Dennis Hopper’s Texas neo-noir is a sultry sizzler, long on atmosphere and rather poky in the pace department. Ladies’ man Don Johnson drifts into a Texas burg and commences romancing both Jennifer Connelly and Virginia Madsen. But who is seducing whom and for what underhanded reason?  Throw in a bank robbery and a couple of murders, and the frame is complete. Don may be on the way to the gas chamber, but he has all those great Texas exteriors to look at in 4K UHD.

The Hot Spot
4K Ultra HD + Region B Blu-ray
Radiance Films
1990 / Color / 1:85 widescreen / 130 min. / Street Date September 1, 2026 / Available at Radiance / £20.83
Starring: Don Johnson, Virginia Madsen, Jennifer Connelly, William Sadler, Charles Martin Smith, Jerry Hardin, Barry Corbin, Jack Nance, Virgil Frye.
Cinematography: Ueli Steiger
Production Designer: Cary White
Costumes: Mary Kay Stolz
Film Editor: Wende Phifer Mate
Original Music: Jack Nitzsche
Written by Nona Tyson, Charles Williams from the 1952 book Hell Hath No Fury by Charles Williams
Produced by Paul Lewis
Directed by Dennis Hopper

Dennis Hopper takes some curious turns with The Hot Spot, a thriller that had potential to become a neo-noir classic. Drawn to a directing proposal by his former producer Paul Lewis (Easy Rider, The Last Movie), Hopper soaks an excellent cast and a sure-fire story with atmosphere … so much so that it slows to a crawl. A show with just enough incident to flesh out a leisurely hour and a half is allowed to linger … the moody, drawling Jack Nitzsche soundtrack can’t hold the picture up forever. This 4K release looks so good, we have to conclude that Hopper fell in love with his images and couldn’t part with any of them. Viewers might be hypnotized as well: as shot by cameraman Ueli Steiger, the parched Southwest looks fantastic.

Star Don Johnson reported that Hopper switched switched scripts at the 11th hour, giving his cast and crew an older draft by Nona Tyson and Charles Williams. Williams had adapted from his hardboiled novel Hell Hath No Fury with Robert Mitchum in mind. He had previously written the source stories for or contributed to the screenplays for René Clément’s  Joy House and Phillip Noyce’s Dead Calm. In the late 1960s Orson Welles had attempted to film Dead Calm as The Deep, with Laurence Harvey and Jeanne Moreau.

Johnson loved the script’s noir-inflected main character, an amoral drifter looking for willing female companionship and a crooked angle to exploit. Drifter/hustler/lady’s man/thief Harry Maddox wanders broke into a Texas town, needing fuel for his (very trendy) Studebaker. He wangles his way into a job selling used cars on the lot of George Harshaw (Jerry Hardin of The Second Civil War), where his slick sales skills show up Harshaw’s other employee Lon Gulick (Charles Martin Smith of  The Untouchables and American Graffiti). Harry is soon romantically involved with the dealership’s demure bookkeeper Gloria Harper (Jennifer Connelly of The Rocketeer), as well as the owner’s wife Dolly Harshaw (Virginia Madsen of Dune), a flagrant tease. Harry soon has more criminal things on his mind, after he learns that the local bank’s security system is sitting in its box, uninstalled. Folksy bank manager Julian Ward (Jack Nance of Blue Velvet) is easily distracted; all Harry has to do is get him out of the way for a few minutes.

The Hot Spot arrived just as Orion Pictures began to implode, and became one of the weak box office performers that hastened the studio’s end. Yet the finished film can be praised for capturing fully the langorous menace of Texas-set pulp thrillers like those written by cult author Jim Thompson. Beginning with a lengthy sequence in the desert, almost every shot is a beauty, with saturated colors and contrasts between interiors and exteriors that make us feel the heat of day. We watch as Harry Maddox wanders the streets on hot nights, looking for a way to grab enough cash to blow town. He eventually robs the bank by arranging a distraction by committing arson. Harry encounters far more difficulty handling the two women in his life, each of whom is a dream girl beyond mortal expectations. Gloria Harper is innocent on the outside but eager for some corrupting experience. Dolly Harshaw initially strikes Harry as a rich but trashy playgirl lacking in brainpower. He discovers her aptitude for connivance the hard way. When two murders occur and various secrets slip out, Dolly isn’t above a little amorous blackmail.

