retiring partner, he obliterates the line. He smashes the line. He wipes the line away with a neutron bomb and then he goes after the bad guy.

"Hi, I'm a huge prick in this film!"

Okay, first off we want to say William Peterson is a huge dick in this film. Don't get all excited ladies, we did not say he had a huge dick, we said he is a huge dick. He treats the law like it was his personal plaything. He treats his new partner (John Pankow) like shit just because he commits the sin of not being his old dead partner. He treats his informant/girlfriend Darlanne Fluegel like shit. When he got turned down by his boss when he asks for "front money" for a sting on the bad guy, he goes out and kidnaps, robs, and gets an FBI agent shot and killed, and then he expresses no fucking remorse about it at all. When he finally gets killed from a shotgun blast to his face at the end of the movie we cheered. He was a total douche in this movie.


Willem Dafoe was good as the bad guy but there were moments, like when he was in the house of one of his black henchmen and about to get his ass stabbed, that he seemed kind of puny to be the villain of the piece. He chews a lot of scenery in his scenes with Peterson and Pankow. Lucky for him though he also got to do many sex scenes with the gal who played his bisexual lover Debra Freuer.

The lovely Debra Freuer.

Pankow was good in this movie but honestly his character was only a bit above Peterson's dickish one. He starts off by being the good guy who bitches about the things Peterson does but by the end of the film he becomes the guy Peterson was. In our opinion though this performance was among his best two ever put on film. His other one was in Year of the Gun. However if we ever meet Mr. Pankow we will be forced to kick his ass for being on Mad About You for all those years. And while we're at it, if you're reading this Paul Reiser, you're ass is getting triple kicked for that piece of shit show.
I'm not sure what the director, William Friedkin, had against Darlanne Fluegel, you may remember her as one of the wives in the late great NBC gangster series Crime Story, in this movie but he had it in for her bad. Her character was weak, got stuck with bad lines, and most serious of all was this bad haircut they saddled her with:
We thought that her haircut in this movie was a crime against all women until we saw this picture of her:

What is it about Ms. Fluegel that makes people do bad things to her hair? She's kind of faded from view now so maybe she finally got a decent hair cut. But we doubt it.

We enjoyed the twists and turns in this film and the movie as a whole. But the dickish behavior of Peterson was a bit of a turn off for us, so was the way the female characters got treated in general by the male characters. The dated scenes, especially the ones in the night club where Freuer's character was a dancer, were laughable now.

You may remember the song "To Live and Die in LA" by Wang Chung, it was the theme of this movie. They also did the score and of course stuffed the soundtrack with their other hit, "Everybody Wang Chung Tonight." It really is amazing what you can do with a drum machine, a synthesiser, and a teaspoon of talent.

Oh yeah, we forgot to mention Jane Leeves from Frasier is in this movie as well, though she is billed as Jane Leaves in the credits. She plays the bisexual lover of Ms. Freuer's character. It's a cameo appearance but it is kind of funny now to see her in this movie leering at Freuer.

We can't recommend you rent or buy this movie but if you happen to catch it late one night on some hellish TV station, then by all means watch it.

So say us! So say us all!!!