31 DAYS OF HORROR 2024- Day 23 : CURSE OF THE UNDEAD (1959)

Drake Robey (Michael Pate), a gunslinger with a difference.

CURSE OF THE UNDEAD (1959) is a cheapie western with an unusual twist: the story's hired gunfighter is a vampire who preys on the locals. 

A product of the mid-20th Century era when entertainment was for some reason absolutely dominated by westerns, the film was clearly an atempt to add something, anything, different to a genre that was getting quite stale and that would not truly cease glutting the market for another full decade or so. The narrative violates many of the common rules of cinematic vampires, but it's a decent yarn that plays like a weird episode of any garden variety 1950's oater. It's eerie enough to hold the interest of fledgling monster kids, and it's certainly a hell of a lot better than the abysmal and unintentionally hilarious BILLY THE KID VERSUS DRACULA (1966). Definitely worth a watch for vampire completists, but don't expect any real scares.

Poster for the theatrical release.

THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)

After not having seen in it since I was a kid I finally made up my mind to sit through 1960's THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, the first and quite literal "westernization" of Akira Kurosawa's 1954 masterpiece SEVEN SAMURAI, and while it's pretty good for what it is I definitely feel it's a textbook case of "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Is it just me, or does this look like a setup enacted by every kid who ever owned a number of old school G.I. Joe dolls or Johnny West toys?

Taking the basic plot of Kurosawa's original — a put-upon peasant village gets fed up with periodic raids from bandit scumbags and hires a team of skilled warriors, plus one aspiring tag-along, to handle their problem — and transplanting it to Mexico during the Wild West days, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN provided iconic western thrills with a terrific cast, but I wonder how well the film would have been remembered if not for that element. If not for the sheer awesomeness of Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, James Coburn, Charles Bronson and the rest, this would, in my opinion anyway, register as a very much by the numbers oater, dripping with many of the hokey touches that make many westerns of the period a bit of a chore for me to take. There's a lighter-than-appropriate tone to the material here that may just be the result of its Americanization, but I found much of the film far too "cute" for my tastes. And if I had to hear the downright oppressive theme tune one more time, I swear I was going to scream.

The cast does a terrific job and the enemy force is given more of a face than the ever-looming bandits in Kurosawa's version thanks to Eli Wallach in a Mexican role that presages his indelible Tuco Ramirez from Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY (1966), but the whole thing reminded me of a modern-day Americanization of a foreign film insomuch as it severed a story from its indigenous roots, largely did away with the source's nuances, and slapped some red, white and blue on it in an attempt to make it less "foreign" or "remote" to an audience the distributors felt may not have given a chance had it played with subtitles or foreign faces. I can understand such thinking when THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN came out, since foreign films mostly ran in obscure "art" cinemas (which hasn't really changed all that much just shy of fifty years later) and the average American moviegoer of the time would have most likely balked at subtitles, but having seen SEVEN SAMURAI, I genuinely fail to see the need for this movie or any of the subsequent films that cribbed from Kurosawa's template, including the first of Sergio Leone's Clint Eastwood "Dollars Trilogy" classics, A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS (1964).

I'm also greatly saddened by American filmgoers who love this film yet remain completely unwilling to see the vastly superior film that made THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN possible. There's a reason why SEVEN SAMURAI is universally hailed as one of the greatest movies ever made by any director in any country, and the story's appeal has nothing whatsoever to do with it being Japanese in origin. If THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN had been crafted with the same level of acting, scripting, direction, cinematography, and just about every other element of filmmaking I would not be writing this now. Again, THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN is in no way a bad movie, but why bother with John Sturges (who made a number of good films) when you have Akira Kurosawa at his very best? I do like westerns but I'm not rabid over them and the ones I genuinely love number less than twenty, and this film doesn't even come close to those in my estimation, so maybe it's just me.

BOSS NIGGER (1975)

NOTE: This was originally written for my main blog back in 2008, but I have added a few tweaks since then.

Finally available in a legitimate DVD release, 1975’s BOSS NIGGER has (as previously bitched about on this here blog) indeed been retitled as the far more P.C. “BOSS,” but I’m happy to say that title is purely for the purposes of display on store shelves. The film itself has been altered in no way whatsoever, preserving both the title and the infamous theme song — sing along, kiddies: “They call him Boss…Boss Nigger!!!” — but introduced with the following disclaimer by writer/star Fred “The Hammer” Williamson himself:

In 1972 I had just completed “The Legend of Nigger Charley” and “The Soul of Nigger Charley.” I made this sequel that you are about to see. I used the “N” word to create sensationalism at the box office, and all three films were a success.

You have to remember that all who used that word against me in those films regretted it.

Enjoy the movie. I approve the title and the song with the dialogue intact.

Fred “The Hammer” Williamson, 2008 

I’ve previously railed against the perceived need to retitle the film and am glad to see the film itself left as it was originally seen, but in this climate where the word “nigger” is nearly ubiquitous in popular rap music (enjoyed across every ethnic group) and just about any R-rated film featuring black men, I find the need for any kind of disclaimer, even one so obviously well-intentioned, kind of ridiculous. Plus the film went out as BOSS NIGGER thirty-three years ago without apology, but whatever; those were the days when Richard Pryor won a Grammy for an album entitled “That Nigger’s Crazy” and no one batted an eye, so different time, different mindset I suppose.

BOSS NIGGER has been somewhat rightly described as BLAZING SADDLES without the comedy, and that’s true up to a point but not wholly accurate as the film is an uneven (though entertaining) blending of straight Western tropes and a tongue-in-cheek attitude. Bounty hunters Boss (Williamson, whose character’s surname is never revealed; it's a good bet it probably isn’t “Nigger”) and Amos (D’Urville Martin, perhaps best known as villain Willie Green in the first DOLEMITE flick) ride into a remote town and set themselves up as sheriff and deputy — much to the open consternation and disapproval of the townspeople —, knowing that wanted outlaw Jed Clayton (William Smith, also known as Conan the Barbarian’s sword-making dad) and his gang of marauding assholes/rapists/thieves are holed up somewhere nearby. Unbeknownst to the townsfolk, the crooked mayor (R.G. Armstrong) is sort of in cahoots with Clayton (it’s never made clear just what the mayor gets out of this arrangement other than not being rendered suddenly dead), and the entire town are such a bunch of pussies that even though they considerably outnumber the outlaws and apparently possess weapons and ammo they do nothing whatsoever to stand up for themselves, allowing the bad guys to ride into town and rape and pillage like the bandits in SEVEN SAMURAI, so it’s up to Boss and Amos to do it for them.

When not killing, jailing or generally humiliating Clayton’s thugs, Boss and Amos (especially Amos) enthusiastically enforce laws they make up on the spot, ordinances such as use of the “N” word or general rudeness directed at either of them being punishable by a twenty-dollar fine or two days behind bars and other such similar penalties, leading to what amusingly amounts to an endless source of cash for the two bounty hunters. Between clashes with assholish white folks and the stereotypical outlaw contingent, our heroes prove to be champions of the local downtrodden (translation: Mexicans) and find themselves on the receiving end of the attentions of a variety of interested females (Amos is pursued by a horny Mexican washerwoman whom he defended from abuse by rednecks the second he entered town, while Boss is fancied by two lovelies: a cute black chick whom he and Amos rescued from bushwhackers, and the local school marm, a white chick whose bloomers become quite humid at the sight of the stylish and handsome black-clad gunfighter). But all good things must eventually come to an end and the end here comes when Clayton finally gets off his ass and takes the fight to Boss, first by running over with a horse a Mexican child Boss had saved from starvation, then kidnapping (and raping offscreen) the cute black chick, and lastly by ambushing Boss, beating the shit out of him while he’s held in place by some henchmen and tying him to a post in the full-on desert heat. Amos rescues Boss and the cute black chick and takes them back to town for a brief rest before the inevitable showdown with Clayton, and when that final battle arrives the next morning the town becomes a low budget would-be Peckinpah-esque shootout, resulting in heaps of bodies before our heroes take possession of Clayton’s corpse and ride off to turn it in for a hefty bounty.

