Cinema: Blood Ample EXTREME PREJUDICE

The Sam Peckinpah Memorial Prize, named after the late, occasionally great director (The Wild Bunch, Ride the High Country), is awarded — on an erratic basis, naturally — to filmmakers whose works include the following elements:

— A cool encounter with at least one highly symbolic scorpion.

— An assemblage of highly trained killers whose simple loyalty to their craft and to one another makes them easy prey to criminals who are merely mercenary.

— Penetration by the above named, among others, of a bandido lair in Mexico where everyone needs a shave and lessons in the safe handling of firearms.

— The expenditure of the entire movie industry’s supply of blood squibs in a succession of brutal encounters between people whose quarrels are either preposterously or obscurely motivated.

— Extraordinarily quick, nay, incomprehensible cutting, imparting an abstract quality to the violence — a terrible beauty, as the impressionable might put it. It also implies that beneath the director’s wolfish exterior there lurks a sheepish artist as well as an existential philosopher eager to prove that morality is a sometime thing, determined by a trigger finger’s itch.

And the winner is . . . Walter Hill (once a Peckinpah writer) for Extreme Prejudice, which stars Nick Nolte as a modern-day Texas Ranger; Powers Boothe as his old buddy, now a master dope smuggler and chatty amoralist; Maria Conchita Alonso as the woman they both love; and a wild bunch from the CIA or somewhere. Their task is to supply the movie with a little mystery and a lot of obscurantist firepower, enough to drown out conventional logic’s objections to a vast silliness.