The storyline is workable and the dialogue excellent but director Hopper is in love with atmospheric effects that slow the story to a crawl. It’s a matter of editorial choices. The running time stretches to linger on beauty shots of Don Johnson leaning against walls or gazing out the window of his seedy hotel room. All of this material looks great, via Ueli Steiger’s painterly cinematography. In 4K UHD, the movie plays like a Dennis Hopper art exhibit.

Hopper certainly got his actors into the spirit of the show. Johnson’s Harry and Madsen’s Dolly could have sprung from the cover of an overheated pulp paperback. They generate the kind of lust that runs wild on a hot summer night, in the back seat of a convertible Cadillac parked somewhere far off the highway. More tension builds with Connelly’s not-so-innocent Gloria, whose chemistry with Maddox is even stronger. But gee, all the crimes and schemes and lies do get in the way of True Love. We do remain interested in finding out if Harry will get what he wants. Will ‘everybody end in mincemeat’ as in  a classic annihilating noir?  Or will The Hot Spot’s amoral hero find himself a neo-noir neo-escape route?

Much of Dennis Hopper’s movie sizzles, like a dirty adult fairy tale. These actors know they’re going to participate in steamy love scenes, and they actively contribute to make them feel intimate and sexy. Most of the time Hopper does seem to their natural exhibitionism isn’t abused. But we wonder if Jennifer Connelly’s situation was perhaps a repeat of Hopper’s (alleged) dishonest treatement of Jodie Foster on his previous movie. After all of his elegant neo-noir scene blocking, Hopper films Gloria Harper’s quasi-lesbian flashback incident using angles that would appeal to a prurient 14 year-old boy. Scenes with actress Virginia Madsen also seem to go for maximum skin. Quotes from Ms. Madsen indicate that she talked Hopper down from a full-on nude scene or two.

Dennis Hopper sometimes shows a fine eye for camera angles. But the director lost his grip on the movie’s narrative flow. The editing room is a place where long rough cuts get pared down to tell a story, and Hopper had encountered difficulty in that area before. Twenty years before he hadn’t been able to make himself cut Easy Rider down to a reasonable length, and other hands eventually whipped it into viewable shape. The Hot Spot plays as if Hopper just doesn’t want the movie to progress. We like the dreamy slow scenes, but there really was a commercial contender here, a potentially more memorable box office winner.

Could The Hot Spot really have been improved? Perhaps only credited editor Wende Phifer Mate knows for sure. Fans that like to soak up noir atmosphere, that identify with Don Johnson’s posture as a moody lone wolf in the henhouse, think the movie is a classic just as it is. This near-perfect 4k presentation is for viewers that like their murder mystery thrills in slow motion, with the scenery and the stars viewed as objects for a voyeur.

Radiance Films tells us that its 4K Ultra HD + Region B Blu-ray of The Hot Spot is a 4K restoration from the original negative, overseen and approved by cinematographer Ueli Steiger. The encoding recaptures the intense colors and atmosphere of Orion’s early show prints. The desert has ten shades of sandy brown in the daytime, and the town looks sharp and clear at night, lit by the occasional neon sign. With all the lovemaking going on, we begin to fixate on the flesh tones as well. Hopper and his cameraman were surely angling for vibe similar to that of the earlier, more accomplished  Body Heat, and his cast cooperates. As said above, in 4K the picture plays like an art exhibit in Texas tones.

It is important to mention that the Blu-ray disc is Region B. The 4K disc is by definition Region – Free.