Directed by Jack Arnold — who, believe it or not, also helmed IT CAME FROM OUTER SPACE, CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, RETURN OF THE CREATURE, TARANTULA, THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, MONSTER ON CAMPUS and HIGH SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, just to name a few —, BOSS NIGGER is a decent enough Western that greatly benefits from Fred Williamson’s trademark cooler-than-polar-bear-shit personality coupled with a wry sense of humor and genuine acting chops, aspects that endeared him to genre fans from the second he hit the movie screen and set him apart from many of the leading men who were his contemporaries; Richard Roundtree, Ron O’Neal and Jim Kelly were all fun presences, but there was only one Fred Williamson and those of us who appreciated his work knew we were on to something unique and consequently his legend endures with a tenacity that few, if any, can match. In BOSS NIGGER he offers a reality-based analog to Cleavon Little’s fully-humorous Sheriff Bart in Mel Brooks’s BLAZING SADDLES and he’s a pleasure to watch as he outmaneuvers his adversaries and takes no shit from anybody, ably assisted by the late D’Urville Martin who takes what could have been a huge zero of a sidekick role and milks it for all it’s worth, playing ex-slave Amos as both capable and dependable while displaying undisguised glee at flagrantly fucking with obnoxious white people. (NOTE: there are some nice white people in the town and they do not get the treatment from Boss and Amos.)

Other than the occasional lapse into pacing more suited for a B-grade TV show (which is unsurprising as Arnold did a lot of TV work), the only thing that annoyed me about BOSS NIGGER was its soundtrack, a wildly inappropriate and strictly by the numbers generic blaxploitation score heavy with “wakka jawakka” electric guitar, and its lazily-written themesong that comes off more as a list of the hero’s attributes than an actual song, and the sumbitch doesn’t even have the decency to rhyme. But if that’s the only gripe that I can voice about this blaxploitation Western — other than it being PG-rated and not the R that would have allowed it to go totally apeshit with graphic violence, sex, cussing and the general sleazy offensiveness that made blaxploitation flicks so much fun in the first place —, it’s a small quibble indeed, so TRUST YER BUNCHE and give the long-unseen BOSS NIGGER (or BOSS, if you insist) a shot.

ADDENDUM: In 2010, I attended the Chiller Theatre convention in New Jersey and got to meet several of my heroes from the blaxploitation boom, including the one and only Fred Williamson, so I made sure to bring a photo from this movie for him to sign, which he gladly did. He was still the coolest of dudes and I wish him nothing but the best.

With the Boss himself.

The uninspired and rather chickenshit packaging for the DVD release.

THE LONE RANGER (2013)

I just got out of Gore Verbinksi's THE LONE RANGER and I have the same feeling I used to get on the day after a full weekend of partying with copious amounts of booze, weed, and psilocybin mushrooms. I feel more than a little disoriented and confused, as though trying to awaken from a weird dream or process a vision quest that didn't work out quite right.

I'm a fan of the western genre. By no means an  expert like my friend Big Black Paul — aka "Big Black-Ass Cowboy" — but a fan nonetheless, so I've seen many of the classics of the form, both domestic and foreign in origin (Italian westerns definitely count). I know all the tropes, so the experience of sitting through this film was akin to watching a pastiche-happy film editor putting together favorite moments from about two dozen oaters, re-shooting them with different actors and modern filmmaking technology, then splicing it all together and unleashing the resulting horse-operatic chimera onto the screen. It's a well-crafted work populated by game professionals both in front of and behind the camera, but it's one fucking weird mama-jamma that tries hard to please and mostly comes up short.

The film features a framing device set at a wild west fair in 1933, in which a kid in a cowboy outfit and Lone  Ranger mask enters an exhibit featuring stuffed examples of conquered animals from the days of the west's then-fairly-recent yesteryear. His perusal of the displays comes to an abrupt halt when the exhibit of "The Noble Savage in his natural habitat" — a faux tipi against a painted backdrop that serves as a 1/1 scale diorama for a life-sized Native American figure holding an upraised tomahawk  — turns out to be an actual, living Injun (Johnny Depp in full old age makeup). The ancient Native American mistakes the boy for the Lone Ranger and once he sorts out that it's just a kid in a costume, the Indian, whom the kid realizes is the legendary Tonto, tells the kid the origin story of the apparently once-real Lone Ranger. Tonto's something of an unreliable narrator and his tale contains a number of questionable points (which his young audience points out throughout the film) but judging from what we are shown as the story unfolds, it's pretty clear to me that it's all a tall tale filtered through Tonto's possibly insane memories.

The story proper takes place in the Texas of 1869 as a railroad is being constructed. Long story short, sadistic outlaw/cannibal Butch Cavendish (William Fichtner) escapes his looming date with the hangman,  rides off into the plains with his equally morally-bereft gang (including one who's apparently a homosexual frontier drag queen who "likes pretty things") and murders a bunch of Texas Rangers who pursue him. Among the Rangers is John Reid (Armie Hammer), who is the only one to survive the massacre, and he vows to seek justice for the murder of his revered brother, Dan (James Badge Dale), who previously nabbed Cavendish and saw him sentenced to prison. Dan lives long enough have Cavendish kill him and cut out and eat his heart (which is depicted with considerable restraint but it's made absolutely clear what happens), which is witnessed by John just before he passes out and is left for dead. Also on Cavendish's trail is Tonto, who has trailed Cavendish for twenty-six years in the wake of the outlaw's massacre of his people, due to a bad decision that the young Comanche made. Finding the apparently dead rangers, Tonto, being a decent guy, digs graves for all of them and soon discovers John is miraculously back from the dead and seemingly chosen for greater things by a stark white "spirit horse" that Tonto communicates with. Telling the resurrected John that he is now a spirit-walker who is incapable of being killed in battle because he's been to the other side and returned, the two team up after the usual cross-cultural misunderstandings common to this kind of tale, and they  share many adventures on the trail of Cavendish, with John adopting his iconic masked look. Complications and encounters along the way include John's youthful love and Dan's comely widow, Rebecca (Ruth Wilson), whom John still adores, a brothel madame with a scrimshaw/shotgun prosthetic leg (Helena Bonham Carter) who wants revenge on Cavendish for reducing her to her current one-legged status, an Injun-massacring cavalry officer who bears an intentional resemblance to General Custer (Barry Pepper, star of the infamous BATTLEFIELD EARTH), and corrupt railroad tycoon Latham Cole (Tom Wilkinson), who has a couple of dark secrets and defines the term "hostile takeover."

