Tag Archives: Western

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

PROGRESSIVE WESTERNS: JOHN FORD’S THE SEARCHERS (1956)

Leave a comment

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

has been dead for over forty years, but still managed to create a storm of Twitter controversy recently when an old “Playboy” interview resurfaced—one in which he acknowledged belief in white supremacy, knocked Native Americans as “selfishly wanting to keep all the land to themselves,” and stated that “we can’t all of a sudden get down on our knees and turn everything over to the leadership of the blacks.”

For anyone who remembers Wayne as a living actor, or has read even a brief bio, the only surprise here was social media suddenly discovering Wayne’s bigorty after it has been well-known for fifty years.  As a political spokesperson, Wayne has long fell out of favor… until fellow draft-dodger Mango Mussolini made vilifying Native Americans fashionable again, along with broad bigotry against non-WASP males. January 6, 2021, Mussolini unlocked the trailer park gates and let loose his band of Jerry Springer-styled terrorist thugs who fancied themselves patriotic cowboys, chanting “1776!”  As we all know—and some are hoping that we will soon forget—the result was five cold-blooded murders, including one law enforcement officer, with Mussolini’s Senate accomplices letting the inciter-in-chief off the hook. These parodies envision themselves as Duke wannabes, wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. That cartoon redneck parody is an image that is all too often broadly assigned to the mythos of the American West.

I recall film and art students saying they were open to any genre,  as long as it wasn’t a Western. That perception is easy to understand, but it is as erroneously stereotyped as anything the self-styled “Nationalists” drum up. The genre is much more complex and egalitarian. Even Wayne himself, as ignorant and mean-spirited as he could be, wasn’t so black and white. That complexity can be found even more in John Ford, who, with all of his artistic and personal flaws, was and remains in the top tier of American filmmakers. Ford was a card-carrying Democrat, which reportedly lead to countless arguments with his favorite leading man, Wayne (although both were bona fide supporters of the Vietnam War).

Still from The Searchers (1956)With The Searchers (1956) we see Ford’s evolving perspective taking shape and influencing his art. The result is what a lot of cineastes believe to be the quintessential Western, if not the greatest of all American films (the BFI currently lists it as the seventh best film of all time). Film critics are more divided, with Roger Ebert and Pauline Kael well-known (partial) dissenters.  Occasional lapses into sentimentality, groan-inducing macho humor, racism and misogyny, a lumbering plot, overt characterizations (especially Hank Worden as Mose, the Shakespearean jester) Continue reading PROGRESSIVE WESTERNS: JOHN FORD’S THE SEARCHERS (1956) →

Capsules

CAPSULE: SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO (2007)

2 Comments

366 Weird Movies may earn commissions from purchases made through product links.

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: Hideaki Itô, Yūsuke Iseya, Kōichi Satō, Kaori Momoi, Yoshino Kimura, Masanobu Andô,

PLOT: A nameless gunman rides into a town where two rival gangs of samurai scheme to find and seize a hidden cache of gold.

Still from Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

COMMENTS: A hawk grabs a snake in its talons and flies off into a painted sunset. A man wrapped in a Navajo blanket (Quentin Tarantino) rolls onto his back, shoots the bird out of the sky, catches the snake as it falls, and in one swift motion uses a knife to slit the body and remove a bloody egg from the serpent’s neck. While he’s absorbed in that operation, three Japanese gunslingers get the drop on him. Tarantino, using a fake Western accent, then describes a rivalry between the red Heike and the white Genji clans, as he slips into an even weirder take on a cowpoke with a southern drawl mimicking a Japanese accent. Not surprisingly, the nameless man turns the tables on the three interlopers and kills them all, without breaking the egg.