Jack Nitzsche’s sometimes-jazzy music score comes across well on the bright soundtrack. The contributing combo includes John Lee Hooker, Miles Davis, Taj Mahal, Tim Drummond, Earl Palmer and the blues guitarist Roy Rogers. For a composer with an erratic creative life, Nitzsche contributed a lot of great film music, as in Cutter’s Way of a few years earlier.

From an older HD release come interviews with actors Virginia Madsen and William Sadler, about seven minutes each; Sadler discusses his ‘reptilian’ character Sutton, while Ms. Madsen praises Dennis Hopper’s direction so highly, we begin to understand the late actor’s high-flung reputation. Another archival item is a quickie interview with Dennis Hopper taken on the run in a French airport during a promotional tour, intercut with BTS shots from the film’s EPK. In just four minutes or so Hopper drops more Hollywood names than I could ever remember. But he seems really happy to have such a high profile picture in release. Dennis Hopper biographer Nick Dawson tells the story of the director’s career and reiterates some key information, such as that the screenplay was written for Robert Mitchum way back in 1961. A rewrite gave Harry Maddox more background and overt motivation, but Hopper reverted to the first script, which leaves us to guess where Maddox came from or exactly why he wants to rob a bank.

And new to us was a closer look at author Charles Williams, whose career and film work gets a nice going-over from Duane Sweirczynski. He talks about the production of The Hot Spot as well.

We appreciated the clarity of Radiance’s essayists for the insert booklet. Writer and magazine editor Elena Lazic takes on the excess and shapelessness of The Hot Spot and makes it add up as a critique of Harry Madox as a guy who doesn’t understand women. She notes correctly that a full hour of the film simply records the development of Harry’s barnstorming erotic relationship with two women at the same time. Writer and podcaster Leslie Byron Pitt is a writer and podcaster  (Fatal Attractions); he examines the show as a neo-noir leaning in the direction of the ‘erotic thriller’ genre of the 1980s. The pamphlet finishes with a profile of Don Johnson written by RJ Smith for Film Comment in 1990.

This writer edited the original trailer. It was initially cut from a B&W dupe of a much longer work print, which indeed had more sexy scenes and scene extensions. Because the hotter scenes in the film had so much nudity, my producer Richard A. Smith commissioned a shoot with a live model to generate steamy close-ups that would not be censored. The trailer was an instant sell. Two shots I had used two shots had in the meantime been dropped from the finished film. Orion Pictures liked the cut so much that they let us access the movie’s B-roll negative for the unused footage. So I can make the proud claim of upholding the time-honored Hollywood tradition of making a trailer with scenes not in the movie being advertised.

Only a few years ago did we finally catch up with and review Dennis Hopper’s previous movie  Backtrack. It’s a different kind of mess, but Hopper certainly snared an interesting cast: himself, Jodie Foster, Dean Stockwell, Vincent Price, Fred Ward, Helen Kallianiotes, Julie Adams, Joe Pesci, Toni Basil, Alex Cox and Bob Dylan. Friends Rocco Gioffre and Mark Sullivan created a terrific miniature helicopter explosion for Backtrack, which I had only seen out of context, on their Moviola.

We were also finally able to review a good disc of the 1990 neo-noir that perhaps best captures the pulp vibe of author Jim Thompson, James Foley’s  After Dark, My Sweet. It had practically become a lost movie. I saw it new in the theater and loved its stark anamorphic cinematography. It stars Jason Patric, Rachel Ward and Bruce Dern.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

The Hot Spot
4K Ultra HD + Region B Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
French TV interview with Dennis Hopper (1991)
Interviews with stars Virginia Madsen and William Sadler (2021)
Author Nick Dawson on Dennis Hopper (2023)
Writer Duane Swierczynski on Charles Williams and his source novel (2023)
1991 Trailer
Limited edition booklet featuring new writing by Elena Lazic and Leslie Byron Pitt, and an older Dennis Hopper interview piece with R.J. Smith.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One 4K Ultra HD + Region B Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: September 9, 2026
(7587spot)

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