Learning Day: Martini Ranch’s “Reach” 🌭

In 1988 a band named Martini Ranch released their debut album, “Holy Cow.” It’s what kids today refer to as proto-eggpunk, and what adults refer to as “what the fuck are you talking about?” It’s DEVO-esque, poppy, nerdy, punk adjacent synth pop. You can’t talk about music without sounding like an asshole, so think of it like this: You know the part of your chest that tightens anytime somebody in real life starts talking about anime? It feels like that.

It’s more fun than I make it sound, but for 1988, the band wasn’t notable. Save for one thing: Providing half of the music and vocals was professional musician Andrew Rosenthal, providing the other half plus some tetanus was sweaty, grinning, uncaged lunatic Bill Paxton.

Note the date: 1988. This is not what Bill Paxton did before he was famous. A shameful secret he’d like you to overlook, like Vin Diesel selling Street Sharks. This was after Aliens, just before Predator 2. Bill Paxton was a household name, giggling from a trash can as he lit Hollywood on fire. And right in the middle of it all he stopped to star in a video for Martini Ranch’s single “Reach.”

The video opens on a lone motorcycle drifter blasting through a desert hellscape. Its rider, Bill Paxton, slows for a broken-down cowboy pushing a baby carriage full of bomb.

Masterful filmmaking. That one scene sets the tone perfectly: The motorcycle and bomb tell us this is a post-apocalyptic nuclear cowboy world, well after society’s collapse. Bill Paxton tells us this is going to be unhinged and possibly infectious. The baby carriage tells us it’s gonna be dumb as hell.

Bill Paxton wrangles his hog through town, passing White Zombies making caskets. In this town life, and velvet top hats, are cheap.

Bill Paxton rumbles by a blacksmith shop, blasting heat from its powerful bellows and its more powerful she-hulk, who has turned her blacksmithing apron into a leather bikini. “Molten steel can’t touch my nipples” her outfit tells us, “but everywhere else is fair game.”

Bill Paxton pulls up to a raucous brothel, the only source of joy in this hopeless waste. He dismounts his motorcycle and hitches it to a post with a chain. He does not lock the chain, this is not to deter theft. It’s to keep his steel horse from wandering away to graze the gasoline plains.

A freaky little prospector goblin gambols up to molest Bill Paxton’s motorcycle. Just shoves his little kobold fingers in every gap. This is overtly sexual, Bill Paxton loves it. He tips the goblin.

Eagle-eyed Hot Doggists will notice that man is freaky little goblin Bud Cort, best known to us for playing the freaky little cyber goblin in Theodore Rex. Bud Cort was the official freaky little goblin of the 1980s. When Bud Cort auditions for a part and the casting director says “action,” Bud Cort drops into a chimp lope and dryhumps the crafts table. “That’s why he’s the best,” the casting director whispers, as Bud Cort wraps his cock in salami and spanks the ham.

Bill Paxton saunters up to the brothel. He hauls two women to him and cackles. This is about to be a party. A Bill Paxton party, so you know he’s gonna wear those girls out in a weird way. Just making them fight with butter knives all night while he swings from the chandelier.

A violent desert storm disrupts the scene. Boots march in lockstep as the beat kicks in. The music sounds like Oingo Boingo making fun of the B-52s, we will not discuss it again. But this means a new crew has arrived. A dangerous one. Silhouetted against the blinding desert sun, we can tell only one thing: Every member of this gang is a sexy lady out for revenge on Bill Paxton. Possibly nursing fresh butter knife welts.

One of the ladies, rocking a more masculine Steve Perry look, spits chaw on a scorpion.

That does nothing physical to the scorpion. It won’t kill it, or deter it. It only shames the scorpion. She spat chaw right in its face just so it can’t go home to its scorpion wife and scorpion kids with pride, knowing that it is feared as a dangerous desert predator. This scorpion will need years of therapy to separate its sense of value as a living creature from its sting. That’s really fucked up, lady.

We pan over to meet the leader of our gang: A total smokeshow.

And also Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow.

“What the fuck?” You might be asking. You’ll want to hold onto that.

Kathryn Bigelow just had her big break the year before this, when her solo directorial debut put her on the map. That debut was Near Dark, the greatest vampire movie ever made. It starred Bill Paxton at his bloodiest, greasiest, and most maniacal. His best, in other words.

They say you need to be careful of your next move after your big break. It’s not your breakthrough movie itself, but what you do afterward that decides everything. Kathryn Bigelow’s next move after Near Dark? Erotically hunting Bill Paxton through a ghost town. Why is she here? Because Bill Paxton prowls the Hollywood night, saving celebrities so they’ll owe him a favor and star in his vanity projects. The danger he saves them from is also Bill Paxton.

The nerdcore hyperpop beat gives way to a haunting western whistle as Kathryn Bigelow’s lady gang takes over the brothel. They pop in a bounty laserdisc playing a video wanted poster of Bill Paxton spinning in place like it’s hour 3 of butter knife duels.

Andrew Rosenthal, the other half of Martini Ranch, sings from the background as one member of a three piece mariachi band. He watches as Bill Paxton steals the show, somersaulting around a Tucson tourist attraction and monkey-kicking the biggest stars in the world. He knows his place is in the shadows, and he’s glad to stay there, because he also knows Bill Paxton’s exact bite force down to the decimal.

