WEIRD WESTERNS: SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (2009)

---

★★★☆☆ 

George Romero's oddest zombie film, in which an island full of Irish cowboys and fisherman battle over what to do with the undead.

---

By Max Sparber

There's a lot that is baffling about George Romero's "Survival of the Dead." Romero, of course, created the modern zombie movie with "Night of the Living Dead" in 1968, the first of a trilogy of beloved zombie films that wed horror to an oftentimes daffy sensibility for social commentary — a lot of people remember "Dawn of the Dead" as a deadpan parody of mindless consumerism, but forget the film includes a pie fight.

Romero rebooted his own series years later with "Diary of the Dead," a film that used a zombie outbreak to satirize the culture of narcissism that has risen with social media — his characters could not stop taking selfies even when the dead rose from their graves.

"Survival of the Dead" runs approximately parallel to "Diary," and briefly intersects with it, but most of the film's action takes place on a place called Plum Island off the coast of Delaware.

The island is split between two feuding Irish families, the O'Flynns and the Muldoons, and they are at war with each other about how to resolve the zombie outbreak that has plagued their island. The O'Flynns, led by "Twin Peaks" villain Kenneth Welsh, dress like Irish fisherman and scour the island for the walking dead; when they find a ghoul, they shoot it in the head.

In the meanwhile, the Muldoons dress like cowboys and are led by Richard Fitzpatrick, a religious bully who will not destroy the zombies, hoping instead for some miraculous salvation, but seems mostly motivated by the desire to be right about something that O'Flynn is wrong about.

So they have the zombie equivalent of a range war, lifted directly from the movie "The Big Country," which likewise was about sailors battling cowboys. The zombies here literally stand in for cattle — they are corralled into horse stalls and tied up in fields.

Even by Romero standards, this is a deeply weird idea for a horror film, and neither critics nor audiences seemed to appreciate it.

It doesn't really work. Romero has admitted that having the island run by Irish patriarchs was mostly a vague gesture to Northern Ireland's Troubles — he wanted to have the film's feud reference a recent internecine conflict, and felt Jews and Arabs would be a bit too obvious.

As much as I like the idea that an entire East Coast island has been colonized by Irishmen who insist on dressing like characters from a 1958 western, it feels less like an inventive satiric detail than a strained metaphor. I guess I'm not mad about the idea that if you drop a group of Irish people anywhere in the world, they'll simply start fighting each other again, as though they never left Ulster. There was plenty of feuding on the part of the Irish in America, but it was rarely a recreation of the fight they left behind. As an example, often referenced in reviews of this film, there were the Irish McCoys who legendarily feuded with the Hatfields, but the Hatfields were from England. Irish-Americans developed new feuds in America; they didn't bring the old ones.

That being said, there is a lot of inventiveness in this film that works. Romero has longed worked with zombies that compulsively repeat simple actions from their lives when they were living — like a second-long loop of film that can be trigger to repeat itself. So Plum Island is filled with zombies going about their daily business, such a mailman, chained to a mail box, who constantly tries to stuff mail in it.

And there is the O'Flynn daughter, who died at some point and has been riding around on the back of a horse ever since, a grey figure that occasionally gallops through a scene, more like a cowgirl ghost than a zombie.

In most zombie films inspired by Romero, the monsters are mindless shamblers, staggering from place to place and only rising to action when they attack and devour a victim. But Romero's zombies retain a hint of their humanity in this reflexive need to engage in simplified human behavior, as though they still have some memory of having been alive.

This gooses the film a bit, in the way good horror does. This is a Weird Western in which the monsters are genuinely haunting, but with a whiff of tragedy. And, as if often the case with Romero, more human than some of the human characters.

Read More

WEIRD WESTERNS: GRIM PRAIRIE TALES (1990)

---

★★★☆☆ 

A middling Weird Western anthology that benefits greatly from its wraparound story, in which James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif, playing two craggy frontier types, tell each other stories.

---

By Max Sparber

"Grim Prairie Tales" is a Western anthology of short supernatural pieces, scripted and directed by Wayne Coe, whose background seems to have been as a storyboard artists and never again made a feature film, although his IMDB page suggests he's attempted to get some additional Weird Western pieces off the ground.

Coe has given the film a genuinely entertaining wraparound story, in which two weary travelers on the frontier regale each other with spooky stories around a campfire. It benefits enormously from the fact that the two roles are played by James Earl Jones and Brad Dourif, although the dialogue has its own pleasures. Jones is a grizzled bounty hunter toting a body, and he is eccentric to the point of madness, while Dourif is a twitchy writer with dapper clothes and suspicious manners.

