Tag: western

New Adventures of Senorita Scorpion, edited by Percival Constantine

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: Variable

senoritaPulp Western writer Les Savage, Jr. (1922-1958) was short-lived, dying at 35; but he began writing at the age of 17, and managed to produce over 20 books, as well as a substantial body of short fiction. Though he’s not well-known today, genre critics who have taken note of his work agree that he was more enlightened in his view of women and of ethnic minorities than most pulp writers (and editors/readers) of his day. An example of his trail-blazing in both areas is his series heroine Elgera Douglas, a.k.a. Senorita Scorpion, who stars in a body of stories set in the mountainous Texas-Mexico border country west of the Pecos River. In 2012, through their Altus Press imprint, modern pulp publisher Pro Se Press have brought all these stories back into print in the two-volume collection The Complete Adventures of Senorita Scorpion. I’ve already reviewed that collection for this site.

Perhaps to whet interest for the originals, in 2013 Pro Se also brought out this short collection of three modern Senorita Scorpion pastiches, written specifically for this book by three authors who’ve published other work with Pro Se previously: Nancy A. Hansen, Aussie writer Brad Mengle, and Andrea Judy. I actually read this anthology (which I received as a review copy from Pro Se, with no strings attached) before I read the originals, but chose to wait until I’d reviewed those here before reviewing this spin-off. This was my first exposure to the work of any of these three.

All of the stories, in relation to the original corpus, take place before Savage’s second story, “The Brand of Senorita Scorpion.” Both Hansen’s “The Bells of St. Ferdinand” and “Wanted: Senorita Scorpion” by Mengel are excellent stories, that would earn five stars from me in their own right. They’re well plotted and constructed, with capably drawn characters, realistic dialogue and credible motivations, nice evocation of suspense, Western action that’s not too over the top to be believable, just the right level of detail, and (in one of the stories) a satisfying note of low-key romance. Each of the two authors has his/her own style; but both portray Elgera and her situation in a way that’s basically consistent with the original stories, as a good pastiche should be –though Elgera’s skill with using a whip as a weapon, which Hansen depicts, isn’t a feature of any of the original stories. (Chisos Owens, who in the originals sometimes threatens to eclipse Elgera, is mentioned here but doesn’t actually appear in person.) Both writers avoid use of bad language, with which Savage himself was restrained as well. Elgera comes across in these stories as the sort of “outlaw” the law-abiding can respect and admire: brave, caring, and sparing with lethal force.

Though having only three stories here is regrettable, it’s also understandable; Senorita Scorpion isn’t as well-known as some other classic pulp characters, so not many modern writers were lining up to want to write about her. That makes it doubly disappointing, though, that one of the three, Andrea Judy’s “A Woman’s Touch,” simply comes nowhere near the standard of the other two. It starts with an implausible premise and throws in a couple more, hangs its plot on an improbable coincidence, offers action scenes so over the top they read like parodies (for instance, no real human beings, no matter how athletic they are, jump in and out of a shot-out window when there’s a door right next to it!), is predictable from start to finish, and never generates any emotional response except irritation. Worse, the portrayal of Elgera and her situation here is markedly “off,” compared to the original stories: there, she’s fully in touch with social reality around her, whereas here, she and her dependents are practically totally ignorant of the outside world beyond their mine; here, she’s quite blase’ about shooting people, (except in the one case where she’s obviously foolish not to!), and here she uses “ain’t” where in both the other stories she speaks proper English. (Judy is also the only writer of the three that uses bad language –but that fails to make her dialog very lifelike.) I would seriously doubt that this author ever actually read the original stories.)

In my overall rating, I deducted a star for the one weak story, but I still felt the other two were strong enough to merit four stars for the book. I’d read more by both authors; and I’d even try more by Judy. She’s apparently the youngest and least experienced writer of the three, and I don’t think tried her best here. With more aggressive editing that demanded her best, her tale might have been much better. (Constantine’s role as editor here, I’m guessing, was just to compile the stories and to draft the short author bios at the end of the book –not to impose any quality control.)

Editor: Percival Constantine
Publisher: Pro Se Press, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Jane Got a Gun

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★★
“The sixties called. They want their Western back.”

janegotagunThere have been no shortage of revisionist spins on the Western over the last few years, looking to drag the genre into the 21st century after it seemed all but dead. Just in the last four months, I’ve seen Bone Tomahawk, The Hateful Eight and The Salvation, and while their approaches have been radically different – as have the degree of their success – they are, at least, trying to bring something new to the party. Jane Got a Gun? Not so much, to the point that viewers may feel the urge to check they haven’t fallen through some kind of wormhole, back to the era of Bonanza and The Virginian.