This opening suggests a level of stylized surrealism that Sukiyaki Western Django doesn’t quite maintain. Tarantino’s character is not the non sequitur narrator he initially appears to be, and the rest of the movie generally takes a more straightforward tone. Essentially, it’s a series of spaghetti Western archetypes, clichés, and homages—a Man with No Name, a hidden cache of treasure, a weapon stashed in a coffin—wrapped in a gimmick: the action all takes place in a mythical version of feudal Japan where desperadoes pack both six-shooters and katanas. In the strangest directorial decision, the Japanese cast delivers their cowboy dialogue (“you gonna come at me… or whistle ‘Dixie’?”) entirely in heavily accented English (learned phonetically, in most cases).  Because the actors’ English pronunciation ranges from passable to difficult to understand to nearly incomprehensible, this odd, distancing choice will be an insurmountable barrier for some.

If you can clear the dialogue bar, the rest of Sukiyaki‘s recipe will be familiar to Miike fans: fast-paced action, absurd comic violence, heavy doses of morphing style, and throwaway bits of surrealism. Holes are blown through torsos, through which crossbow bolts are then fired; bright flashback scenes are graded toward the extreme yellow and green ends of the spectrum; babies are found curled up in hybridized roses. We also learn that, in old West saloons, samurai were fond of interpretive dance performances scored to didgeridoos. All this nonsense leads to a heart-pounding, if hackneyed, finale that proves the old maxim that the more important a character is to the plot, the more bullets they can take without dying. After the gunsmoke clears from the village-sized battlefield, a silly closing epilogue will make Spaghetti Western fans groan.

Tarantino’s involvement in Sukiyaki is a testament to the mutual admiration between he and Miike, and it’s noteworthy that his role here comes five years before his own revisionist take on Spaghetti Westerns in 2012’s Django Unchained. As for Miike, in some ways Sukiyaki marks the beginning of the winding down of his weird movie period; his next major work seen in the West was the excellent but entirely realistic Thirteen Assassins (2010), and since 2015 has been spending more time on Japanese television series aimed at elementary school girls than on making weird cinema.

In 2020, MVD visual released Sukiyaki Western Django on Blu-ray for the first time (in the North American market). All of the extras—a 50-minute “making of” featurette, six minutes of deleted scenes, and a series of clips and promos—are also found on the 2008 DVD. The one thing that makes this release special is the inclusion of the extended cut that played at the Venice Film Festival and in Japanese theaters. The box cover claims this extended cut is 159:57 minutes long—a typo for 1:59:57, as the cut clocks in at almost exactly two hours. There are no significant differences between the two versions; Miike simply snipped away insignificant bits from many once-longer scenes, resulting in a shorter, faster-paced, and improved film. (A detalied list of the differences can be found at the always-excellent movie-censorship.com).

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…utterly deranged homage to westerns all’italia… dialogue is delivered in phonetic English so weirdly cadenced that self-conciously cliched lines like ‘a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’ approach surreal poetry.”–Maitland McDonagh, TV Guide

Capsules

CAPSULE: SPINDRIFT’S HAUNTED WEST (2020)

Leave a comment

DIRECTED BY: Burke Roberts

FEATURING: The members of “Spindrift”

PLOT: Four musicians record sights and sounds from their “Ghost Town Tour” in a pastiche of performances, wandering about acid-infused scenery.

Still from Spindrift's Haunted West (2020)

COMMENTS: What better way to write a movie review than while listening to that movie’s music in the background? Normally I don’t have the film playing while I write my reviews, but having reached the half-way mark in Spindrift’s Haunted West, I have figured out what’s going on and can be certain of two things.

The first thing: this isn’t really a movie. Haunted West begins in wide (wide wide) screen, its opening credits over what could be the establishing shot of a top-tier spaghetti western. Blue sky, jagged hillside, and a day-time moon lurking above. But Spindrift quickly show their hands in the opening scene: the band wanders around a derelict town while their music plays non-diegetically. Things move forward, in their meandering way, with shots from performances in historical saloons, shots from performances around campfires, and the occasional music-video-esque backdrop of gibbets, “Olde West” thoroughfares, and some neat-o pointy rock sites.

