Good to Go

Plot synopsis:
S.D. Blass (Art Garfunkel) is a beat journalist for the Washington Daily Tribune newspaper in Washington, D.C. His editor-in-chief pressures him to deliver more featured stories, as it's been too long since Blass has had a decent article printed. Blass reaches out to Matthew Harrigan (Harris Yulin), a detective for the Washington Metropolitan Police department, looking for a good story to pursue. He learns about a nurse that was raped and murdered on her way home after working the night shift at Washington Metropolitan Hospital. Unbeknownst to Blass, the detective had fabricated the police report and placed the primary blame on go-go music and its concert goers. Blass take the story and publishes it with the title: "Nurse Murdered at Go-Go: Music and Drugs Blamed for Violence."
Meanwhile, Max (the owner of "Maxx Saxx Entertainment") manages three of the city's top go-go bands. After fifteen years of playing at local clubs, he feels the timing is perfect to take go-go music nationally. He arranges a sit-down meeting at the Watergate complex with Gil Colton (an L.A.-based record producer) hoping he'll sign his artists to a recording contract. Colton loves the music and the band's energy when performing live at the local clubs. However, he's worried about all of the bad press and media attention that's associated with the live performances. Because of this, he decides not to sign the artist and heads back to L.A.
Little Beats (an up-and-coming conga player for one of Max's go-go bands) has an older brother ("Chemist") who was once a promising college student majoring in chemistry. However, he started using illegal drugs, primarily PCP (aka "Luv Boat"), and is now robbing and stealing to finance his drug addiction. He also hangs with Mr. Ain't (Fred Brathwaite) and his street crew as they travel around the city wreaking havoc, including the rape and murder of the nurse. Eventually, this leads to Chemist being falsely accused and charged with the murder and rape. Little Beats is apprehended by Det. Harrigan, with hopes of getting more information of Chemist's whereabouts. Blass (now aware that the detective has been fabricating many of his police reports) has chosen to disassociate himself with Harrigan. He gets in touch with Little Beats, Chemist, and their mother and works to clear Chemist of the allegations, along with exposing the police misconduct of Det. Harrigan.