The rural farming life of Jane Hammond (Portman) and her husband, Bill (Emmerich), is thrown into turmoil, when he comes home, shot multiple times. Turns out, he had a battle with notorious outlaws, the Bishop Boys, which ended with several dead on their side, and Bill severely injured. Worse follows in the wake, as John Bishop (McGregor) is on the trail, seeking revenge for his men. With Bill in no state to defend himself and Jane, she turns to former boyfriend Dan Frost (Edgerton, also co-writer on the screenplay), who reluctantly agrees to help Jane stand against the Bishops.

The results are so overwhelmingly bland, one suspects they’re a great deal interesting than the disastrous production, which saw original director Lynne Ramsay literally not show up on the set for the first day of shooting. It took almost three further years for the movie to be released – and they probably shouldn’t have bothered, since it was the lowest grossing wide opening weekend ever for the Weinstein company, then posted the worst second weekend drop ever for a 1,000-plus screen release. Though you can see why it flopped, it’s not a bad movie, just an utterly forgettable one, without a single particularly memorable character to be found. Portman – also a producer, which may explain some things – perhaps comes out best, although her performance consists mostly of setting her jaw and exuding steely resolve. It’s not complemented by the flashback structure used in the story, which is clunky at best, and results in a severe lack of narrative flow. What was the hot-air balloon about, for instance?

It’s even fairly retro in the way Jane leaves most of the fighting to Dan, at least until the very end, and the movie simply feels astonishingly safe, as if O’Connor was reluctant to take any risks at all, for fear of jeopardizing a production which had already gone very badly wrong before his arrival. But sometimes (and Apocalypse Now is likely the best example), film-makers just need to say, “Screw it”, and plunge on regardless towards realizing their vision. If the results may or may not be great, they’ll probably be less forgettable than here, and considering how long it took to arrive, it wasn’t worth the wait.

Dir: Gavin O’Connor
Star: Natalie Portman, Joel Edgerton, Noah Emmerich, Ewan McGregor

Strange Empire

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★★★★
“Strangely appealing.”

strangemepireThis Canadian TV series ran for 13 episodes, but was not renewed at the end of the first series, leaving the double shock which occurred at the end of the final episode, with no hope of resolution. That’s a shame, since there was a lot to like about its grubby portrayal of 1869 life, just north of the border between Canada and Montana. It begins when a wagon train of settlers, passing near the mining settlement of Janestown, is attacked and almost all the men are killed or driven away, leaving the women to fend for themselves. In particular, there is Kat Loving (Gee), a half-Indian sharpshooter who seeks the truth about her husband’s fate, and Rebecca Blithely (Farman), a female medical researcher, something almost unheard of at the time. But they are up against John Slotter (Poole), who runs Janestown as his own personal fiefdom, and whose wife Isabelle (Jones) is a match for the new arrivals in terms of her wits, and likely surpasses them when it comes to crafting of intrigues.

It’s the characters – the three women, and let’s not forget John, who eventually becomes the glue that binds them together in common cause – which drive this. Kat is certainly the most conventionally “heroic,” becoming the town’s sheriff, a position which brings her into direct conflict with Slotter; yet, she also has a murky past, being a wanted woman for the murder of a surveyor. Rebecca is the most difficult to get a handle on; while possessing a brilliant mind, she has a near-total lack of “people skills”, to the point of near-sociopathy. Finally, Isabelle possesses no scruples and is prepared to do absolutely whatever may be necessary to achieve her goals and escape her low-born upbringing – including seducing her husband’s father, when access to his money becomes necessary. They make a fascinating trio, well-drawn and well-portrayed by the actresses concerned.

The past year has seen a number of new takes on the Western genre, from Bone Tomahawk and The Hateful Eight to The Revenant. Empire does, perhaps, try somewhat too hard to be subversively revisionist, not least in the gratuitously transgender “cowboy”, who seems to have been added to the story for no reason than to appeal to trendy modern sensibilities. It’s much better when not attempting to pander to those, sticking with the Slotters’ efforts to keep their teetering mine business afloat, along with its probably more profitable brothel sideline, by any means necessary. This is balanced with Kat’s refusal to let John act like some kind of medieval baron, and insistence that he face the consequences of his murderous actions, which are becoming increasingly more frequent – if she can’t get justice for the massacre of the male settlers, perhaps there are other crimes that can be pinned on him.

While there are a number of side-threads (the strong role of Chinese businessman Ling is also very interesting), it’s this which drives the plot forward, and I was kept watching in the fervent hope of seeing Slotter get what he deserves. It’s to the show’s credit, with its unwillingness to collapse into a simple “black hat/white hat” mentality, that the outcome remained in doubt until almost the last few minutes of the final episode.