The anthology has four stories, and, at the film's release, critics claimed the stories were unmemorable and undercooked. This seems like a fair criticism, as I saw it years ago and mostly forgot about it, but for one story about a pregnant woman and a traveled that culminates in the most gynophobic sequence I have ever seen on film. I will not bother to discuss this sequence, as, rewatching, its sudden and unexplained body horror is the least interesting story in the film, if the most memorable.

No, the other three stories interest me, because they attempt something more complicated than a simple genre mash up. All three try, with various degrees of success, to make their horror indigenous to the west, rather than grafted to it. The first tells of an old man who disturbs an Indian burial mound and suffers the consequences, the second tells of a lynching, and the third tells of a gunfighter haunted by the man he killed.

Of the three, I think the middle one is the most successful, and, oddly, so do Jones and Dourif, who have a funny habit of acting as both storytellers and critics. There is nothing supernatural about the tale, but it tells of a pioneer child who discovers her father (played by the ever-oily William Atherton) is a murderous racist — and then coming to terms with the fact.

This story barely seems to qualifies as a Weird Western tale, but it is a horror story in its own way, with its own monster. Lynchings certainly weren't unique to the old west, but Coe suggests that they had their own quality on the frontier. Atherton is new to life on the frontier, owning a mile of land he hasn't even started to plow, when the lynch mob comes to call, and one very quickly gets the sense that if he refuses to play his part, he will be cut off from the settler community. We also get the sense that everybody knows this would be fatal for him and his family. So the frontier has created this sort of impossible circumstance, where survival is contingent on joining in with murder.

The story of the old man and the Indian graveyard works worst of all. It is brief and confusing, and while I like the fact that it addresses the original sin of the West — the destruction of the indigenous population — Indian burial grounds are a woeful cliche of horror. There is something satisfying about the old man's fate, in that he is buried alive in an Indian burial mound, which I haven't seen before and is specific to the west. And yet it wasn't clear what his trespass was, and why it was fatal.

The story of the haunted gunfighter is mostly set in a room in a brothel, where the gunfighter starts to unravel. His meltdown involves an animated dream sequence in which he become a bullet, and the animation resembles something Bill Plympton might have animated hopped up on peyote. The man's emotional collapse is signaled by him becoming very fussy about his appearance, and both this and the animation are unexpected, if not terrifying.

But there is something to be said for the unexpected. There's something to be said for a movie that looked at old Western movies and said, you know, without changing too much, these could be horror movies.

There have been a few films like that. "High Plains Drifter" has a lot in common with Clint Eastwood's other cowboy revenge movies, except he might be a ghost. "Ravenous" is a sort of gloss on actual frontier cannibal stories, but goosed with the Native American Wendigo legend. The recent "Bone Tomahawk" is essentially "The Searchers," but with cavemen at the end of the trail.

I find my preference is for this sort of film, even when, as with "Grim Prairie Tales," it's not quite successful.

Read More

WEIRD WESTERNS: SUNDOWN: THE VAMPIRE IN RETREAT (1989)

---

★★★☆☆ 

An enjoyably New Wave Weird Western, featuring a Western town full of vampires trying to survive on artificial blood, and not doing a very good job of it.

---

I sometimes think about creating a blog called Cult Films That Never Found Their Cult, made up of films that should have found a devoted following, but for some reason never did. "Meet the Hollowheads," as an example, a 1989 film set in an alternative universe made up entirely of tubes. Or "Crimewave," a 1986 Sam Raimi film scripted by the Coen Brothers that I am increasingly convinced nobody else has ever seen.

Add to the this 1989 film "Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat," which got lost as the result of a studio closing. It was produced by Vestron Pictures, a delightfully eccentric outfit whose catalogue could be the starting point for my cultless cult film blog. "Street Trash," a 1987 film about an alcoholic beverage that makes hobos melt? "The Lair of the White Worm," Ken Russell's bonkers adaptation of a Bram Stoker story featuring Hugh Grant menaced by a demonic snake? "Hider in the House," scripted by the superb Lem Dobbs and featuring a perfect idea for a thriller: Gary Busey has secretly moved into your house and sneaks out at night to steal your food and watch you sleep.

"Sundown: The Vampire in Retreat" is an overstuffed, slight new wave vampire comedy set in Moab, Utah, so its features Monument Valley-style bluffs and canyons towering over the action of the film. This unavoidably makes the movie feel like it is supposed to be a cowboy film, and director Anthony Hickox doesn't really resist this at first, and gives into it completely by the film's end.

But, properly, this is a vampire film, telling of a small community of bloodsuckers who have retreated to a town that is on no map and are trying to develop synthetic blood rather than continue to murder people. The community is marvelously represented: All wear sunscreen to protect against the sun, all wear big hats and walk under umbrellas at all times. It's a magnificently weird-looking world in this film, especially as many of the locals wear Victorian costumes with Western embellishments.