Tags: murder

Review:
They got stoned on "angel dust" and then piled on this nurse at the Go-Go?. (There are Spoilers) Set in the crime and drug infested slums of Washington D.C just blocks away from the center of power of the United States Government, the Capital and the White House. "Short Fuse" or "Good to Go" takes place in the mid-1980's at the beginning of the then much heralded "War on Drugs". The war initiated by the Reagan/Bush Administration that's still with us after twenty years and still going strong as well as being frustrating,for the local police and Federal DEA and FBI fighting it, as ever.A gang of homeboys, high on crack and angel dust, go on a wild rampage one Friday evening. The destruction ends with the vicious and deadly rape and murder of a nurse going home from her job on the night-shift at the local hospital. Washington Tribune reporter S.D Bass, Art Garfunkel,needing a story for his papers morning edition calls D.C Police homicide Chief Harrigan, Harris Yulin,for some breaking crime news. Harrigan gives Bass the inside scoop about the nurse's rape and murder. Bass is also told that the rape/murder happened at a local music and dance club called the Go-Go.Making all the headlines the next day the Go-Go manager Max, Robert DoQui, is outraged at Bass for reporting that the rape/murder happened at his nightclub when it actually happened in an empty alley blocks away. Bass who took Harrigan's story about the murdered nurse at face value begins to realize that he's using him to implicate the night club and those who work and go there.This on Harrington's part is to give the public the impression that those living in the almost all-black US capital city of Washngton D.C are for the most part not law abiding but mostly a bunch of drug addicts and criminals. Later Bass' suspicions are confirmed when a couple of white teenagers high on pot drive their car into a congested inner city intersection killing themselves and their both reported to be, by Harrigan's and the D.C police official's, black.Bass is later at the police station as an impartial observer where Harrigan is interrogating young Beats Daughtry, Reginald Daughtry,about the whereabouts of his big brother Tony Daughtry's,Richard Brooks, known on the street as "Chemist". Harrington wants to know what role Tony had in the nurse's murder which in fact he had nothing to do with. Befriending the young and scared Beats Harrington tells him and later his mother, Hattie Winston, that if Tony turns himself over to him he'll see to it that no harm comes to him and he won't end up on a cold slab at the city morgue.Tony not wanting to turn himself in is later caught up in a shoot-out with the same gang of homeboys, who raped and murdered the nurse, with the police. When the dust clears five of the "gansters" and two D.C policemen are killed. Hungry and on the run for days with nowhere to go or hide Tony end up in his mothers apartment. Tony feels that he'll be killed by the vengeful police and Chief Harrigan for the deaths of their two comrades, which he had nothing to do with. Taking up reporter Bass' offer to give himself up to him Tony is in for a big and deadly surprise later in the movie. Bass with Chief Harrigan coming along to peacefully take Tony into custody has Harrigan, instead of arresting Tony, shooting him dead in front of his shocked and terrified mother and younger brother as well as Bass. Feeling that he let Tony and his family down and is responsible for the innocent mans murder Bass is now more determined then ever to go public with what happened.The city is now about to explode, since the newspaper Bass works for refuses to print his story, over Harrigan's killing of Tony, thats been reported as a justifiable act of self-defense which nobody in D.C proper for a minute believes. It's now up to Bass to get the truth about Tony's death out to the public before Harrigan has the same thing happen to him that happened to Tony before he can tell it!The film "Short Fuse", slow moving at first, really picks up in the last fifteen minutes or so as Bass is on the run from the murderous Harrigan who's trying to prevent him from telling the truth, about his cold-blooded murder of Tony. At the same time Brass trying to prevent a major race-riot from erupting in the streets of D.C, over Tony's death, fights and claws his way to the stage at a coast-to-coast televised Go-Go music concert as he leaves Harrigan who's chasing him behind stuck in the crowd. Bass making it to the stage ends up telling the millions of viewers the truth about Tony's death and Harrigan's role in it. Thus both vindicating himself as well as seeing to it that justice is done to the wild cheers of thousands of Go-Go music fans at the concert.. Slow Moving Stinker. Good to Go (aka Short Fuse) is a snoozer.  I rented it a few years ago because I was lured in by the cover art.  The cover made it look like a decent action flick-cops, guns, helicopters, etc..  However, it moves at a snail's pace and had no intelligible plot whatsoever.  I feel it was a showcase for the "go-go" music contained within and nothing else.  Don't get suckered in; ignore this movie.. Good to Go. Director of Special Photography for Good to Go , and who's work appears on the soundtrack: WG Allen Please include: www.UFOdc.com. I created a chemical technology which was used to render daily's for the film and often consulted with the producers on film sequences throughout the film. Working on the film for the duration of production in DC, WG Allen was able to create a working copy of the film which was used to represent the film at the Cannes Film fest in 1986 After leaving Good to Go WG went on to work with ABC News in the White House and on board Air Force One. WG is currently a UFO investigator working on Close Encounter Samples taken by him during assignment.. Witness Art put the "funk" in "Garfunkel" and watch this oddity today!. In Washington, D.C. in the 1980's, Go-Go music was huge. Go-Go is an urban cross between funk, R&B, soul and dance music with extended songs meant for the largely African-American audiences to dance the night away to. Some of the most famous practitioners of this genre of music include Trouble Funk, Redd & The Boys, and Chuck Brown and the Soul Searchers. Max (DoQui) is a music impresario and label head who is trying to make this music go global and has a large record deal in the works for Redd & The Boys. Spoiling this dream, a rape and murder occurs outside a club that caters to the music, called, you guessed it, The Go-Go. Or did it? Trying to get to the truth, alcoholic newspaper reporter S.D. Blass (Garfunkel) calls Chief Harrigan of the local police precinct. Harrigan leads Blass to believe Chemist (Brooks) was involved in the crime. But along the way, Blass befriends Chemist's little brother Beats (Daughtry) and begins to question Harrigan and his motivations. After a lot of chaos and confusion, Blass begins to sort things out - but he's going to have to do it fast before a race riot occurs in D.C. Can he do it? Please read in a gravelly, portentous, gravely serious Don LaFontaine-like movie trailer announcer voice: Art Garfunkel. Has a: SHORT FUSE. Coming this summer. When we think of actors that could be chosen for the lead role in a movie entitled Short Fuse, names like Clint Eastwood, Charles Bronson or Jason Statham come to mind. But for some reason yet to be fathomed by mankind, they chose noted badass Art Garfunkel for the role. And true to form, in this movie he's such a wet noodle that he makes Toby from The Office look like The Ultimate Warrior. But in all fairness, this movie was originally titled Good To Go (and characters do say that a lot and there's a song of the same name on the soundtrack as well). Adding weirdness to inappropriateness, the main thrust of this movie is urban, street-level crime, in the era of boomboxes, graffiti and Kangol hats. Again...Art Garfunkel? But seriously, we could see what they were thinking because "Bridge Over Troubled Water" has some fresh beats.And if they were so gung-ho for Garfunkel, why hire Harris Yulin as the only other White guy in the cast? They look very, very similar. So much so it's hard to tell them apart in some scenes. But the tell is Garfunkel's bizarre combover. It makes Donald Trump's look positively normal by comparison. Plus the movie has a lot of product placement for Pepsi. It's practically a 90-minute commercial for Pepsi. But it's hard to imagine the Pepsi people being very happy that a movie about a drug-fuelled rape and murder with a bunch of shootouts and car crashes is so tied in with their product. That observation aside, by far the best thing about Short Fuse is not, as you might expect, the length of the fuse of one Arthur Ira Garfunkel. It's the music! In all seriousness, the soundtrack and the live performances are uniformly excellent. All the bands mentioned above are excellent, both musically and from a showmanship perspective. We really were dancing in our seats! As a concert film documenting the Go-Go phenomenon, Short Fuse is actually an important "Art"-ifact. Robert DoQui, who was in Diplomatic Immunity (1991), and resembles Richard Roundtree but is an accomplished actor in his own right, is always worth seeing, as is future Law & Order star Richard Brooks, who also appeared in Shakedown (1988). Short Fuse is listed in some sources as a "concert drama" and seems to be little-seen, even though it was released on the Vidmark label. But the cast, as well as the musical performances keep it from ever getting boring.Witness Art put the "funk" in "Garfunkel" and watch this oddity today! For more action insanity, please visit: comeuppancereviews.com