Created by: Laurie Finstad-Knizhnik
Star: Cara Gee, Melissa Farman, Tattiawna Jones, Aaron Poole

The Complete Adventures of Senorita Scorpion, by Les Savage, Jr.

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Literary rating: ★★★★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆

scorpion1Action adventure fiction, in the pulp era, tended to be a male-dominated field; the writers and readers were overwhelmingly male, and the protagonists having the adventures and engaging in the derring-do tended to be correspondingly male. The culture of that day had deep-rooted stereotypes about the unfitness of the “weaker sex” for strenuous physical challenges, and about the inappropriateness of combat as a role for females who were supposed to be naturally gentle and demure. But there were writings that bucked these assumptions, particularly in the Western genre. Senorita Scorpion, the creation of Les Savage, Jr. (1922-1958), wasn’t actually the first pistol-packing cowgirl to be featured in the Western pulps of the 30s and 40s; but she proved to be the most popular, one of the most unique, and probably the subject of the longest running and thickest corpus of material of any of these fictional ladies: seven stories, originally published in Action Stories from 1944-49. Through its Altus Press imprint, (CreateSpace is just the printing service) Pro Se Press seeks to bring the best fiction of the early modern pulp magazine era back into print, in book form now, for a new generation of fans. These stories (plus one by Emmett McDowell, which used the Senorita Scorpion name for an entirely different character) were a felicitous choice for one of their first projects, in two volumes.

The stories included here are: “Senorita Scorpion” (1944); “The Brand of Senorita Scorpion” (1944); “Secret of Santiago” (1944); “The Curse of Montezuma” (1945); “Brand of the Gallows-Ghost” (1945); “Lash of the Six-Gun Queen” (1947); “Gun Witch of Hoodoo Range” by McDowell (1948); and “The Sting of Senorita Scorpion” (1949). For purposes of this review, the McDowell story is considered separately; the main body of the comments below refer just to the stories by Savage.

Our setting here is Brewster County, Texas in the 1890s. This is a real county, located in the Big Bend area west of the Pecos and north of the Rio Grande, and the geography of the area as depicted by Savage is real, including the inhospitable Dead Horse Mountains. When we first meet protagonist Elgera Douglas, a.k.a. “Senorita Scorpion,” she’s a girl outlaw pulling off a daring robbery, but she’s not an outlaw who wants to prey on others in order to live without working; her motivations are considerably different. They’re rooted in the background of the story series, which is gradually disclosed in the first tale; but it won’t be an undue spoiler to explain it here.

In 1681, a grandee of New Spain, Don Simeon Santiago, discovered a gold mine in the Dead Horse Mountains, originally worked by the local Indians. He built a house and ranch there, in the only valley in the range with enough water to support humans and cattle, and sent several fantastically rich shipments of gold south to Mexico. Soon, however, the ranch was attacked by raiding Comanche, who killed everyone they could find and, when they left, sealed off entrance or egress to the valley by caving in the mine tunnel which served for that purpose. The only survivors were George Douglas, a British-born slave originally captured from an English ship in the Caribbean, and a Mexican Indian slave woman. From these two, over the next two centuries an inbred Douglas clan of mixed Anglo-Indian ancestry and culture grew up in the valley. In 1876, they finally succeeded in digging through the mine and re-uniting with the rest of the world, though they kept the location of their valley secret.

By 1891, clan leader and official landholder John Douglas, Elgera’s father, lies in a coma, and the Santiago lands are under the covetous eye of ruthless cattle baron Anse Hawkman, who owns everything in the area worth owning and has used legal chicanery to force the smaller landholders off their claims. Elgera (“El Gera” is Spanish for “the blonde one”) is one of three children, the only girl, and not the oldest; but with her father disabled she’s the undisputed leader of the family. Savage never actually explains why; we’re left to infer that it’s because of her strong, born-leader personality –which is definitely evidenced– and the respect commanded, in a situation where fighting is a necessity, by her formidable gun skills, which considerably surpass those of most men. She’s become an outlaw, as the law defines it, in order to strike back at Hawkman and his interests.

scorpion2From this beginning, the first four stories proceed in a chronological arc; each is self contained, but the following ones build on the preceding ones in terms of character and situational development, so that what we have is a genuine story cycle. In the later three stories, the chronological relationship to the rest of the corpus isn’t as clear, except that they all take place after the events of the first story, and that “Lash of the Six-Gun Queen” is set near the end of the decade. Savage makes statements inconsistent in details with what he wrote earlier in one story, and another tale also gives some evidence of forgetfulness on his part. The rest of the Douglas clan simply disappears in the later stories, and their unique sociological circumstances aren’t explored at all, while the Santiago Ranch functions about like a set or a piece of furniture; there’s not much attention to its fortunes or the practicalities of running it. Elgera’s supposedly well-known skill at cards is only brought out in “Brand of the Gallows-Ghost,” and never mentioned elsewhere.