The second thing: Haunted West is the perfect thing to play on a grainy projector with dodgy speakers during your next Western-themed party. Delaware-born band leader Kirkpatrick Thomas must have spent a youth saturated in Western movies, Western television shows, and acid rock. His band’s sound veers from Prog-Western to Ballad-Western to Acid-Wibblies, with even some visits from what I can only describe as “Mariachi Luau.” The one constant is an Ennio Morricone vibe, as might be expected; Morricone was God’s gift to Spaghetti Westerns.

I often mention the length of short movies–whether it be a comment on efficient story-telling or a bafflement at how something so short could seem so long. Spindrift’s Haunted West moseys onto the screen, showcases some considerable musical talent, and then moseys away. This travelogue music video is a much better investment for your seventy-seven minutes than some movies I could mention, so pull out the Bulleit, slap on a stetson, and rock on, rock in, and rock out with Spindrift.

WHAT THE TOMBSTONE SAYS:

“Here lies George Johnson / Hanged by mistake / 1882 / He was right, we was wrong / But we strung him up & now he’s gone.”

Capsules

CAPSULE: THE LAST MOVIE (1971)

1 Comment

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Stella Garcia,

PLOT: A stuntman stays on in Peru with his mistress after his American movie crew has moved on, and is involuntarily cast in a movie the locals are making with fake cameras.

Still from The Last Movie (1971)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The initial critical assessment of The Last Movie said it was a stumbling, self-indulgent mess of random, stoned footage that director/star Dennis Hopper tried (and failed) to salvage by editing it into something resembling a ian Western. Now that years have passed and we can reappraise the work from a more sober perspective, we can see that this knee-jerk reaction was absolutely correct. It’s half-baked Surrealism, with the emphasis on the “baked.”

COMMENTS: So here’s how I like to imagine the making of The Last Movie went. “Dennis, you’re a genius, and ‘Easy Rider’ made a gazillion dollars, so let’s fly to Peru and make a Western about Hollywood types going to Peru to make a Western!” (Puff.) “Get a crate of whiskey! He can play the director.” (Glug.) “Great! Sam, now shoot a bunch of Western-type scenes, put a guy in jail, get some dancing girls to do the can-can, blow some stuff up. Doesn’t matter what you shoot, there’s no plot. It’s not a real movie.” (Puff.) “Kris, can you play us ‘Me and Booby McGee’ while Dennis rides a horse? Cool.” (Glug.) “OK, everybody get drunk and we’ll film it. Dennis, cry a little.” (Puff.) “Wait, it’s been 25 minutes, did we remember the opening credits? Throw ’em up on screen while Dennis and his chick kiss in a field.” (Puff.) “OK, now let’s have the villagers film some scenes using cameras made out of bamboo… see, they can’t tell the difference between reality and the movies anymore. Did I just blow your mind?” (Snort.) “Damn, that’s some fine Peruvian coke. Get that chick naked in that waterfall, Dennis wants to make out with her!” (Puff.) “Throw in a ‘scene missing’ intertitle at random. Remind ’em it’s a movie.”  (Puff.) “I know what we need: a gold mining subplot! It’ll be, like, a metaphor for Hollywood!” (Glug.) “Let’s all get drunk and go to a brothel.” (Next day.) “Let’s film a scene where everyone gets drunk and goes to a brothel.” (Sniff.) “Wait, is that ether? Let’s have Dennis try to get a fur coat from this guy’s wifuuuh sajkagkudsigkuytadijah… bluh… panties.” (Puff.) “We still got some time? Gold mining expedition montage.” (Sip, looong puff.) “I think I’m peaking… what was in that tea? Anyway now the villagers are shooting the movie for real with live ammo and they put Dennis in jail and shoot him while he rides away on his horse and he gets drunk and slaps some whores and no one will believe he’s actually in a movie cause they’re too busy making a movie and he stumbles into a church and then a woman lactates on his face and the villagers throw a fiesta with fireworks and let’s have Dennis confess to the priest that he sinned ‘in movies,’ and then everyone gets drunk and Dennis dies for their sins, but he does a couple of takes, because it’s a movie.” (Puff, glug.) “Did we remember to tie up that gold mining subplot? Let’s close with a scene with two guys by a campfire talking about whether you need mercury to pan for gold. Just improvise. Has anyone seen my Quaaludes?”