There's a ton of action and a surprising amount of percussive violence and gunplay, which at times lends the film the feel of "What if Sam Peckinpah directed a kid's western" (there are a few obvious nods to Peckinpah's epochal THE WILD BUNCH), plus we get Tonto providing no small amount of Indian mysticism, so it's pretty much a textbook post-Ford/Leone horse opera. That said, it's a dreamlike  (my friend Suzi called it flat-out boring) pastiche that at times defies one's willing suspension of disbelief and prompts the audience to ask aloud "What the fuck did I just watch?" The problems arise from a few factors, chief among which is the obvious attempt at scoring another PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN box office bullseye and the film's borderline-hallucinogenic length. It's visually lush and epic with gorgeous cinematography by Bojan Bozelli — who did the honors for one of my favorite comedies of the 1980's, namely TAPEHEADS (1988) — but that lushness cannot hide a certain meandering pace that compounds the length in the film's attempt at being more meaty that it actually is. I didn't find it boring but I did note how goddamned long the thing was. At two and a half hours, the movie's at least forty-five minutes too bloated, and once it reaches a certain point it feels like time has warped and the film just might go on forever. I swear it felt like it just. Would. Not. End. And when it does finally wrap things up after a spectacular two-train chase sequence that looks for all the world like the template for a tie-in videogame, it ends on a weird, mystical note that I don't feel works for the narrative, despite some of the other mystical touches on hand throughout. (The sight of the pale spirit horse inexplicably perched on a tree branch being perhaps the most perplexing. It's so weird that even Tonto tersely observes "There's something wrong with that horse.")

The Lone Ranger himself is something of a problem because the script can't seem to nail down just what his personality is. He fluctuates between being a righteous proponent of the letter of the law, a clueless moron, a wacky comedic lead, and, worst of all, a bit of a pussy. He could have been worse but those seeking a western hero to inspire them are advised to look elsewhere.

The elephant in the room, namely Tonto, was one of my favorite things in the film. Yes, he's not played by an actual Native American, but Depp is clearly out to rehabilitate Tonto — already a much maligned and misunderstood character — from his perceived stereotypical, broken-English-speaking stoicism and red-faced Uncle Tom(ahawk) side-kickery. I dug Tonto's bird-on-head and white face paint with symbolic black tears (believe me, he has very good reason to express the sadness in his soul), and he is by far the more interesting of the film's heroes. It was a bold move to tell the story from his (possibly skewed) point of view and I definitely appreciate that. However, would it really have been so hard to find a Native American actor to play the part? Sure, Depp is a box office draw and possesses a huge fan base, but it's 2013, people...

When the lights came up, my friend Daniel noted that we'd just seen $230 million bucks riding off into the sunset, and he could not be more right. The ending was clearly a setup for a hoped-for franchise, but that just ain't gonna happen. Some iconic properties are ripe for re-invention/reboots and some have that happen every generation or so, but, and I hate to say this, I honestly believe that the Lone Ranger's time passed once the 1950's ended. He's just too firmly-defined as a kid-friendly, ultra-squeaky-clean good guy who rides the range selflessly righting wrongs in a Wild West whose romanticized patina has been long washed away by the general acknowledgement of the horrific atrocities committed as the west was won, or rather stolen by lawlessness, faithless governmental dishonesty, unbridled racism, and still-horrific genocide. Our innocence/blindness in that department is long gone, and nowadays is anyone really going to buy a western hero who only shoots people in the hands? I say the Ranger and Tonto are a nostalgia item who are more or less doomed as our culture becomes more cynical with each passing day. The audience of roughly sixty attendees mostly consisted of moviegoers aged sixty and over, clearly fueled by fond memories of Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels,  and that demographic is simply not numerous nor box office-present enough to warrant the Lone Ranger and Tonto being given another shot by a major studio again. Sadly, this flick may be the final nail in their pop cultural coffin.

Bottom line: I didn't hate THE LONE RANGER, but I am not blind to its many faults (several of which I just couldn't bring myself to bother going into) and needlessly-oppressive running time. It looks great and Tonto is a lot of fun, but I cannot recommend it as a first-run ticket expenditure. When all is said and done, what we're left with here is yet another huge-budgeted disposable "product" movie that will look great on TV as one combats insomnia and gets lulled to dreamland by its aforementioned borderline-hallucinogenic pace. I suppose there are worse things to have than a western-inspired dream, so keep it in mind when you require a pretty cinematic soporific. And if you want to see a genuinely good western from Gore Verbinski, look no further than the animated RANGO (2011), which features Johnny Depp giving voice to the title character.

BUFFALO RIDER (1978)

If you’re of a certain age — specifically, a middle-aged American whose childhood/adolescence occurred between roughly 1973 through 1980 — you are likely to recall the spate of cheapjack "family" films featuring some random white dude or family of white folks, either in the past or the then-present, who lived in the woods or on the prairie with a legion of animal friends from assorted species. Those flicks did decent box office and were mostly marketed as children's matinee fodder, and god knows I saw several of them, most notably BROTHER OF THE WIND (1973), THE LIFE AND TIMES OF GRIZZLY ADAMS (1974) and THE ADVENTURES OF THE WILDERNESS FAMILY (1975). However, despite my regular attendance at Saturday afternoon movie matinees, one of that brief period's films that I never heard of until about a week ago is 1978's BUFFALO RIDER, and if I'd seen its trailer at the time, I would likely have gone to see it. I mean, just look at this:



A feature-length exercise in padding out a movie’s running time as much as possible, the film opens with an eight-minute “In Search Of…”-style history of the decline in the once-voluminous buffalo population and confusingly alternates between narration from some unidentified individual who claims to have heard the movie’s details from his grandfather, and the grizzled tones of a secondary narrator who is apparently meant to represent the common buffalo hunter (it’s never actually made clear). Tons of nature/animal footage unspools as the audience is filled in on the year 1871 seeing a new tanning process that made buffalo hide as easily rendered into numerous products as simple cowhide, thus escalating the already ruinous and wasteful efforts of sleazy buffalo hunters who skinned the beasts and left their carcasses to rot, leading to the tragic and staggering figure of some forty-million buffalo being slain between 1871 and 1875. This sequence also introduces us to a trio of scurvy buffalo hunters who serve as the flimsy story’s villains, and these guys would easily fit in as the standard unwashed human vermin common to Spaghetti Westerns and certain Sam Peckinpah horse operas, but more on them later.

According to the narrator, Jake Jones, the titular character, was (apparently) a thoughtful and silent former buffalo hunter who sickened of the slaughter and left to live as a buckskin-clad mountain man in the wilderness of Utah and Wyoming, until the Fall of 1881, when he encountered a baby buffalo whose mother had been killed by some scumbag hunters and was under attack by a pack of hungry coyotes. Jake and the buffalo fight off the coyotes and Jake decides to care for the orphaned calf, rather than let it fall victim to the assorted predators in the area (this despite Jake clearly having been established as one of those hardcore crunchy, bearded at-one-with-nature types). Deciding he would have to care for the buffalo until its wounds healed, Jake immediately ties up the poor beast and embarks on a long period of breaking the wild buffalo in a homemade corral. Despite already having a totally serviceable horse, Jake soon chucks a saddle on the buffalo — which eventually grows into a 2000-pound behemoth named Samson (a name the narrator oh-so-helpfully reminds us is “from the Bible”) — and learns to ride the clearly-unwilling shaggy bulldozer in a lengthy, slo-mo-accented sequence replete with “stirring” ‘70’s faux-frontier music and the frequently repeated and awful theme song, a tune that evokes ‘70’s-era TV commercials for pickup trucks and beer, and the lyrics of which bestow upon Jake the heroic nickname of “Buffalo Jones,” thus cementing him as a legend or something.