There are too many stories in this film for any one to really get the time it deserves. The main story is essentially a remake of a classic western theme, in which cowboys want their herd to graze freely while townsfolk want to bring civilization, with its plots of land and fences, to the west. In this case, though, the cowboys want to preserve their own rights to graze freely, and they want to graze on humans.

John Ireland leads this group of cowboys. Ireland was a genuine western movie star, but here he seems enfeebled and vaguely embarrassed -- he just can't seem to manage the vampire physicality demanded of him, and so the melodramatic flourished demanded by the role come off more as shrugs. He is planning a revolution against the town leader, played by David Carradine, who acts as though the whole movie were a bit of a lark. By the end of the film, they have raised armies against each other, all dressed in proper cowboy gear, and the spend a lot of time shooting at each other with wooden bullets.

At the same time, the film tells of a the scientist who invented synthetic blood and the bullying vampire who is very jealous of him, of a child who might have either the scientist or the vampire as her father, of two sets of punkish couples roped into the battle (including Twin Peaks' Dana Ashbrook, barely present in this film.) At some point, a Van Helsing show up, played as a loudmouth bungler by Bruce Campbell, and a local vampire immediately falls in love with him; she is played by the superb Deborah Foreman, making the most of a minuscule role.

If the film is overstuffed, it benefits from an entertaining cast, mixing eccentric character actors (including the always enjoyable M. Emmet Walsh) with unknowns who largely seem like they should be headed to a Flock of Seagulls concert after filming, and all give the film an appealingly anarchic quality. There's a deep well of weirdness in this film, playing itself out under Moab's towering western landscape, and it feels right.

It feels like the sort of place anyone might go, buy a town, and go quietly balmy in it.

Read More

WEIRD WESTERNS: BILLY THE KID VS. DRACULA (1966)

---

★☆☆☆☆ 

The first of two Weird Westerns made back-to-back by William Beaudine in which Western outlaws battle monsters. John Carradine starred as Dracula, and regretted it.

---

By Max Sparber

I'm going to peek in occasionally on a subgenre of Western films, called the Weird West, which combines westerns with supernatural elements. It's a surprisingly popular genre nowadays. If a western isn't a prestige piece featuring a big budget and serious actors acting serious, it's probably a Weird Western.

Wikipedia has a small and not especially insightful entry on the Weird West, identifying it primarily as a mash-up genre. The entry quotes author G. W. Thomas, a contemporary pulp novelist who wrote an essay called "Crossing Horror: Using Horror in Other Genres," which is the source of Wikipedia's quote. "Unlike many other cross-genre tales, the weird Western uses both elements but with very little loss of distinction," Thomas wrote. "The Western setting is decidedly 'Western' and the horror elements are obviously 'horror.'"

That's true of the movie I am about to write about today, and, to be fair to Thomas, is often true of Weird Western tales. But, as you'll see, it's not entirely true, and I'm not even certain it is mostly true. Because there is another tradition in the Weird West, and it's one that feels as though it rose indigenously with the story of the west. These are the frontier equivalents of Britain folk horror tradition: Tales that borrow from cowboy ghost stories, or Indian legends, or undiscovered monsters that might inhabit the vast, rugged land that stretched west of the Mississippi. We'll get to some of those films later.

But our first film, "Billy the Kid vs. Dracula," is the sort of mash-up Thomas describes . Even though the film was lensed in 1966, it is untouched by the revisionist sensibilities that had started to dominate the American Western, and has more in common with the sorts of juvenile oaters produced by Poverty Row studios a decade or so earlier. There was no effort to recreate the historic west, nor to revisit it with fresh eyes. Instead, the story takes place in a nondescript Western town that was actually the Corriganville Movie Ranch, built in the 1940s as a movie set and looking like it. It featured stock characters, and it's first 10 minutes, featuring a drunk and a stranger on a "Stagecoach," seems an explicit nod to the great 1939 John Wayne western "Stagecoach," which also featured John Carradine.

Carradine had been playing Dracula for a while, debuting in the role in "House of Frankenstein" all the way back in 1944, and his version of the vampire made terrific use of his Mephistophelean features, stagey mannerisms, and sonorous baritone. Carradine was often a very good actor, especially in westerns, as he was part of director John Ford's stock company. He is, it must be said, not especially good here. He may have disliked the role when he was doing it, and later regretted the film — here's the actual quote: "I only regret 'Billy the Kid Versus Dracula.' Otherwise, I regret nothing."