Reviewing the wanted footage, Bill Paxton spins and snarls at the camera with Gollum teeth. He’s still somehow sexy. Science doesn’t understand it. In every model this is the point where the viewer’s genitals should retreat, a natural biological response to the roar of a nearby predator. It helps preserve the next generation in the event of an attack. And yet when shown this video, all subjects rated their emotional response as “would.”

This is all intercut with scenes of Bill Paxton buried to his neck in sand, ants and tarantulas attacking his face as he desperately tongues for a martini. Okay, let’s check back in on the experiment- “would” ratings have gone up 17%! Impossible.

Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow and two of her amazons mount an old pickup and pursue Bill Paxton with lassos. We’ve had this dream before. Let’s get out of here before their breasts turn into our mother’s faces.

Their hunt is successful. Here, I have made a gif of the time two amazons and Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow hogtied a rogue Bill Paxton.

This is a watershed moment. The high tide mark of a personal fetish. In 1996’s From Dusk Till Dawn, director Quentin Tarantino cast a young Salma Hayek as a stripper who pours tequila down her feet into the mouth of a waiting pervert. Then he cast himself as that pervert. At this moment he became the Forever King of Foot Perverts, and it was a mistake. He spent the rest of his life chasing and never matching that moment. Somewhere around the time two female bodybuilders truss his feet, and just before Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow brands him on the ass, the thought must have occurred to Bill Paxton: “Is it all downhill from here?”

Andrew Rosenthal’s overshadowed mariachi band are being dragged to their deaths, yet they continue to play their instruments. It’s noble, like the band on the Titanic if both the boat and the iceberg were Bill Paxton.

Andrew Rosenthal is lynched and hung. His last request? To shred.

Granted, say the gods of Chaos.

It whips ass. This is Andrew’s one and only moment to shine. When Andrew found Bill Paxton bound to the hitching post by Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow, his ass still smoking from her brand, Andrew asked him “can I have something cool to do, too?” Paxton was generous that day, shaky and spent and looking down at a lifetime of sexual coasting. Through the gag made of his own underwear, Paxton answered “Yrmf.”

Andrew got his guitar solo, and then he pushed his luck.

“Can I also be saved by one of the Amazons?”

“Yrmf.”

“And she makes out with me?”

“Yrmf!”

“While Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow watches and claps?”

“Wrrf um Herm Rogga?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think it exists yet. Can I do it?”

“YRMF!”

Clad only in a dirty pink onesie, Bill Paxton leads the men of this town into a final showdown against the powerful ladies dominating them. One of these filthy, filthy men has a spider monkey, like a pirate might have a parrot.

That man is Golden Globe winning actor Lance Henriksen. This is his entire role in the video: Be filthy and present with monkey.

“What the fuck is happening?” You ask, having politely saved that question like I asked you to earlier.

You fool, you god damn idiot. You burned it too early! Now you won’t have that question when you really need it. And you will. You will need it like Bill Paxton needs rope burns on his neck from Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow.

Abandoned by his peers, the ladies begin to shoot Bill Paxton’s clothes off. “Ok,” says nearby Andrew Rosenthal. “I think we get it, Bill.”

Bill Paxton is defeated. The post-apocalyptic nuclear amazon cowboys led by Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow tie Bll Paxton to their truck and roadhaul him by the taint until he is dead, dead, dead.

I forgot to mention one of those nuclear amazons is Jenette Goldstein – Private Vasquez from Aliens. I forgot to mention her because so did the video. She’s barely in it. I had to find a clear shot of her in the outtakes.

Kathryn Bigelow, Lance Henriksen, Jenette Goldstein – likewise both present and cut from the video is Adrian Pasdar, the lead of Near Dark. Everyone involved with the movie is here, which means that in the middle of filming Near Dark – the bleak and beautiful modern vampire western where Bill Paxton plays a bloodsoaked immortal sociopath – he stopped an intense take to ask if the entire cast and crew would like to strip and hogtie him in the desert. Of course they all said yes: Bill Paxton saved their lives that time the set got attacked by Bill Paxton.

Oh right, there are outtakes. Let’s get into them. They open with Bill Paxton the way his friends know him best: Hitting himself in the face with a motorcycle chain.

The man in the yellow shirt, just passing through the scene, laughs. “Classic Bill,” he might say. He might follow this up with “would you like to come aboard my private submarine and spend 9/11 on the deck of the sunken Titanic with me, BIll Paxton?” Because this man is Academy Award winning director of Dark Angel, James Cameron. Also because that’s where he and Bill Paxton actually were when 9/11 happened.

“What the f-”

Shut up! Not yet.

Yes, James Cameron directed this video. Hot off Terminator and Aliens, about to direct The Abyss, James Cameron took this job filming his future wife, Academy Award winning director of The Hurt Locker Kathryn Bigelow, while she rope-spanked Bill Paxton in a cowboy outfit.

Curious how they did that shot with Bill Paxton buried up to his neck in sand while ants and spiders attacked his face? You’ll kick yourself: They buried Bill Paxton up to his neck in sand while ants and spiders attacked his face.

James Cameron, in particular, thought that was fucking hilarious.

“When can I say ‘what the fuck is happening?!’” You’re wondering.

I’m so glad you asked. It’s right now, when I tell you that in the video for Martini Ranch’s “Reach,” the haunting western whistle was provided by Beverly Hills Cop’s Judge Reinhold.

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Joshua Graves, who is known as “the Bill Paxton” of his local TGI Friday’s.