Once man and beast forge themselves into a clumsy team, the wafer-thin plot finally gets underway. In fact, calling it a plot is something of an overstatement since what we really get is mostly a series of sporadic events, punctuated with footage of animals that are meant to make the film’s kiddie audience “ooh” and “aah” at the wonders of nature, and counterpointed with occasional looks at the douchebaggery of the bad guy buffalo hunters. Said douchey hunters encounter Buffalo Jones when they try to kill his horned mount and end up shooting Jones in the process. Samson runs away from the hunter with Jones on his back and the pair stumble upon the conveniently-located home of another mountain man/minor-league gold-panner and his wife, who nurse Jones back to health and welcome him into their household. From there, the highlights (?) include:

• An uneventful encounter with a “Grizzly” that’s actually clearly a standard black bear.
• A feeble run-in with an Injun who wants to kill Samson because he’s perceived the beast as “big medicine” thanks to there being some crazy bearded hippie on its back. The Injun proves to be quite incompetent at his task and ends up with his jaw broken by Buffalo Jones’ rifle butt. Remember, this is supposed to be a family film.
• Buffalo Jones’ friendship with a raccoon named Bandit, a creature whose presence is included solely to stretch out the running time. Once introduced, the focus of the narrative completely shifts to Bandit and his adventures in the desolate winter landscape as he faces a hungry cougar (featuring moments where I would have sworn the cougar was about to eat the poor raccoon’s head), endures an icy flash-flood and, despite having been clearly identified as a male, is suddenly revealed to be a female that gives birth to a pair of adorable babies, thus providing the film with yet more footage of cute l’il animals. All of this Bandit stuff goes on for a solid ten minutes, after which Bandit and her babies abruptly disappear from the film, never to be seen or mentioned again.
• Uninteresting sequences in which we see the buffalo hunters going about their business and basically being a pack of repulsive assholes. Meant to establish character, all these bits do is make us fervently wish these goons were excised from the story because they seem to serve no purpose whatsoever, but our endurance is eventually rewarded (sort of)…
• Buffalo Jones’ mountain man friend goes out hunting for game and runs into two hungry Grizzlies — this time actual bears of the proper variety — who very savagely fight in such a manner as to make me think the film’s animal wranglers had little or no control over what happened when they unleashed the bruins for the shoot. The bears bloodily tear the living shit out of each other and I swear it does not look faked in the least. Again, this is supposed to be a wholesome “family” film.

After all that filler, the plot kinda/sorta begins to go somewhere when the mountain man’s wife mentions her brother, his wife and their infant son are on their way to visit, at which point all that time wasted with the buffalo hunters finally serves a purpose. The hunters bushwack the innocent family, killing the adults and leaving the baby untended on the ground as they ransack the covered wagon for anything they can find, after which they head into the nearest town to trade what they’ve stolen for booze and other assorted frontier distractions. When the family does not arrive on time, Buffalo Jones hops on Samson for the first bit of actual buffalo riding in quite a while, and goes in search of the missing relatives (opting to ride Samson instead of a much swifter and more efficient mount, such as, oh, a horse). It takes Buffalo Jones four days to come across the dead couple and the pillaged wagon, where he finds the baby — who has miraculously held on for all that time without food, water, or a change of diapers, plus to say nothing of somehow managing not to be devoured by the local predators — and clues that incriminate the hunters who had earlier attempted to kill him. But vengeance must wait as the next twenty minutes of screen time are padded with Buffalo Jones’ four-day efforts to make it back to his mountain man friend’s shack, a journey including fending off hungry wolves, getting into a slo-mo fistfight with another cougar, a quick look-in on the squabbling hunters, tons of footage of Samson’s bulk providing difficulty in his making his way through deep snow, riveting close-up footage of Buffalo Jones reloading his pistol, Samson acting as a babysitter, Jones and Samson battling their way across a river’s strong current and, my personal favorite image, Buffalo Jones grabbing a big porcupine by its tail and making off with it so he can make a broth from its meat to feed the starving baby.

After dropping the baby off with the mountain couple, Buffalo Jones rides off on Samson in search of the killers, but first he runs into more film-padding in the form of a pack of wolves who want to eat him and Samson. (Jones does not simply whip out his gun and shoot the wolves because that would be douchey and against nature, something that forcing a buffalo to let him ride it obviously is not.) The hunters have split up, so Buffalo Jones tracks two of them to a saloon where, in the film’s most visually-outrageous moment, Jones rides his buffalo into the place and blazes away with his revolver, executing the two hunters and confusing the living shit out of the assorted drunken prospectors and mountain men in attendance. The remaining hunter is soon located and meets a deservedly horrible slo-mo end when he’s mercilessly trampled by Samson, while Buffalo Jones stoically drives the beastie. With justice served, Buffalo Jones and Samson ride off into the sunset and the narrator announces that the orphaned baby was his grandfather. That revelation was clearly meant to have a certain level of profundity but its desired effect merely elicits a dozy “And I care because…?” from the half-asleep audience.

BUFFALO RIDER is one very odd entry into its genre. Though ostensibly a family feature, the film is an uneasy fusion of the western, the ‘70’s post-hippie back-to-nature zeitgeist, and stoner entertainment that kind of floats from incident to incident in something akin to a dreamlike state. The virtually silent hero who rides a buffalo looks like a mythic figure straight out of a peyote-fueled mystic vision and the film’s whole vibe fairly reeks of good, skunky buds as inhaled in the back of a tricked-out van some thirty-plus years ago. If I still smoked weed, I’m betting this ultra-mellow oddity would not be half-bad to sit through while completely baked, but seen without illegal intoxicants its flaws are glaring. For a movie containing supposedly family-acceptable violence of both the human and animal varieties, it’s not at all exciting, and its story particulars at times feel as though they were communicated by a child randomly dropping building blocks into place and hoping the narrative makes sense and flows naturally. It's worth a look for western completists, but I most strongly recommend it for insomniacs who may find its meager charms a soothing lead-in to solidly nodding off.

TRUE GRIT (2010)

I don't know what you thought of the 1969 TRUE GRIT, but I saw the remake yesterday and it was an odd experience because I saw the original for the first time since I was a kid a few months back and I thought it was merely so-so. The remake, though purportedly more true to the source novel, was virtually a beat-for-beat remake of the original and consequently it was also so-so. It does improve on the original in a few ways — chief among which are not having the incredibly annoying Kim Darby in the lead, and a better, less "Hollywood" ending — but for the life of me I can't understand why it's getting the universal critical acclaim it's racking up. My guess is that since westerns are pretty much a dead genre, audiences (and critics) are starved for "horse operas," so they go crazy when a competent one shows up in the current climate of lame rom-coms, cookie-cutter Judd Apatow films (almost all of which are overrated and not funny, at least not to me), superhero movies of wildly varying quality, Michael Bay cinematic abortions that display a shocking contempt for their audience, and the annual blockbuster season that turns the screen into a toxic waste dump. The new TRUE GRIT is not a "bad" movie by any means, but it simply is not "all that." Here's the breakdown:

• Like the original, it's too long by at least twenty minutes and it moves at a lugubrious pace. There is no suspense or thrills to be had in it and the film even manages to make Cogburn's famous horseback gunfight against four opponents devoid of excitement (which certainly cannot be said about the John Wayne version).
  