The major characters are well-developed, and several appear in more than one of the stories. (Chisos Owens tends to play as large a role in most of the stories as Elgera does, and actually does more of the fighting.) Savage develops his plots with considerable originality and artistry, and the stories benefit from his trademark serious research to ground his work in actual Western history. (The fraudulent so-called “History of Montezuma,” for instance, really was produced in 1846 under the conditions he describes in “The Curse of Montezuma;” and while I haven’t been able to check his details about 17th-century Native American and Spanish mining/smelting practices in “Secret of Santiago,” they have a ring of truth.) He writes action scenes well; he’s an excellent prose stylist, and has a good sense of pacing, and the stories employ elements of mystery which are very effective in adding to the suspense he conjures. Elgera’s a likable character, as are the various good guys who assist her; and the villains are the sort you love to root against. A half-Indian heroine is as much of a trail-blazing feature, in this period, as a combat-capable one, and Savage’s treatment of Hispanic and Indian characters isn’t racist; some are villains, but others are treated very positively.

Critics might complain that some plot elements are a bit exotic (such as a character who’s a Satanist, or the premise of a peyote-based cult in one story), or that there’s some reliance on coincidence in places. But peyote use really is historically a feature of Southwestern Indian religion, and coincidence IS at times a feature of real life, too. There’s not much bad language in the stories (McDowell uses more of it than Savage does), and what there is isn’t particularly rough.

In terms of her action chops, we’re told much more often about Elgera’s gun skills than we’re shown them –but we are shown them occasionally. She uses lethal force sparingly (and only in defense of herself or others), though when she has to, she takes it calmly in stride. (Bad guys who take her on hand to hand –and she’s no slouch at that type of fighting, either!– usually wind up killing themselves accidentally; but as a group, they’re too stupid to recognize that pattern and avoid it. :-) )

Will Murray contributes introductions to both volumes; the second one deals mostly with the genesis and publication of the stories, but the first one regrettably concentrates mostly on the sex appeal of the pulp cowgirl characters in general and the more salacious aspects of the cover art. To be sure, many males then and now were, and are, culturally conditioned to view both real and fictional women only, or primarily, as sexual commodities. But that’s not, IMO, the most helpful lens here for viewing the character –nor the primary one that Savage invites us to use. Yes, he depicts Elgera as powerfully attractive to most of his male characters (and she tends to be fickle in her own romantic attractions –one of my primary quibbles with his portrayal of the character). But the stories certainly aren’t about sex, Elgera and her male admirers never do anything more than kiss, and her sexuality is just an ancillary part –not the be-all-and-end-all– of who her character is.

A brief word will suffice about McDowell’s story. My wife considered it out of place, and a detriment to the book; it’s included because Savage’s publishers, when he was too busy working on a novel at the time, enlisted McDowell to write a Senorita Scorpion story, and this is what they got. He used the name, but makes the woman’s character and circumstances totally different from Savage’s Elgera, and changes the setting to Arizona in the early 1880s to boot. Essentially, it’s a story about a completely different woman with the same nickname. Taken on its own terms, though, it’s actually a solid story with an excellent twist, and one of my favorites in the book.

Author: Les Savage, Jr.
Publisher: Altus Press, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as printed books: Volume 1 and Volume 2

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Coyote, by Bran Gustafson

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆☆☆

coyoteFull disclosure up front: the author and I are in a couple of Goodreads groups together, so I was aware of his debut novel; and I knew he’d offered a free review e-copy to group members. I didn’t request one, since I prefer to read in print format; but on the recommendation of my friend David Wittlinger, I did put my name in for the paperback Goodreads giveaway (which is still ongoing!). When Bran became aware of my preference for paper, he kindly gifted me with a paperback copy, which I really appreciate. His openness to honest feedback is also appreciated; he made it clear from the outset that he’d appreciate even a bad review as long as it was honest and provided him with feedback. It didn’t take me long to read enough to tell that my review wasn’t going to be a bad one!