And then Dennis Hopper takes all the footage back to his shack in New Mexico and drops acid and starts editing it together. Then his good friend shows up and looks at the rough cut and says “Dennis, it’s good, but it makes too much sense. You need to put all these scenes in random order.” And then Dennis passes out on the editing machine.

I kid The Last Movie, but there’s one thing that can be said for it: absolutely no drugs were spared in its making.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…one of the all-time classics of pretentiously incomprehensible cinema.”–Radio Times

(This movie was nominated for review by “Cletus.” Suggest a weird movie of your own here.)

Capsules

CAPSULE: STRAIGHT TO HELL (1987)

2 Comments

DIRECTED BY:

FEATURING: , Joe Strummer, Dick Rude, Courtney Love

PLOT: Three gangsters, with a pregnant girlfriend in tow, blow an assignment, rob a bank, and hide out in a Central American village ruled by a band of coffee-addicted desperadoes.

Still from Straight to Hell (1987)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: This silly, violent and absurd attempt at a Western comedy made by non-comedians doesn’t really work, except as a curio.

COMMENTS: The story behind Straight to Hell is that filmmaker Alex Cox had assembled a number of punk bands for a concert in Nicaragua, which had to be canceled due to political turmoil. With his schedule involuntarily cleared and time on his hands, he sat down with a guy named Dick Rude (!) and scratched out a movie script in three days, using the musicians and whoever was available on short notice as actors. The result is a silly spoof, made on the spur of the moment, with punk rockers trying to be comedians. There’s a party vibe, and it’s clear that the cast and crew had a blast farting around in the desert. It’s equally clear that you will never have as much fun watching it as they did making it.

Sy Richardson (whom Cox had worked with before on Repo Man and Sid and Nancy) was one of the few actual actors available for the project on short notice, so the prolific character actor gets a rare featured role here, and makes the best of the opportunity. (Because he’s cool, black, and wears a suit and tie while brandishing a gun, he’s often pointed to as a precursor to Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules in Pulp Fiction). The Clash’s Joe Strummer is second-in-command, while Rude takes the role of the youngest and jumpiest of the gang. Courtney Love is Sy’s shrill, preggo girlfriend, who’s so effectively annoying that they effectively write her out of the script after the setup. Besides the main cast, Eighties underground culture aficionados can keep an eye out for cameos by the Pogues, Elvis Costello, Grace Jones, , and even .

And yes, it is weird, although more in the vein of a spectacularly drunk Mel Brooks than of . The credits list a “sex and cruelty consultant” (a bit tongue-in-cheekly, since there’s not terribly much of either). What you do get it some attempted slapstick from musicians trying to be comics, scenes spoofing Once Upon the Time in the West and Cool Hand Luke, hard-to-understand accents (not only from the rotten-toothed Shane MacGowan), a Western hot dog vendor, a butler who serves coffee to desperate killers, a barrelhouse piano version of “Night on Bald Mountain,” a musical number (including “Danny Boy”) or two, and a long conclusory shootout to prune the cast (including a few extra bodies like Jarmusch who show up at the last minute to get mowed down). Perhaps the oddest touch of all are two brief shots of Ray Harryhausen-style animated skeletons: a wolf who howls at the moon and a human clutching a knife between its teeth. It’s like Cox bought a few seconds of unused footage from a Charles Band production and shoehorned them into his movie at random. Whatever charm Straight to Hell possesses comes from the fact that you seldom have any idea what will happen next.