• Remember "Leaning On the Everlasting Arms," the tune sung by psycho Robert Mitchum in THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER (1955)? Well, you sure as hell will after seeing the new TRUE GRIT, because an instrumental of it plays incessantly throughout the film.
• Jeff Bridges is excellent as Rooster Cogburn and does not in any way evoke John Wayne's version of the character. It's a totally new interpretation and much more believable than Wayne's Oscar-winning performance (which is only to be expected I guess, because Wayne brought his "god of the western" stature to every role he played, especially late in his career, even in films that were not westerns).
• Hailee Steinfeld is a perfect Mattie Ross because, unlike Kim Darby (who was Miri in the original series STAR TREK episode of the same name), she's the right age for the role (Darby was in her early twenties when playing Mattie) and is not so fucking annoying that you want to shoot her through the eyes. Like Bridges, she brings a total believability to the part and she is very good for a relative newbie.
• Matt Damon is both unrecognizable (due to makeup) and quite good as Texas Ranger LaBoeuf (pronounced "LeBeef") and makes one completely forget Glenn Campbell's utterly forgettable original version.
• The interaction between the characters is fun and at times chuckle-inducing, but the film's pacing renders the proceedings into an almost-dreamlike state. That can work in a Sergio Leone western, but this is not one of those.
• Like the original, we follow Mattie's quest to bring her father's killer to justice, but again we don't care all that much because it's a given that she will succeed and the villain (and his cronies) gets barely any screen time, so we have no character definition other than that which is automatically inferred by their narrative positioning as "black hats."
• Again we get the bit with Mattie ending up in the pit with the rattlesnakes, a sequence that was totally unnecessary to the narrative in the first place and adds nothing to the new version (other than a slightly different outcome to her up close and personal encounter with one of the poisonous reptiles).
  
• As previously mentioned, the film is an almost beat-for-beat remake, despite the Coen Brothers' claims that it's a "new version," and as a result the whole endeavor comes off (to me, anyway) as cinematically superfluous.

The one thing that I am glad of as a result of sitting through it is that it reminded me of MAD magazine's excellent 1970 parody of it (from MAD #133), drawn by the stellar Mort Drucker (one of the best cartoonists ever, whose work is often unfairly overlooked because it runs in a humor magazine). I looked for images from it online and while doing so I was surprised to find that several reviewers of both the new and old version of the film cited that they found the MAD version more memorable than the actual movie. Next to George Woodbridge, I think Drucker was the very best of MAD's artists from the moment they shifted from a comics format to a black & white magazine. Check out these panels to see what I mean:

(I love how the one gunman is riding a hog for no apparent reason.)

But I'm straying from the remake, so allow me to sum up by stating that the new TRUE GRIT is worth seeing, sort of, but I suggest waiting for cable or DVD rental. It ain't worth $13.00 (NYC ticket price).

SOLDIER BLUE (1970)

"A staggeringly powerful, magnificent film. Must be numbered among the most significant, brutal, liberating and honest American films ever made. It is a movie of great art and courage." -The New York Times

"Horse feathers!!!" -Cine-Miscreant

I finally got around to seeing Ralph Nelson's infamous SOLDIER BLUE, one of many Viet Nam-era flicks taking place in disparate genres that were thinly-veiled protests against the war, and I have to say that on all fronts — political allegory, western saga, romantic comedy — it's pretty much full of shit.

When Sam Peckinpah's superlative THE WILD BUNCH (1969) opened the door to outrageous displays of graphic cinematic ultra-violence, it did so with a talented (if whisky-marinated) hand guiding the camera and possessed a compelling story with characters who had actual depth, but in no time flat there were scores of imitators that fell far from the benchmark set by Peckinpah's epic, and SOLDIER BLUE definitely falls into that category.

SOLDIER BLEW, er, BLUE tells the story of foul-mouthed New Yorker Cresta Lee (Candice Bergen) a blonde proto-hippie chick who's been "rescued" from two years of "captivity" among the Cheyenne and is now being sent to a fort where she'll be reunited with the fiancée she only wants to marry for his money. Also on board the wagon she’s traveling in is a shipment of government gold, cash the Cheyenne need to buy guns with, so in short order the soldiers are wiped out and Cresta flees to the hills, accompanied by Honus Gant (Peter Strauss), the lone surviving cavalryman. Calling Gant by the snarky nickname “Soldier Blue,” Cresta demonstrates that her years among the “savages” was time well spent, outstripping Gant in survival skills, common sense and sheer balls, and over their journey toward the fort they must persevere against the elements, a band of hostile Kiowa, an unscrupulous trader — played by Donald Pleasance, here giving one of his most ridiculous performances — and, in the tradition of many previous western-set romantic comedies, each other.

Gant’s basically a decent sort, but his jingoism and naiveté constantly clash with Cresta’s views on the Indians and their treatment by the military; when Cresta attempts to enlighten Gant about massacres in which women and children are raped and tortured, Gant refuses to hear it and labels her a liar. He also considers her a traitor for her views and is shocked to discover that the only reason Cresta left the Cheyenne wasn't that she was unhappy or being mistreated, but because they just did things too differently for her to ever feel at home as one of them. Oh, and she was also married to the leader of the band that killed soldiers escorting the wagon, meaning that her sacred Whiteness has been tainted by intimacy with an Injun.

During the course of their misadventures the two opposites are inevitably — and predictably — attracted to each other and eventually end up getting it on — while Gant has a freshly-treated bullet wound that went clean through his leg, no less — in what was surely the only conveniently located cave for at least a twelve mile radius that wasn’t filled with rattlesnakes, mountain lions, or who knows what, plus to say nothing of the Cheyenne, who could have done something really spiffy with such a primo apartment (there I go, thinking in NYC real estate terms again).

Realizing that their love could never flourish outside of the cave, Cresta leaves Gant and makes it to the fort by herself only to discover that the dickhead in charge won’t spare a couple of men so they can rescue Gant; the regiment needs all available personnel to launch an attack on the nearby Cheyenne village and once Cresta gets wind of that she slips past her obnoxiously horny hubby-to-be and makes a beeline straight to the Cheyenne to warn them of what’s coming. The tribe’s leader for some reason has faith in the word of the Army — after all, they gave him a medal and promised no hostilities — and against the judgment of his advisers neither flees nor takes the fight to the cavalry.

What happens next is what gained the film its infamy; it turns out that all the wacky misadventures and squabbling were all just a lead-in to a hideous reenactment of the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre, an orgy of rape, torture and general sadistic evil perpetrated in the name of “keeping the country clean,” and forty years after its release this sequence still disturbs and nauseates for its sheer cruelty. Children are trampled beneath the hooves of charging horses or impaled on bayonets, unarmed people are beheaded — a nice effect, I have to admit — women are stripped and pawed by gangs of slavering brutes, then raped and mutilated — in one truly sickening instance a naked native woman puts up too much of a fight, so her rapist instead decides to cut off her breasts, which we thankfully only see the start of before the camera moves on to chronicle some other hideous act — and scores of innocent people are shot and dismembered, their component parts impaled on pikes and waved about in victorious celebration or kept as the most ghoulish of souvenirs. No bullshit, this scene would instantly garner an NC-17 rating if released today, to say nothing of possibly spurring Native American interest groups to riot in the streets over the incredibly exploitative manner in which the atrocities are depicted.

Gant manages to hobble to the action and witness for himself the horrors described by Cresta, and when he attempts to stop the inhumane mayhem he’s declared insane, a coward, and a traitor. When the smoke finally clears and the plains are literally strewn with bodies and severed limbs, Gant is led away in chains and Cresta, in full Cheyenne garb, joins the pitiful remnants of the village and begins a long march to either incarceration or a miserable existence on some reservation.

