Who payed the critics

Too much of everything

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Made on the cheap, the awful Michael Madsen/Dennis Hopper combo floats for 90 minutes with Hopper covering his daughter's accidental hit and run incident. Slimeball Ron takes advantage of this to get Hopper to do something for him. Hopper threatens Ron and nearly strangles him to death in a bathroom, except he comes back to the bathroom to find him dead. He proceeds to throw the body out the window of the bathroom and try to cover the body up with a trash bag. Madsen rolls up as a lively and somewhat interesting serial killer. Though mostly it's Madsen's lively over-acting that makes it enjoyable. Madsen offers to hide the body in his car and that he's seen Hopper throw the body out the window. Hopper slowly decides to go with this madman after the Madsen's car gets the attention of the cops. This leads to a rather pointless and sole car chase action scene that looks like it was the probably the best they could afford. Hopper discovers that Madsen is a rather prolific serial killer, picking up random women and killing them. It's at this point that the movie stops being a thriller or interesting because it bogs down in a road trip movie with Madsen and Hopper driving around and musing about murder and their boring childhoods that have no real effect on the plot. This also has pointless exploitational scene of a peeping tom homeless guy who goes back and forth listening to Hopper and Madsen's ADR'ed conversation and watching a woman strip in a changing room. It's one of the most laughable scenes I've ever seen, as the director seems more interested in a peep show then the actual characters in the movie. Other lame scenes including pointless flashbacks to both character's childhoods that really explain nothing and go nowhere. We don't need to know anything about their childhoods. We don't need to know Madsen burned his father alive as a kid. That's rather hard to care about considering we already get the point he's a serial killer. All those scenes exist to just have Madsen crone on and try to convince Hopper that's he's no better than him in the killing department. It's awful, the suspense is finally brought back when Hopper is made to cooperate with Madsen in a massive cover-up mission that involves wiping phone messages off of Ron's home phone recorder (Madsen destroys it) and getting rid of the victim's car and his daughter's wrecked, bloody car that was taken by Ron as leverage to get him to do something for him. Unfortunately, both of them are not counting on Ron's current girlfriend who is sneaking around trying to find him and is ultimately done away with by Madsen. Madsen's instructions are not followed to the letter and he goes after Hopper and reveals that he set him up in a WTF twist that will leave your head swimming and the bigger twist that ends the movie rather anti-climatically is that Hopper has invited the police into his home and they shoot an armed Madsen dead in the closing moments of the movie. And right to credits. Seriously, it's a lame ass thriller and only recommended to people who want to watch Dennis Hopper act nervous, yell at people and ADR things.Madsen plays a Mr. Blonde clone with a John Deere hat, and may be quirky and interesting for a few moments but little is done with him when having him sit and describe his childhood. The rest of the actors are community theater level and atrocious. In only 90 minutes the movie has succeeded to annoy me and bore me all at once. Plus the weird product placement that was not blurred out for some reason. Yes, South Park shot glasses support drunk driving and hit and run. Also, Hefty is the only trashbag you should use to put dead bodies in according to this movie. Odd scenes where Hopper is seeing into the future trial of both his daughter and him complete with a lesbian prison inmate getting abusive with his daughter. And Ron the kindest blackmailer and slimeball you've ever seen who comes off more as a used car salesman or a door to door salesman selling life insurance than a slimeball conman with an agenda. Further odd scenes of Hopper watching home movies of a little girl that's suppose to be his daughter and looking concerned while he ADR's his thoughts into the scene. The movie is just odd and not even really enjoyable. It's not as bad as Chasing Ghosts though, as far as Michael Madsen movies go.