The story is supposedly based on the Canonically Weird Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!—Cox went so far as to secure the adaptation rights—but the similarities between the two films are completely superficial. Remastered with new digital gore effects and re-released in a director’s cut in 2010, Straight to Hell is obscure, but Kino-Lorber’s 2018 edition with director’s commentary is actually its third appearance on DVD (it was released by Anchor Bay in 2001, and by Microcinema DVD under the title Straight to Hell Returns in 2010). The film is also available on Blu-ray or streaming outlets.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s a very weird vibe, and it requires one to not only accept, but also embrace, boredom. If the movie has one theory, it’s this: if you stare long enough at a certain spot, something weird and cool is bound to happen.”–Jeffery M. Anderson, Combustible Celluloid (DVD)

Capsules

CAPSULE: CANNIBAL! THE MUSICAL (1993)

2 Comments

Recommended

DIRECTED BY: Trey Parker

FEATURING: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Dian Bachar, Ian Hardin, John Hegel

PLOT: Alferd Packer and a small band of hopeful gold-rushers lead an ill-fated expedition from Utah to Colorado through the snowy Rocky Mountains. Six walk in; one walks out. It’s also a musical.

Still from Cannibal! the Musical (1993)

WHY IT WON’T MAKE THE LIST: The base premise of a comedy-musical about a historic cannibal gold-rusher is certainly attractive enough to watchers of weird. Beyond that, Cannibal! The Musical, while funny and charming, doesn’t shoot for the extremes of weirdness commonly seen on the List. It’s not even the first musical western comedy we’ve reviewed here, and it’s way at the end of the line of movies we’ve considered.

COMMENTS: Fans of the animated franchise “South Park” can already tell you how skilled Trey Parker and Matt Stone are at writing musicals; the theatrical feature South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut was a surprising hit with show-stopping numbers, and then “The Book of Mormon” (the play, not the book) cemented their reputation. And of course, black humor is a given with this creative pair. So it’s interesting to see their work on this low-budget production when they were still students at University of Colorado-Boulder, before “South Park” made them famous. It released originally as Alferd Packer: The Musical in 1993 before Troma Entertainment, spiritual peers to Parker/Stone, picked it up for distribution as Cannibal! The Musical.

For a hopeful few seconds it meets the expectation you have for a Troma movie, when the film opens with a deranged cannibal attacking and taking bites out of hapless settlers in the snowy woods. This turns out to be a flashback from a courtroom, circa 1883, where defendant Alferd Packer (Trey Parker) is on trial for murdering his traveling party. Later, in his cell, a local reporter who’s attracted to bad boys goads him into telling her his story, by segue of talking about his horse, Liane. And so we’re swept into the musical tale of the ill-fated Alferd Packer’s Gold Rush expedition in 1874, accompanied by a ragtag band of optimistic hangers-on—teenagers James Humphrey (Matt Stone) and George Noon (Dian Bachar), Mormon priest Shannon Bell (Ian Hardin), butcher Frank Miller (Jason McHugh), and twinkle-toed Israel Swan (John Hegel)—none of whom have the slightest clue about gold-mining or surviving treks through the Rockies in the dead of winter.

Of course, for a campy comedy musical, the movie treats the historical Packer’s tale with about as much accuracy as Mel Brooks recounting the Spanish Inquisition. Townspeople and random pioneers on the trail warn the party of grave doom, Indians, and a cyclops (who proves disappointingly un-Harryhausen). The group stays disciplined by putting individuals on time out when things get uncivil. Bad luck haunts the crew in every way from losing the horse (to which Packer will sing an ode) to stumbling into random bear traps, and the crew gets lost enough to chance upon the Grand Canyon on their way from Utah to Colorado. A band of punk-rock trappers taunt the party along the way. Asian kung-fu Indians beset the party. While not a lot makes sense, the story moves at a swift enough clip that you’ll barely mind. Be wary after watching it so you aren’t caught idly singing “Hang the Bastard” in inappropriate contexts.