I’m all in favor of westerns that don’t shy away from honest portrayals of how the west was won (or stolen if truth be told), but this film has no idea of what kind of movie it wants to be. One minute it’s a heavy-handed pseudo-hippy lecture about how the treatment of the natives was totally fucked up (no shit, Sherlock), then it’s a light-hearted battle of the sexes farce wherein Cresta proves herself five times the man Gant is and manages to look hot in her tasty red calico poncho (with no undies), but that all goes out the window when Donald Pleasance shows up with an unintentionally (?) hilarious pair of buck-toothed dentures and our heroes must figure out how to escape from his murderous clutches in a sub-plot that goes nowhere, all of which culminates in the aforementioned apocalyptic climax. Any one of those tacks would have been okay for a coherent film, but the end result here is a slapdash mess that milked the horrors of its final ten minutes for all they were worth in the film’s promotion and poster imagery. Sadly, the only thing that works in the film is the violence, an unflinching display that tries to out-Peckinpah Peckinpah — which it doesn’t — and even rips off his famous slo-mo squib compositions to much diminished effect. Western auteurism as grindhouse exploitation movie, if you will.

But by trying to be all things to all audiences, SOLDIER BLUE ends up as an incoherent, preachy Mulligan stew of presumably well-intentioned political correctness, but if they were going to tell the story of the Sand Creek Massacre, wouldn’t it have been a good idea to have some Injun characters who were more than just walk-ons with Murphy Brown acting as their mouthpiece? We get to know absolutely nothing of the people who get wiped out solely for what appears to be a crass ploy to lure gorehound moviegoers into seeing “the most savage film in history.” If you, like me, were intrigued by the provocative ads and reviews that shower almost endless praise upon it for its “daring to tell it like it was,” take my word for it and let SOLDIER BLUE slowly fade into cinematic obscurity. A feel-good flick it ain’t and it’ll really kill all the joy in the room when you make it past the first forty-five minutes. The perfect companion piece for a double bill with the even more exploitative and offensive CUT-THROATS 9 (1973), which is a subject for another post and a much better film.

Oh, and did I mention that the characters reference the Battle of Little Bighorn, which did not occur until twelve years after the events of this story? Way to do your research, fuckstick!

TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

BILLY THE VID VERSUS DRACULA (1965)

You've simply gotta love any movie poster in which the hero looks like he just took a huge, fear-fueled dump in his jeans.

I dunno what the hell was going on back in 1966, but it sure was a banner year for the zero budget horror/western hybrid movie, what with JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER and this being unleashed around the same time. I was barely a year old when those landmarks in cinema came out, but some three years later I clearly recall encountering BILLY THE KID VERSUS DRACULA on TV, placing it among the very first handful of movies I ever saw, and I remembered parts of it vividly upon seeing it again nearly forty (!!!) years later.

Just like its sister film, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER, BILLY THE KID VERSUS DRACULA was directed by William "One-Shot"Beaudine, but is the far livelier of the two movies thanks in no small part to the presence of legendary actor/whore John Carradine, whose famous deeper-than God's balls voice gave the film's vampire a bit of extra "oomph." Oh, and for the record, the vampire in this story is never identified as Dracula or even given a name at all, so go figure.

John Carradine as the film's vampire (significantly not Dracula), working the Jedi Mind Trick.

Much like its sister film, this flick bears the look and tone of an especially whacked-out episode of BONANZA, and the story kinda/sorta manages to outdo JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER thanks to being a lot more lively and featuring one of the worst (best?) endings in the history of either the Western or horror genres, but more on that shortly.

The movie opens as a family of German immigrants sleep outdoors next to their covered wagon and the unnamed vampire shows up to slake his bloodthirst upon the family's nubile daughter, but he's driven off by a handy crucifix. Thwarted, the vampire hitches a ride with a stagecoach bearing a whiskey salesman, a widow who owns a ranch (which is the stagecoach's destination) and her bachelor banker brother from Boston. During a brief stopover, the vampire spots some friendly Injuns and of course drains one of their number (a cute actress in cheesy costume shop Pocahontas drag), thus spurring said Injuns to totally massacre the stagecoach, killing everyone on board. The vampire waits until the dust has settled and steals the banker's identification so he'll have an alias ready for when he shows up at the widow's ranch, his objective being the seduction and vampirism of the widow's comely niece, Betty (Melinda Plowman), so he'll have an undead squeeze to keep him warm on those lonely nights, er, days. Now going by the name of "Mr.Underhill ," Dracula (or whoever the fuck he is) arrives at the ranch and announces he's the new owner/proprietor now that the widow is dead, but first he kills the German immigrant girl whose family is staying at the local boarding house.

In case you're wondering how the hell Billy the Kid (Chuck Courtney) figures into all of this, he's now a reformed outlaw and the foreman at the ranch and is involved in a tepid territorial pissing contest with the previous foreman over him having usurped both the guy's job and his girl, the aforementioned Betty (the actual Western-style ranch conflict plot is utterly beside the point, so it won't be discussed any further, except to say that at one point the former foreman kicks Billy's ass like nobody's business). Anyway, Billy befriends the now-childless Germans and gets them jobs at the ranch, much to Drac's annoyance since they both have his number as being an undead suckface and know all the lore of how to spot and handle undead suckfaces (mirrors, wolfsbane at the windows, etc.). Needless to say, nobody believes the pair — although Billy begins to catch on — and their obvious suspicion of Drac doesn't please him one bit...

I'll spare you the rest of the particulars, but it all comes to a head when Drac kidnaps and semi-vampirizes Betty in order to make her his undead mate, and Billy hauls ass to her rescue. Upon arriving, Billy empties his revolver into the vampire, who merely looks at the outlaw like he's completely out of his mind and promptly hands Billy a pretty decent beatdown (the second he's received thus far. Some Western tough guy!).

Dracula (or whoever he is), kicking Billy's ass.

As Billy lays on the ground, the sheriff and the town doctor show up and the sheriff also empties his gun into the vampire, who this time around actually states aloud that guns are useless against him. Once the sheriff's gun is empty, Billy gets up from the floor and grabs the sheriff's gun, lobbing it square into the vampire's face, sending him toppling to the floor unconscious. Billy then borrows a scalpel from the town doc and uses it in place of the traditional stake to polish off the evil suckface. THE END.

No, seriously! That actually happens, and you can click here to see this flaming bit of lunacy for yourself!

At a mercifully short seventy-three minutes, BILLY THE KID VERSUS DRACULA must have been intended as part of a double or triple bill when originally released, and at so short a running time it's over and done with before it has a chance to get boring, so give it a look for a few cheap laughs if nothing else. And kids love it!

JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER (1966)

One of the many things I love about bad movies is the more often than not unintentional towering ludicrousness wielded by many films in the sub-genre. A good case in point would be 1966's JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER, a bit of camp candyfloss that's remembered these days for little other than its colossally silly title and its nonchalant fusion of horror and Western tropes. I seriously doubt a bunch of Hollywood film producers spent weeks (or even hours) brainstorming over their next sure-fire creation and settling upon a film in which the famous outlaw has it out with a descendant of of everyone's favorite crafter of man-made monsters, but nonetheless somebody figured making such a film would be a good idea so there you go.