Coyote (the relevance of the title becomes clear eventually, but it has a symbolic significance as well, IMO) is set in the fictional Western U.S. state of Montezuma, “the Untamed State.” Montezuma is a state in economic and moral free-fall since the depletion of its oil deposits and the resulting decamping of the industry, and the closing of its one interstate highway due to maintenance and safety issues. Much of it is inhospitable mountain and desert terrain, unable to sustain a large population without outside resources, so population (especially decent, wholesome population) is declining and social pathology is on the rise. Crime and violence flourish, but not much else does. To this not very inviting place comes Mai, our 20-something protagonist, with no resources but a Bronco (the four-wheeled type) and a .38. She was born here; but what motivates her to return isn’t immediately revealed. Her Bronco breaks down in a declining town, where she soon finds that its bleak, shabby exterior masks a festering, rancid mass of lucrative vice and corruption, over which two murderous redneck clans vie for control.

Author Gustafson has elsewhere cited “spaghetti Westerns” as a major literary influence on this novel (an opener for a projected series), and the noir tradition (more so in its extremely grungy modern state, rather than the more restrained classic models) is clearly another serious one. But the kind of central role Clint Eastwood so often played in Westerns of this stripe is Mai’s here, and the switch to the distaff side creates a subtly different dynamic of its own. One reviewer has said he’s not sure if Mai is a good or a bad person, nor sure if even she knows. Personally, I’m not that doubtful. Some significant choices Mai makes and significant things she does clearly show me that she is basically a good person at her core, who listens to her conscience. And while I’ve used the word “noir,” the author’s own vision clearly isn’t morally anarchic; in its own way, we could even call this a morality tale.

That said, readers have to be prepared for a journey through a world of moral and physical grunge that can almost be nauseating in places. Mai herself is no plaster saint. Raised without roots by a now-dead, peripatetic con man father (the Bronco was basically their home), she had virtually no positive rearing, by example or precept. Hard-living and sometimes hard-drinking, in desperate circumstances, she’s not above stealing what she needs; her speaking style can be profane or obscene, and she’s too emotionally-constipated and wary of others to form a relationship with any other person, but not averse to one-night sexual stands –more, I think, as a lonely way of reaching out for even illusory human connection than as a deliberate attempt to exploit others. (At this point in his life, that seems to me to describe bar owner/tender Slim’s sexual psychology, too.) She’s also got a savage temper that can be dangerous, though not to the inoffensive.

Slim has some qualities, good and bad, similar to hers; and flawed as they are, this pair actually represents, in the town of Maquina, the closest thing it has to forces of goodness and light. At the other end of the spectrum, we have the forces of real darkness and evil, embodied in the worst sadistic dregs of the Skaggs and Carter clans. In between these poles, we have a continuum of characters varying in their shades of gray, who may provide textbook examples of the unwillingness of most people to actively oppose evil if it involves any risk or inconvenience, and of the remarkable ability of humans to convince ourselves that our behavior is justified (even when we know it’s totally wrong).

On the plus side, all of these characters are drawn with wonderful precision and distinctness. The pace of the story is fast and non-stop, and it’s deliberately designed to be a quick read, with short chapters (some only a page long) that entice you into turning pages. (And you won’t need much enticement; the need to know what’s going to happen next here is compulsive!) Mai’s self contained and stand-offish, hard to get to know, much less like (though that doesn’t mean you won’t, by the time you close the book!), but she’s easy to side with and care about, and she’s a more dynamic character inside than she initially seems to be. In a novel where action is an important component, the author handles action scenes well. (Some are a bit graphic; there are a couple of mental images that aren’t best read by the squeamish.) As an action heroine, Mai’s got guts and resolve (she may not be the biggest dog in the fight, but she’s got more fight in her than some), but she’s not a trained pro with her gun, and she can make mistakes with it (one of them a lulu). In her situation, that makes her believable, where a super firearms expert wouldn’t be. And the ending is so perfect it raised the rating at least a quarter star. (There’s no cliffhanger as such, either.)

A final thought: obviously, in creating this setting, which is practically post-apocalyptic though not actually so, the author is trying to establish a modern American milieu where he can let his characters operate in an essentially lawless environment. Beyond that, though, I think there is some real social commentary here –an implication that it might not take much in the way of economic and moral collapse for the whole U.S. to go the way of Montezuma; and there are real life tendencies pushing in that direction. (And if that happens, decent people won’t have 49 other states to move to; they’ll have to keep a moral compass, and make their stand where they are.)