Formed from the quirky imaginations of the Parker/Stone team, Cannibal! The Musical is an enjoyable romp with plenty of the team’s trademark dark humor. The production at times is patterned after Oklahoma! There’s parody of tropes both musical (songs break down mid-verse as the singers argue about chord theory) and western (“Look at all these teepees we have; because we’re Indians!”), yet despite the gory opening scene there’s barely a whiff of a horror aspect: our Troma expectations fizzle after the first five minutes and don’t rekindle until the final twenty. Considering it was a student effort that started out as a fake trailer for film class before the professor called the team’s bluff, the movie is an excellent, if silly, effort. Its legacy is a cult following, the occasional stage revival, and the introduction of “shpadoinkle” into weirdophile vocabulary. But it only has passing business flirting with the wild west of weird cinema.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“It’s all pretty stupid, but at times, there are refreshingly ludicrous notes that even people old enough to see this movie without a guardian can appreciate. One approach: Imagine the film taking place in South Park animation. If Cartman were ripping that man’s arm off and eating it, it might be cute.”–Anita Gates, The New York Times (1998 revival)

Alfred Eaker's Fringe Cinema

BILLY THE KID VERSUS DRACULA AND JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN’S DAUGHTER (1966)

Leave a comment

In 1966, William “One-Shot” Beaudine produced two western-horror hybrids, which were rare for the period. True to Beaudine’s M.O., they were also two of the year’s worst movies.

Billy the Kid Versus Dracula is the better known of the two, primarily because it stars as the vampire. Carradine had a pragmatic approach to film acting: if you paid him a good salary, he gave a good performance. If you gave him a cheap salary, he gave a cheap performance. What meager budget this film had must have all gone to paying Carradine, because he’s easily the best thing about it—which is not to say he’s good. He’s not, but he’s entertaining, giving what looks like a fifty-dollar, bug-eyed, ham performance that hardly compares to his work in The Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach, etc.

Still from Billy the Kid Versus Dracula (1966)Dracula has left Transylvania and is traveling out West via stagecoach. He puts the bite on Folgers Coffee lady Virginian Christine and an Indian girl, turns into a bat (with clearly visible strings), and then takes on the identity of Jack Underhill so he can vampirize pretty Betty (Melinda Plowman). Unfortunately for Drac, Betty is engaged to wholesome hombre (?!) Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney).

Christine, under Drac’s control, is no Dwight Frye, but she’s almost as much fun here as she was selling coffee. Plowman is pure decor, and she doesn’t seem to affect Courtney, who’s a dreadfully neutered Billy. Without Carradine’s repeated barking, hypnotizing, and wired bat flights to liven up the many dull stretches, the film wouldn’t even qualify in a bad lover movie list. Well into alcoholism, Carradine looks flamboyantly dead already. His showdown with Billy is in a silver mine, and although bullets pass right through Drac, he gets conked out by the butt of a pistol. Of course, he doesn’t get to actually slaughter anyone.

Baron Frankenstein’s granddaughter, Maria (Narda Onyx) lives out West, too, in Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter. She has a lab and wants to make a new monster.

Meanwhile Jesse James (John Lupton) and his wounded henchman Hank (Cal Bolder) need a doctor. The local Mexican girl Juanita (Estelita, milking all the south-of-the-border cliches ) warns them against taking Hank to Lady Frankenstein: “These Frankensteins are bad people. My people will return when the last Frankenstein is gone.” The law on his heels, Jesse doesn’t listen, but wonders if Juanita is onto something when Maria takes him into a library with no books. Hmmm. Jesse kisses Juanita. Juanita is now in love and runs to the sheriff to save Jesse from those Frankensteins, even thought she knows Jesse is wanted and will be hung—but Juanita will wait for him (?!?) Lo and behold, Maria, wearing  what looks like a pride flag motorcycle helmet, transforms Hank into Igor, shouting “I am in command. You will obey! Kill, kill!” Well, apparently he could have used a better brain, or a touch of tenderness, because he kills Maria.

Still from Jesse James Meets Frankenstein's Daughter (1966)Onyx is a campy hoot, and again a bad performance enlivens Beaudine’s listless direction and a moronic script by Carl Hittleman. Although neither film is trashy or charming enough, the titles, and a couple of cheez whiz performances, may be enough to convince you to add it to a seasonal party playlist. Or, perhaps not.