#Judgment night soundtrack genius movie#

Here, it feels like an album that has kept an underrated genre gem in the cult consciousness, long past its expected shelf life.

#Judgment night soundtrack genius movie#

Sometimes it’s a shame when a movie’s soundtrack eclipses the legacy of the movie that spawned it. Throw a stone at a group of white ’90s kids who grew up in the suburbs, and chances are you’ll hit someone who considers that album Their Jam. The real catalyst for its rediscovery, however, is usually the film’s chart-making rap-rock soundtrack album, which featured an innovative series of collabs between some of the biggest hip-hop and metal artists of the time (Living Colour and Run DMC, Slayer and Ice-T, and so on). In the case of Judgment Night, that cult appeal is twofold: one, Hopkins directs the hell out of it, injecting a pretty boilerplate chase thriller with seas of ink-black Gothic cinematography and exciting moments of suspense.

It’s a grimy depiction of Chicago as an apocalyptic hellscape, with the cinnamon-roll boys at its center struggling to ‘man up’ to survive the bloody night ahead of them.īut cult films are a curious thing – movies can resonate with people long after their initial theatrical run, often for the strangest reasons. A harrowing, stripped-down actioner following a group of Evanston suburbanites ( Emilio Estevez, Cuba Gooding Jr., Stephen Dorff, and Jeremy Piven) running afoul of a crime lord ( Denis Leary) one dark night in the big, bad city of Chicago, the film treads similar territory as Walter Hill’s The Warriors and John Boorman’s Deliverance.

When director Stephen Hopkins’ gritty urban thriller Judgment Night came out in 1993, it was released to mixed reviews and a modest box office take ($21 million on a $12 million budget).