Jim Mickle’s violent black comedy Cold in July begins with a suburban family man (Michael C. Hall) confronting and then fatally shooting a burglar who’s broken into his home. The movie takes place in 1989 in east Texas, and the local sheriff who investigates the shooting writes it off as self-defense. Unfortunately for the man who pulled the trigger, Richard Dane, the burglar’s father is a hotheaded killer just released from prison; after getting word of the incident, ex-con Ben Russel comes to town and starts terrorizing Dane’s family. Watching Cold in July unfold, I was continually reminded of work by two other artists: John Carpenter, the director of such horror and sci-fi classics as Halloween (1978) and They Live (1988), and Sam Shepard, the longtime actor and playwright who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1979 drama Buried Child. This is a shotgun marriage, to be sure, but it works.
Uneasy alliances are a common motif in Shepard’s writing, and the two men take on a third partner when Russel recruits his old war buddy Jim Bob, a pig-farming private detective who favors gaudy cowboy outfits (played by Don Johnson in a scene-stealing performance). Together the men discover that the son has entered a witness protection program after leading the FBI to key players in the east Texas underworld, and that in his new life he’s been making snuff films in which he beats Mexican prostitutes to death with a baseball bat. Ashamed of this, Russel decides to hunt down his own son and kill him, and Dane, secretly enamored of the old man’s outlaw code of honor, offers to help. From this point the father-and-son relationship begins to evoke the broken families Shepard wrote about in Buried Child, True West, and his screenplay for Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas.
Directed by Jim Mickle