Considering when it came out, JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER could have gone a number of ways with its game of genre-fusion, possibly having been influenced by the groundbreaking Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Leone or the atmospherically gory and tits-a-plenty splendor of the Hammer films horror cycle, but instead the finished product reads like an even more studio-bound and artificial-looking episode of BONANZA had it been written by a staff script hack ripped on a dangerous cocktail of Percodan and Jim Beam. Directed by William "One-Shot" Beaudine — so nicknamed due to his tendency to make do with only one take of any given shot — the flick is sadly lacking in any scares whatsoever, titties, gore (although there's an "artificial" brain, but that doesn't really count), suspense or even excitement of any kind, but what it lacks in those it makes up for by being a played-totally-straight example of "camp" in that distinctly 1960's sense of the term, and being totally suitable for the kiddies dropped off at matinees when it originally played. In fact, the movie kind of has the feel of a kid's Western as filtered through the perceptions of a child suffering a high fever, something I experienced a number of times as a kid, only with films of other genres (most memorably the horrendous THE LAST DINOSAUR).

JESSE JAMES MEETS FRANKENSTEIN'S DAUGHTER is a bit of a misnomer since the titular Frankenstein is actually the good Doctor's grand-daughter, but why quibble when you have a story like this: Dr. Maria Frankenstein (Narda Onyx) and her brother Rudolph (Steven Geray) have fled Germany due to their medical experiments being too heinous even for that locale and have now set up shop in a convenient mansion somewhere in or near Mexico (the exact location is utterly beside the point), there to continue their delving into forbidden knowledge.

Narda Onyx as Maria Frankenstein, grand-daughter of the original slab-jockey: it takes a special caliber of actor to keep a straight face in a role — and helmet — like this one.

The pair kidnap local Mexican kids and transplant artificial brains into their crudely-trepanned craniums in hope of creating someone who'll do their bidding (exactly what their agenda is is never explained) rather than piecing together random parts of the deceased and coming up with a towering monstrosity, but each experiment is met with fatal failure for their subjects (they're actually poisoned by Rudolph in hope that his sister will think she's destined to fail, thereby abandoning her madness). Undaunted, Maria determines that what her experiment needs is a grown, muscular giant of a man, but where to find one when every single Mexican in town is either dead or has wisely left the area?

Enter famous outlaw Jesse James (John Lupton) and his hulking pal Hank Tracy (Cal Bolder), who get mixed up in a "who cares?" heist that results in Tracy getting wounded. The pursuit of timely medical assistance leads the pair into contact with peasant girl Juanita Lopez (Estelita Rodriguez) and her parents, all of whom fled town when Juanita's little brother fell victim to the Frankenturds, and Juanita leads Jesse and Hank right to the Doctor's door, hoping to discover the truth about her brother's suspicious demise while Hank receives medical help (not a very good idea if you ask me). Finally obtaining the raw materials for her experiment, Maria devises a plan to keep Jesse out of the way while she transforms Hank into a robotic thrall of flesh and blood, renamed "Igor." Will Juanita discover the truth? Will Jesse get some more G-rated nookie from Juanita (the first round of which occurs after a tasteful TV-style fadeout)? Will Maria have her revenge on Jesse after being spurned by him in favor of Juanita's south-of-the-border sexiness? Will Hank ever wear a shirt again? Will a jealous former-outlaw and the local sheriff nab Jesse and turn him into a human pinata?

Hank (Cal Bolder), post-insertion of artificial brain and renamed "Igor" for no apparent reason (no, seriously), as the Doctor checks out his impressive pecs.

The answers to all this (and less) will be had by the time the words "The End" magically appear onscreen, but it's a decent enough waste of time getting to that point. Yeah, it's pretty much "baby's first horror movie," but it's harmless fun that will definitely hold your interest if you've ever sat through any of the legion of TV Westerns unleashed on the airwaves between 1955 and 1970. The acting is about standard for something of this ilk, but special props must be given to Onyx and Rodriguez, both providing over-the-top performances that team up to create an unintentional "Battle of the Ridiculous Accents." My only real complaint here is that there's no decent '60's-era Hammeresque red stuff to be had, because it would have been awesome to see Hank in full-on-Frankenstein mode crush Rudolph until at least some amount of blood spewed out of his mouth, ears or eyes, accompanied by the sound of bones crunching beneath the onslaught of Hank/Igor's muscles.

Oh, what Hammer studios could have done with this...

But whatever. If this turns up on American Movie Classics or Turner Classic Movies, or even your local TV station at Jesus O'Clock in the morning, give it a look just so you can say you've actually seen a movie with a title this stupid.

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY (1962)

The westerns of Sam Peckinpah come from a place informed by the director's boyhood amongst real-life cowboy types and his absorption of their reminiscences of the waning days of the old west, and RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY is the film where the Peckinpah oeuvre as we came to know it got started. Originally intended as nothing more than a B western, in Peckinpah's hands RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY stands as a solid and very entertaining tale of two aging lawmen whose era has come and gone.

Western cinema legends Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea as Gil Westrum and Steve Judd.

Western legends Joel McCrea and Randolph Scott star as Steve Judd and Gil Westrum, once partners in law enforcement, but now considered over the hill. When Judd takes a job transporting what's quoted as a quarter of a million dollars-worth of gold from a mountain mining camp, he encounters Westrum for the first time in years and enlists his old friend's aid as a second hand for the job. But while Judd has stayed true to his path as a lawman, Westrum has fallen to working as a carnival games gunman in the Buffalo Bill mold and engaging in endeavors of questionable legality with the young and impetuous Heck Longtree (Ron Starr), and, at Westrum's suggestion, the two plot to go along with the trusting Judd and steal the gold once it's transported away from the mining camp. Longtree's an excitable kid with no impulse control and a hair-trigger temper, so he spends a considerable amount of the story fucking up and getting his ass handed to him by a number of opponents, including the elder lawmen who both rightly think he needs to get his shit together as a man. A major stumbling block on Longtree's path of development enters the narrative in the form of Elsa Knudsen (Mariette Hartley in her screen debut), a lovely young woman who leads a restrictive and sheltered life with her fanatical preacher dad (R.G. Armstrong), a man of the cloth who sees sin in everyone and everything, so he has done all within his power to keep his daughter away from the outside world. (There is a strong hint of the preacher thinking that no man is good enough for his daughter except for himself, a point that his daughter calls him on and earns her a hard smack in the mouth for her efforts.)

Longtree (Ron Starr), about to put the moves on Elsa (Mariette Hartley).

Upon seeing Elsa, Longtree immediately puts the moves on her, but finds out that she is engaged, a point that frustrates him because Elsa is clearly attracted to his rough-and-tumble bad boy charm (isn't that always the case?). Much to her father's consternation, Elsa tags along with Judd and his cohorts since they are on their way to the camp where her miner fiancee, Billy Hammond (James Drury) resides, and during the trip Longtree attempts to get "ungentlemanly" with the shocked Elsa, an act that earns him a back-to-back ass-kicking from the elder gunslingers. All the while, Westrum schemes to steal the gold, fully aware that he would be betraying his old friend in doing so, but an old dude's gotta do what an old dude's gotta do...

Upon arriving at the mining camp, Judd begins collecting the gold while Longtree, now pissed off about Elsa leaving, escorts Elsa to the area where her fiancee lives with his four brothers. Much to Elsa's horror (and Longtree's, for that matter), it very quickly becomes apparent that once married to her loutish fiancee, Elsa will be expected to share her body with her husband's brothers, a scurvy and unwashed bunch comprised of, among others, L.Q. Jones and the always sleazy (and awesomely so) Warren Oates.