**SPOILERS*** Finding her boyfriend, Bradley Armstrong, in the arms of another girl Kate, Tamara Cholakian,Gena, Chelsy Reynolds, gets so drunk to the point where go gets in her car and visually impaired, by the bottle of booze, and runs down and kills law student Pete Farmer, Robert Baugh. Even worse leaves the scene of the accident.Getting in touch with her dad Henry Clark (Dennis Hooper), a big time real-estate business man, he tells Gena to hold still until he can come up with something to get her off the hook. Henry had been having a big fight with his partner Ron Sloan, Roy Tate, over his unsavory business practices. Henry tells Ron to take a hike out to the Death Valley Desert for the summer and forget to come back.Ron picking up the outside extension phone, as Gena called her father, heard the trouble that she's in and started to use that to get back in with Henry by blackmailing him over his daughter's action. Going to the Clark home and finding Gena alone Ron gives her this cock & bull story about him working for her dad in helping her out with the accident that she had that night. Ron then takes the incriminating evidence, the damaged car with blood stains of the dead Pete Farmer, away from the police to find. When Henry find this out from Gena what Ron did he blows his top. And gets in touch with Ron at the company cafeteria to talk things over. Going into the bathroom to get away from anyone listening in, there was a couple of cops sitting at one the tables having a snack,Henry grabs Ron by the throat and squeezes it until he passes out. Waiting outside for Ron to recover and leave the bathroom Henry notices that he's not leaving and when he goes in he finds him on the floor dead. Panic-stricken Henry throws Ron's body out of the bathroom window, in broad daylight, and waits outside for the coast to be clear to dispose the corpse that was hidden under some brush. This sets off a bizarre encounter with Will, Michael Madsen, who seems to know everything that happened between Henry and Ron. Even the fact that Ron was laying dead in the bushes.Will has a problem of his own he has a dead hooker in the trunk of his car that he's trying to get rid of. Talking Henry into helping him by driving his, Will's, very distinctive looking car through the local hooker's strip in town while he gets rid of the two bodies, Ron and the dead hooker Christianne De Marco, some miles away. Will wants Henry to seen by the locals thus giving him an alibi to Christanne's murder.By now you and those in the movie "Choke" forgot about Gena's hit and run accident but it later comes to the surface with explosive results. It comes out end of the movie with an ending that came right out of left field with the force of ship load full of Cruise Missiles. Weird is the word for "Choke" that keeps you guessing to what's happening in the movie and just what that deranged cuckoo bird Will is up to until the last frame. Michael Madsen's Will is so strange and obnoxious in this movie that at one point he actually invites a cop, Gino Dentie, to tow away his car. The car that had two murder victims in it's trunk? this after the cop warned him over and over to move out of a parking space reserved for the disabled.Michael Madsen, who seemed to be doing a John Deere commercial throughout the entire movie, was so nuts and off-the-wall that for a moment I thought that he may have well had a disable sticker on his car fender due to the mentally unstable condition that he was in.

Hopper has never been worse as if he felt as this movie is worthy of only a grade B performance and he delivers a rather good one. Outside of Madsen and Hopper the acting is horrid; you've seen better at your local high school. The sound and at times the editing and camera shots are low end of B-movies. The scene with the peeping tom is of movies greatest gratuitous nudity scenes I've ever seen (it doesn't even come close to fitting in the movie). The script was probably a great 10-page outline, but when it comes out to a full-length movie there are more holes in it then the dead bodies Madsen left behind. I do have to say Hopper dressed in a nice suit driving the Hummer had me laughing out loud, but I don't think that was the intent. Yes there is a little style, and Hopper can always draw my interest. However the interesting plot concept never pays off and you are left wondering why you wasted your time watching this.

***SPOILERS*** What would otherwise have been a teaming in heaven, this Hopper-Madsen teaming is little more than a waste of film roll. Not surprising I suppose considering the recent track record of the actors, both have never been in a worthy theatrical release for a number of years."Choke" starts out promising. A Wealthy businessman (Hopper) discovers his daughter was the culprit in a hit and run accident. Rather than report it, they decide to stay quiet, because she was drinking at the time. Little does he know, someone overheard. Blackmailing into taking a job he didn't at first want to, Hopper then decides it's easier if he just knocks off the man - and before you can say "cover up" - a body is pushed out a second story window. Enter, Madsen, as a strange man, who drives up in a classic car, claiming to have seen Hopper's act. Instead of turning him into the authorities though - Madsen asks Hopper into his car and together they go cruising on the highways, stopping (constantly) to talk about their evil deeds. It's this "stopping and starting", that causes "Choke" to crumble. At times, it's as if we are watching a home video of a couple of actors talking (most of the time about nothing in particular), forgetting that they are supposed to be entertaining the audience. For Madsen and Hopper fans only.