Nothing really works in the movie. Billy the Kid is Billy the Kid in name only here — he's a reformed outlaw, and the filmmakers seem to have no actual historical understanding of the character, so he's presented as an amiable dreamboat, played by a young fellow named Chuck Courtney and looking like a Tiger Beat model. The actual Billy the Kid was jolly, loved to dance, was fluent in Spanish, and a recently discovered photo of him shows Billy in a striped sweater playing croquet. There's none of this here, and Courtney could be playing any retired gunslinger with a boyish face and indistinct but cheerful mannerisms.

Likewise, the film doesn't seem to have a clear sense of what a vampire is. Carradine does sometimes turn into a bat — albeit one of the worst movie bats I have ever seen — and cannot be seen in a mirror, but the film has him allergic to wolfsbane rather than garlic (and the wolfsbane looks like red peppers), and he frequently seems to be out and about during the daytime, although this might be the fault of director William Beaudine, who did not seem to know how to lens a day-for-night shot.

Knowing that it is not a very good film, however, does not preclude "Billy the Kid Versus Dracula" from being an enjoyable film. There is a tension created in the film, and it's fun to watch the film wrestler with it. In fact, there are two tensions, one in the text, and one on the subtext.

Firstly, this film legitimately is a mash-up. The filmmakers took a bland cowboy movie and welded in a bland vampire movie, and every seam shows, to the extent that the cowboys are genuinely bewildered to find themselves in a vampire movie and the vampire seems to have no idea why he's in a cowboy movie. The only moment when Carradine seems remotely interested in the film is when he discovers there is a pretty young girl with a cave on her property, and the entire film consists of his plan to kidnap her and put her on a fairly nice antique bed in the cave, as though he can't wait to get out of the Corriganville Movie Ranch to someplace that felt more appropriate to the vampire.

Billy the Kid is likewise a bit helpless. He is, after all, a gunslinger, but here's a guy who can't be harmed by bullets, and Billy the Kid doesn't have anything else he knows how to do. I am about to give away the film's climax, but, trust me, it won't ruin it for you when you see it: When Billy the Kid fails to kill the vampire by shooting him, he just tosses his gun at Dracula, the way frustrated villains used to do in the Superman television show. Unlike in Superman, however, this works: The gun knocks Dracula out, and Billy the Kid calmly stakes his unconscious body.

In fairness, there is no vampire legend that says they can't be knocked out by hucking a gun at them, but it's still something of a surprise. There's actually a cowboy in Bram Stoker's "Dracula" — the Texan Quincey Morris — who has a gun, and apparently the original vampire novel could have been much shorter if Quincy had just lobbed his sidearm.

But, as I mentioned, there is also tension in the subtext, and it's a pity it goes unexplored. There is a moment when John Carradine gets angry at a vaguely European housekeeper who suspects him, shouting that the immigrant needs to be talked to. But Dracula was also an immigrant, and, a generation back, so was everybody except the Native population of this country.

The story of the so-called taming of the West is actually one of an immigrant population seizing a land from the original inhabitants, and it is a mark of the film's lack of self-awareness that they didn't realize that Dracula is a perfect metaphor for that. After all, Stoker's "Dracula" is an invasion story, about a murderous immigrant coming to London to stalk and murder its population.

It might have been fascinating to parallel the story of Dracula with the story of the West, and the film seems to nod at at, as the first person we see Dracula attack is a Native American, which then prompts a war party to kill everybody in the stagecoach that carried him.

And why would the Indians distinguish between white men and vampires? Both were pestilent European invaders who murdered Indians to steal from them. In fact, the Lakota and Dakota Indians had two words for white men, one punning. The first, wasi'chu, which simply means "non-Indian." But the other word is wašin icu, and it means "taking the fat," and references white men who simply drained a place of its stolen resources, which seems appropriately vampiric.

This sometimes makes me want to take issue with the idea that the Weird Western in a mash-up genre. The West itself was a mash-up, and Western stories are often about the conflicts between two different stories. For instance, the range war film is, essentially, a mash-up between a pioneer story and a cowboy story, with the two groups competing for the same resources.

Believe it or not, it is entirely possible to tell a story about indigenous Americans in which no single white man appears, as they were here for thousands of years before Europeans made their way to these shores. This sort of film isn't made very often, but could be.

It is likewise possible to tell pioneer stories where they never meet gunslingers, cowboy stories where they never meet Indians, and so on. But the Western has always enjoyed pressing these groups, and their competing stories, together and seeing what happened, especially since what happens is usually violent conflict, and violent conflict is one of the absolute staples of narrative storytelling.

And so, yes, the Wild Western is often a mash-up film, but it's just mashing something new into a genre that already relied on mashing things up. It's no real invention to tell a story in which a monster moves west across America — that's always been the story of America. It's just that the monsters have changed.

Read More