Note: Readers should be strongly warned that there’s a LOT of bad language here (f-words, profanity, vulgarism, etc., which characterizes the speech of most characters, some to the point where it’s clear they can’t communicate any other way. (Mai and Slim aren’t really any more profane than the average person with their background would be.) And although there’s really no explicit sex as such, there are very definite sexual situations and implied sex (the town brothel is a key part of the setting), and the exploitative sexual attitudes and raunchy, sexually-oriented talk from some characters is very pervasive. These factors were what cost the book a fifth star; just because they impacted my enjoyment that negatively. But it’s important to note that Bran is not trying to promote bad language or raunchy sex, and that these aren’t what the book is about; rather, it’s about morality and healthy relationships in the midst of a bad and raunchy world. And readers less bothered by these points might easily rate the book as even a five-star read.

Author: Bran Gustafson
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Hard Bounty

  By

★★★
“Nobody dressed like that in those days.”

hardbountyI can’t believe an IMDb reviewer wrote the above, with an apparently straight face, because it’s severely missing the point of this nudie-cutie Western. The women are certainly packing, but the large-caliber weapons on display are not restricted to six-shooters, if you know what I mean, and I think you do…  That said, I reviewed this as a girls with guns flick a long time ago, back when this site was not even a gleam in my eye. But watching it again, I was beginning to wonder if I’d seen a different movie, as the first half is entirely action-heroine free.

It focuses more on bounty hunter Kanning (McCoy), whose life is disturbed when his former partner shows up, the murderous Carver (Terlesky, whom we’ll always remember fondly for his role in another Wynorski film, the brilliantly tongue-in-cheek Deathstalker II). The tension of unresolved issues runs high between them, in and out of the saloon/brother where Kanning’s girlfriend, Donna (LeBrock sporting a British accent for some ill-explained reason) is the head girl. There’s no shortage of nudity, certainly, but that’s the only action in which the ladies take part. Then, Carver – again, for ill-explained reasons – strangles one of the saloon ladies, and high-tails it off back to the land baron who employs him. Donna and her colleagues decide to head after him and take revenge for their fallen comrade, and Kanning, fearing the worst, tails along to help them out as they go in with guns a-blazing. Ah, so that’s why I reviewed this.

It certainly isn’t saying much, but this is far better than Gang of Roses II, and arguably more entertaining than the similarly-themed Bad Girls [which I probably should review here at some point, though that would mean having to watch it again]. The players are easy on the eye, though who knew breast implants were so prevalent in the Old West, and the dialogue could certainly have used an additional polish. For example, just before heading off on her mission, Donna is told by Kanning, “You can’t do this!”, to which she replies with the immortal (for all the wrong reasons) line: “There’s only two things I can’t do. One is make love to a woman, the other one is piss up a wall. And right now, there’s only one of those I regret not being able to do.” Er… what?

The action is about what you’d expect from a modest genre entry, with a moderate amount of blood-free gun-fighting. The ease with which the whores become stone-cold killers is quite surprising, given the complete lack of any fondness for guns shown previously. However, I was just happy to see it at all, having started to question my memories from two decades previously. You need to be able to handle that this almost feels like two different films joined in the middle, with the first being a lightly-amusing excuse for lingerie and less, and the second a revenge-driven thriller. Still, I can’t say I minded either too much, and as long as you manage your expectations, you probably won’t either.

Dir: Jim Wynorski
Star: Matt McCoy, Kelly LeBrock, John Terlesky, Rochelle Swanson

The Keeping Room

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★★★
“Clearly nothing civil about this war.”

keepingroom1 keepingroom2 keepingroom3

The second half of 2015 seems to have seen a flood of “revisionist” – whatever that term means – Westerns. We’ve already had the likes of Bone Tomahawk and The Revenant, with The Hateful 8 due out imminently. This is another along similar lines, though also has a debt to Cold Mountain, sharing a theme of Civil War women forced into surviving on their own, with the menfolk off fighting each other. In this case, it’s two siblings, Augusta (Marling) and Louise (Steinfeld), along with their black maid (Otaru), who are barely scraping a living out of the land. When Louise is bitten by a racoon, her sister rides into town to seek medicine, but encounters Moses (Worthington) and his colleagues, the advance guard of the approaching Union army. He takes a shine to her, but she rebuffs his advances at the point of her rifle; that only spurs the men on, so they follow her back to the house and lay siege to the three inhabitants, driven by an apparent combination of lust, and a desire to take revenge for their humiliation.

This opens with a quote from Civil War General, William Sherman: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over,” and that’s an appropriate quote, since the moral here appears to be that there are times when barbarism needs to be met with equal or greater force. Augusta, in particular, is a great exponent of this, pragmatic and down to earth. When Louise tries to deflect a chore by whining, “She’s the nigger, she should do it,” her sister chides her in response, “Like I told you, Louise: We all niggers now.” However, even Augusta falls prey to the convenient flaw most commonly seen in the “final girl” of slasher films: failing to finish off your opponent when you have them at your mercy, in this case wandering off and leaving Otis after knocking him out. It has to be said, I was close to yelling “Shoot him in the head! IN THE HEAD!” at the screen there.