The grubby redneck awesomeness that was Warren Oates.

That prospect is bad enough on general principle, but it's made worse by the simple fact that Billy's brothers are about on par with the ass-rapin' hillbillies from DELIVERANCE or the cannibal mutants in THE HILLS HAVE EYES, only displaying a rather sociopathically redneck sense of humor.

Perhaps the worst wedding in cinema history.

The naive Elsa gets a hard dose of reality when the wedding ceremony, held at the divey local saloon/whorehouse, swiftly degenerates into a Fellini-esque parade of human freakishness and poor behavior fueled by booze that culminates in her attempted gang rape at the hands of the Hammond brothers. Fortunately, Elsa's screams attract the attention of our heroes and they rush to her rescue, holding off her would-be attackers at gunpoint and hauling her ass out of there. The Hammonds are not at all pleased with this development and challenge Judd and company's right to Elsa in a miner's court, but Westrum resorts to a necessary underhanded move (that I won't spoil for you) to ensure Elsa does not end up returned to what would be a lifetime of unwilling sexual slavery, and our heroes leave to return her to her father. But just before they set off to take Elsa home, it is revealed that the estimated quarter-mil to be transported is actually less than one tenth of that figure, but Westrum's desperate enough to continue on with his plan, something that does not sit well with young Longtree, who has come to respect Judd and re-consider his partnership with the duplicitous Westrum. When Judd twigs to Westrum's intended treachery, things take a turn for the worse, only to be compounded by the very pissed-off Hammonds who are bent on getting Elsa back by many means necessary...

I've only related the basic elements of the film's plot, but several of what would become recurring themes in Peckinpah's films are set in stone with this narrative. The plight of the elder gunslinger becoming a dinosaur with the advent of the 20th century, examinations of masculine loyalty, the redemption of men who have lost their moral way, it's all here, plus a very sympathetic female character in Elsa. Who can't understand the sadness of her desire to escape her smothering life on her dad's farm, only to have her dreams of a better, more exciting life utterly crushed by her filthy fiancee and his disgusting, drooling brothers? Peckinpah is obviously very much on Elsa's side, despite her naivete, thus shooting down his oft-cited reputation as a misogynistic pig.

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY is truly one of the great westerns and should not be missed by serious students of the genre or even the casual DVD watcher. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for a great many reasons that I will leave you to discover for yourself.

THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE (1970)

Stella Stevens and Jason Robards in a sweet love story directed by Sam (THE WILD BUNCH) Peckinpah. Yes, you read that right.

It will come as no surprise that Sam Peckinpah is a filmmaker whose body of work I mostly hold in very high esteem (though let us not make mention of THE OSTERMAN WEEKEND), yet in recent weeks I realized I had not yet seen all of his films. Setting out in earnest to correct that gaping hole in my cinematic education, I ordered some of what I had not seen from Amazon and what awaited me was a pair of very pleasant surprises. I'll get to discussing RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY soon, but before that I thought I'd show some love to THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE, easily the most atypical of Peckinpah's films and one of the most under-appreciated and misunderstood.

Coming a year after his fantastically violent (for its time) and simultaneously artistic THE WILD BUNCH (1969), THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE is a work that seems almost intentionally calculated to piss off audiences whose blood thirst was catered to with Peckinpah's previous film. It's a western alright, but when you look at it it's really a love story that happens to have a western setting. Yes, you read that right: a love story directed by Sam Peckinpah, a complex filmmaker and man whose work and person have been labeled as misogynistic innumerable times over the past four decades.

Rated R for no good reason — it would get a PG-13 if submitted to the MPAA these days — THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE is the story of the title character (played by Jason Robards in an outstanding and totally believable performance), a man whose "friends" (L.Q. Jones and Strother Martin) strand him in the desert with no water, yet, after a few day's trek through blistering heat and a sandstorm, he discovers a watering hole and survives to profit from it. After setting up a dinky makeshift way-station where he charges ten cents per drink — the nearest water for horses and carriage passengers is twenty miles in either direction — Hogue meets a sleazy and rather fraudulent traveling preacher (David Warner, in the first of three collaborations with Peckinpah) who gives him the idea of staking a legal claim on the land where the water is. Venturing into the nearest town to make said claim, Hogue lays eyes on Hildy (Stella Stevens in her finest role), a local whore, and in no time Hogue finds himself deeply smitten by her. There are other sub-plots, the most significant one involving Hogue's firm belief that the sons of bitches who left him to die will some day end up at the watering hole and in Hogue's vengeance-seeking clutches, but the film belongs to the romance of Hogue and Hildy, and if ever there were a film featuring a believable "whore with a heart of gold," this is it. The two snags in all of this are Hildy's disapproval of Hogue's plan for vengeance, something that does not sit well with her or the audience because Hogue is clearly not a killer, and Hildy's goal to leave the remote desert town for the high life in San Francisco, a path that will spell the end of a relationship that's a truly beautiful thing to behold. The sweet Hogue treats Hildy like the lady she very obviously is, her vocation as a whore not mattering to him one bit, and his kindness to and respect for her affect the woman deeply, an aspect of the tale that also touches the audience. Stevens deserved an Oscar for her performance, as did Robards, and their romance is a great example of the oft-seen but seldom believable cinematic trope of true love. The montage that illustrates Hildy and Hogue's blossoming relationship once she moves in with him out in the middle of nowhere is both sweetly intimate and heartfelt, and considering my love of Peckinpah's testosterone-fueled cinema of violence and sheer manliness, you can imagine my surprise at discovering the director was capable of anything even remotely within that realm of appreciably tender humanity.

Along with the unlikely spectacle of a Peckinpah romance, the film is also loaded with the most humor in any Peckinpah film before or since, and, unlike many attempts at comedy within a western context, it actually works here to genuinely amusing effect. Hogue's dealings with officials in the town, Cable's initial encounter with Hildy and his subsequent fleeing from the saloon where she plies her trade, the preacher's "comforting" of a nubile and grieving young woman, and several other segments are quite funny and may be somewhat jarring to some of those in the audience who expected a standard western, especially when taking into account the film's very straight and dead-serious opening five minutes and largely serious final fifth. It's something to keep in mind when approaching this film for the first time.

Considering how open, honest and tender THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE is, I would have loved to see Peckinpah return to the narrative well from which it sprang, but such was not to be. Peckinpah immediately followed THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE with 1971's STRAW DOGS, a vicious piece of work that more than any other earned him his rep as a misogynist (thanks to its infamous two-on-one rape scene) and remains highly controversial to this day. That film could not have been more of a polar opposite to CABLE HOGUE if it tried, and from then on Peckinpah remained firmly entrenched in the realm of ass-kicking uber-masculinity, forever more denying his potential for the more sensitive story to us he-men who are unafraid of and unashamed about our enjoyment of that which is romantic.

There is much about the film's plot particulars that I have not discussed in order not to spoil its myriad surprises for the first-timer, so I'll sum up by saying that this is a very special film from a director who handled elegiac looks at the old west like no other, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to see a side of Sam Peckinpah that puts the lie to those who ignorantly slag him off as a macho shithead. With that in mind, I especially recommend THE BALLAD OF CABLE HOGUE to any women who never gave Peckinpah a chance thanks to his mis-diagnosed misogyny or a dislike of westerns. TRUST YER BUNCHE!!!

Poster from the original theatrical release.