FilmDungeon’s Chief Editor JK sorts through the Dungeon’s DVD-collection to look for old cult favorites….

True Romance (1993, USA, France)

Director: Tony Scott
Cast: Christian Slater, Patricia Arquette, Dennis Hopper
Running Time: 119 mins.

In the early nineties, Tarantino wrote a couple of screenplays, including True Romance and Reservoir Dogs. He chose Reservoir Dogs for his directorial debut and was willing to sell True Romance. In 1993, after his debut was released, he took a date to the perfect date movie: True Romance, the film he had written. And boy, did it turn out to be a good movie; great fucking movie. Just looking at the cast members rolling by in the opening credits is astonishing; seeing so many (future) stars in one ensemble cast is rare. Director Tony Scott couldn’t deal with the screenplay’s non-chronological structure, so he changed it to a linear one. But aside from that, it’s a real Tarantino movie: the sharp dialogue, the great characters, the humor, the sudden bursts of violence; it’s all there. And then there’s an amazing sequence, one of the best he ever wrote: the famous Sicilian scene with Dennis Hopper and Christopher Walken. Oh man, that is legendary. Also memorable is the brutal confrontation between Alabama and the sadistic Virgil, played by James Gandolfini. The whole movie is basically a rollercoaster in which the two main characters – Clarence (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) – fall in love, get married, kill Alabama’s pimp, take off with his coke, and head to Hollywood to sell it, stumbling into one crazy situation after another while always keeping the film’s romantic core intact. True Romance is Scott’s best film and by far the best Tarantino movie not directed by Tarantino. In other words: it’s a must-see.