Barber also has a flawed concept of pace, the film grinding to a halt just when it should be escalating relentlessly, in order for the maid to deliver a lengthy monologue about an incident that happened when she was 10. While not irrelevant, it really needed to be somewhere else in the film, as it derails all the tension built up to that point. It’s a shame, as there has been a strong sense of looming and ever-encroaching violence, right from the opening scene, depicting an encounter between a slave and a stagecoach. While infuriatingly flawed in a number of ways, not least Barber’s over-obvious direction, Marling’s performance in particular does make it worth watching, and the story reveals a side of the war not previously brought to the screen, to my knowledge.

Dir: Daniel Barber
Star: Brit Marling, Hailee Steinfeld, Muna Otaru, Sam Worthington

The Bandit of Hell’s Bend, by Edgar Rice Burroughs

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Literary rating: ★★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

banditBorn in 1875, as a youth Burroughs actually spent time working as a cowboy on a 19th-century Western ranch owned by his brother. Though that was in Idaho, while this novel is set in Arizona, his knowledge of basic ranch life and Western conditions in the frontier era was firsthand; and the descriptions here suggest that he had some personal familiarity with the landscape of the Southwest as well. So in this novel, he was following the axiomatic advice for authors, “Write about what you know.” His main weakness in much of his work, his disdain for research, is therefore largely moot here, while his main strengths –an ability to deliver adventurous plots and stirring depictions of action, creation of strong heroes who embody what are traditionally thought of as “masculine” virtues, moral clarity, and a masterful evocation of the theme of “primitivism” that can appeal to repressed and regimented readers– are undiminished. I’m not typically a Western fan, because I think modern examples of the genre too often degenerate into cliché.’ But the early Westerns produced by the writers of Burrough’s generation (which also included Zane Grey, whose influence I recognize here) preceded the modern cliches,’ and possess a more original quality –even if some of the tropes were beaten to death by later writers.

In 1880s Arizona, the inhabitants of the Bar-Y Ranch and neighboring Hendersville have to contend with occasional lethal Apache attacks, and the stage carrying bullion from Elias Henders’ mine is being held up with disconcerting regularity. Local suspicion pegs the principal masked culprit as Bar-Y cowboy Bull –but is local suspicion correct? And the plot will soon thicken, because both ranch and mine will face a suave menace that fights with the machinery of the law rather than with guns and tomahawks. The storyline is genuinely exciting, with a strong narrative drive that kept me eagerly turning pages to see what would happen next, with an element of mystery. (I guessed the culprit’s identity before the denouement, but I didn’t foresee everything that would happen.) Burroughs also understood that romance doesn’t need to be sappy to be romantic. There’s a well-drawn theme of conflict here between the effete, over-civilized, arrogant East that fights through dishonesty and wants to take from others (and the West that Burroughs saw was in many ways an oppressed colony of the U.S.-European industrialized world, as much as the hapless peoples of Asia and Africa were) vs. the primal, strong, down-to-earth West whose people look you in the eye and fight for what’s theirs

Burroughs has created a hero and heroine that you strongly care about, and want to see come through their jeopardy. Bull is more flawed than some Burrough’s heroes, because he has to struggle with a bit of an alcohol addiction; but that doesn’t diminish him for me –he’s a human being, with some human weakness as well as strength. Diana Henders is not a weak hot-house flower who functions solely as a damsel in distress –like any of us, she may find herself in need of a rescue sometime, but not through any weakness or incompetence on her part; and she’s also ready to do some rescuing herself when it’s needed. Of any of the Burroughs heroines I’ve encountered –and that’s been several– she’s the one I like the best, and that I find to be the most sharply-drawn, and most possessed of leadership and heroic qualities. (She’s an intelligent, likeable girl who enjoys reading and playing her piano. If you’re attacked by an Apache war party bent on ending your life, you’d also find her a very capable and cool-headed ally to have at your side with her Colt.) Some of the secondary characters here also come across as more vivid and lifelike than is usual for this writer, IMO.

Like other regional writers of his day, Burroughs was careful to reproduce authentic dialect in the character’s speech, indicated by unconventional spellings that reflect the pronunciations, not only of Western cowboy patois, but of a thick Irish brogue and a Chinese accent as well. This isn’t done to ridicule anyone; indeed, some characters who exhibit each of these speech patterns prove to be very sympathetic.

