Film Appreciation - Everything a Big Bad Wolf Could Want

Cody Hamman's appreciation for the 1993 action thriller Striking Distance has him howling.

My father was born in 1954, so he would have been around 12 years old when the Sam the Sham & the Pharaohs song “Lil’ Red Riding Hood” was released, and it made a memorable impact. He would tell a story about going over to a friend’s house to listen to records, and they would listen to the friend’s older brother’s copy of the “Lil’ Red Riding Hood” album. That was the nice part of the memory. The sad twist was that the friend’s older brother was killed in a car accident after that. According to my father, who tended to exaggerate, the guy was ejected from his vehicle and had his head split in half by a street sign. Why he felt the need to tell me that detail, especially since I was a kid when he would tell this story, I couldn’t say. But the story has stuck with me, and now I think about it every time I hear “Lil’ Red Riding Hood.”

Filmmaker Rowdy Herrington was born in 1951, and it could be that “Lil’ Red Riding Hood” played a memorable role in his youth as well, because he made it a prominent part of this 1993 action thriller Striking Distance.

Herrington was from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he set the story of Striking Distance (which he wrote alongside producer Marty Kaplan) in his hometown. You could tell he was enamored with the place, because he gets some great shots of it – and also staged some cool action moments there, including an awesome opening car chase sequence that includes some entertaining shots of a vehicle being pursued by police cruisers down a very bumpy road.

Bruce Willis stars in this one as Pittsburgh cop Thomas Hardy. When the film catches up with him in 1991, he’s a homicide detective and is dealing with the guilt (and backlash) of having recently turned in his partner / cousin, Jimmy Detillo (Robert Pastorelli), for using excessive force. Hardy is a fifth-generation cop, though, and his police captain father Vince (John Mahoney) fully backs his decision.

Unfortunately, Vince doesn’t survive past the opening action sequence. Tom and Vince are riding in a car together when they hear the call that the Polish Hill Strangler, the serial killer who has been terrorizing the city, has been spotted and is on the run. The car chase ends with smash-up involving the killer’s vehicle and the Hardys’ vehicle... and when Tom regains consciousness, his father has been shot dead.

Hardy suspects that the Polish Hill Strangler is a police officer, but an over-the-hill criminal is arrested for the murders instead. Hardy barely has time to process this when his distraught cousin Jimmy commits suicide by jumping off the 31st Street Bridge. Yeah, there’s a lot of set-up to get through before the story really gets rolling.

Jump ahead to then-present day 1993 and we find that Hardy, now a washed-up alcoholic, has been reassigned to the River Rescue Squad. And what do you know, the bodies of women start washing up in the river, appearing to have been murdered by the Polish Hill Strangler... and these women are all people Hardy knows. The killer has returned to torment Hardy.

Cops like Hardy’s uncle Nick (Dennis Farina) and the hot-tempered Eddie Eiler (Brion James) warn him to stay away from the case, but Hardy can’t help but do some investigating of his own with the help of his new partner, Jo Christmas (Sarah Jessica Parker). Along the way, he has interactions with Jimmy’s brother Danny (Tom Sizemore), his police officer uncle Fred (Tom Atkins), and wins Jo’s heart despite the whole “washed-up alcoholic” thing.

Word is that Willis gave Herrington a rough time during the filming of Striking Distance, calling the shots and have scenes rewritten throughout production. This caused more trouble in the long run, because the movie didn’t go over well with test audiences, who were apparently confused by the Willis-dictated additions to the story. Extensive reshoots were carried out in Los Angeles, with Willis reportedly blaming Herrington for the problems crew members said Willis caused.

It may have been a tumultuous production, but I don’t think the issues come through in the finished film. From what I can tell, there’s only one moment where it’s evident that there was a deleted scene, and that’s when Hardy comes walking into a party situation with his cousin Danny by his side, and we don’t see how they crossed paths and decided to go to this event together. But that’s a minor oversight. For the most part, Striking Distance works very well for me, and I was surprised to hear that there was so much trouble behind the scenes.

My father was a massive action movie fan, so the first time I ever saw this movie was because he had rented on VHS as soon as it reached the local video stores. It was his pick, but I really enjoyed the movie as well, as the blend of action with serial killer thrills made it the best of both worlds as far as I was concerned: a strong representation of my father’s favorite genre which also has elements of my favorite genre, horror. It doesn’t lean into the horror, but it’s there a little bit. And I liked the movie so much, I even made sure that we added a copy of the VHS to our collection once a used tape went up for sale at the video store.

The movie has a great cast. Despite Willis’s tendency for disruptive shenanigans, the man was a great leading man back in the day, and Herrington gave him great actors to share scenes with. It’s awesome to watch him interact with the likes of Mahoney, Farina, Atkins, James, and Sizemore. I think my brother’s favorite cast member was Sarah Jessica Parker, though. There was a time when he was watching Striking Distance over and over, and I suspect it was mainly because he liked looking at Parker’s character.

It helps that there’s an easily rewatchable movie around her. I have watched Striking Distance many times over the decades, and not only have I continued to enjoy it with every viewing, but my appreciation for the film has grown as the years have gone by. Sometimes a very long time would pass between my viewings of the movie, but I would always be impressed by it all over again when I went back to it. It may not be an all-time classic on the level of Herrington’s Road House, but it is a damn good action thriller in its own right.

And it makes great use of “Lil’ Red Riding Hood.”