There’s a bit of ethnic stereotyping, in that Wong the cook is knowledgeable about poisons, and an opium user (of course, a fair number of 19th-century Chinese were opium users –not very surprisingly, since the British promoted the opium trade, and forced it on China in two wars!) and there’s no real attempt to understand or present the Apache viewpoint. (Though even if their basic grievances are just and legitimate, when they’re attacking with the intention of killing you, fighting back IS your only short-range option.) But the only real villains here are white. And while Bull’s comment, “Thet greaser’s whiter’n some white men,” is phrased in racist terms, the insight he’s experiencing is subversive of racism. (“Greaser” is an ethnic slur some characters use for the Hispanic character, but he thinks of Anglos as “gringos” with just as little authorial censure; I think Burroughs here is only reflecting the common parlance of the day, as with his dialect speech. When Wong is referred to as an “insolent Chink,” it’s by a creep whom the reader readily recognizes as Wong’s inferior.)

My rating of four stars rather than five was for a very few logical slips in details, and for a few glossed-over points where plot developments were a tad dubious, IMO. But those are quibbles; this was a really good read, for any Western and/or action adventure fan!

Author: Edgar Rice Burroughs
Publisher: Both Ace Books and CreateSpace, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

Lady Deception, by Bobbi Smith

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Literary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆

LADY DECEPTIONThis is another book I got for my wife, because I felt the pistol-packing cowgirl on the cover would appeal to her, and then read on her recommendation. It’s even more of a departure from my usual reading fare, since it isn’t only a Western, but a paperback romance as well. Set mainly in Texas in 1877, the title refers to the heroine’s penchant for using disguise and deception in her work; she’s a bounty hunter with a reputation for bringing in her quarry alive. The leading male character is an ex-gunfighter recently turned rancher, who’s mistakenly accused of complicity in a bank robbery; she’s hired to bring him in alive.

Smith’s prose style could use polishing, and often lacks artistry; scenes often aren’t sketched with much sensory detail, and many of the characters are not sharply drawn. However, the plot moves with several inventive twists and turns that enhance reader interest, and Smith even incorporates a bit of mystery, in the hidden identity of the shadowy outlaw chieftain El Diabloto. (Astute readers will guess this early on –but trying to guess the solution to a mystery is part of its fun.) Cody and Luke are both appealing characters whom the reader can readily like and respect. Despite their human foibles (see the note below), to the extent that the book presents any moral messages, they’re generally wholesome ones, and even religious ones in places. One of our heroine’s guises is as a lady preacher; her preaching definitely presents a theistic and moral world-view, with a call to repentance and a recognition of the possibility of forgiveness and grace, and she has a positive effect on some characters’ lives. (Granted, to some degree she’s playing a role here –but it’s not a role that’s wholly foreign to her.) Western-style gun-fighting action isn’t pervasive in the book, but there’s some of it; and Cody will earn Luke’s recognition that she’s “good with a gun.”

Note: There are a couple of explicit unmarried sex scenes here, and a certain amount of bad language, of the h- and d-word type.

Author: Bobbi Smith
Publisher: Montlake Romance, available through Amazon, both for Kindle and as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.

The Vengeance of Fortuna West, by Ray Hogan

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vengeanceLiterary rating: ★★★
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

While I haven’t read many Westerns, my wife is an avid fan of the genre, and I know she also admires the strong, brave heroine type of character (so do I –I married one!), so I got her this book for Christmas, and then read it on her recommendation. Fortuna, the protagonist here, is the recent widow of a New Mexico marshal, who gets herself made a deputy in order to go after the outlaws who killed him –not as improbable a quest in her case as it would have been for most women of that era, since he taught her to handle a Colt more proficiently than most males, and she’s a skilled rider, huntress and tracker who once brought down a bear. (Of course, the terrain she has to search is rough, and the killer outlaws aren’t her only jeopardy.)

Hogan has been a prolific Western author, with well over 100 novels and a large body of short fiction to his credit; the sheer volume of his output probably militated against very careful craftsmanship, and his diction here is mediocre. He also gets his details tangled in a few places, and a few notes don’t ring quite psychologically true. But the novel succeeds as well as it does because of the appeal of Fortuna’s character; the plot is straightforward and Hogan’s writing style simple, making for a quick read (it could be read in a single long sitting, and he provides enough action and suspense that a reader might want to) and Fortuna’s need to choose whether she intends to bring her quarry in alive or execute them on the spot gives the story some moral depth. (There is some bad language here –which Hogan explains, through Fortuna’s musings, as a response to stress-and, obviously, some violence, but no sex.)

Author: Ray Hogan
Publisher: Doubleday, available through Amazon, currently only as a printed book.

A version of this review previously appeared on Goodreads.