Tag: western

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.

Deliverance Creek

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★★★½
“Once in a Lifetime.”

deliveranceThere’s one thing it’s vitally important to understand before watching this. It’s not a stand-alone Western movie. This is what’s called a “backdoor pilot”: something aired as if it were a discrete entity, with the aim of gauging audience reaction to see if it gets picked up. This matters, because it explains the film’s otherwise inexplicable failure to resolve… Well, just about any of the plot threads it constructs during its 90 minutes. If you expect closure, you’re going to be massively disappointed, and there are other aspects which are similarly out of place, such as Skeet Ultich as a local saloon pimp, who serves absolutely no purpose. However, if you take this for what it is – an introduction to the setting, characters and situations – it’s actually more than serviceable, especially since it’s a product of Lifetime, whose output tends to the bland in the same way as vanilla pudding. Thanks largely to Ambrose, this rises above that, and leaves me definitely interested in seeing more.

She plays Belle Barlow, struggling to keep things going on her farm as the Civil War grinds on; her husband was fighting for the Confederates, but has not been heard from in forever. Things aren’t made easier by the neighbours, the Crawfords, who own the local bank and the loan on which Belle is falling behind. Her sister, Hattie, is also involved in helping the underground railroad, the network which smuggled escaped slaves to freedom: Belle has mixed feelings about this, but finds herself hosting one such refugee as her “slave”, Kessie. Meanwhile, a bunch of renegade soldiers, led by Belle’s brother Jasper (Backus), arrive on the farm, intending to knock off a delivery of army gold that will be held temporarily in the bank. Initially opposed to this, Belle’s opinion is changed after a tragic accident, for which she blames the Crawfords, and it turns out Kessie holds the key (literally) to pulling off a successful robbery.

I can’t stress this enough: do not go in, expecting any one of these threads to reach a satisfactory conclusion. It’s the journey which you need to enjoy instead, because the destination is never reached. Fortunately, I was forewarned, and so didn’t suffer the same sense of “Is that it?” as some reviewers. Instead, I was able to appreciate a heroine that’s a good deal more complex than many, and the film also does a good job in portraying the murky nature of the Civil War, where people from the same town (or even family) would sometimes be on different sides. I particularly liked Belle’s little rant in regard to the Crawfords:

I want revenge too. But a bullet for each of them while they sleep is little comfort. I want them to suffer, as I have suffered. I want them to feel what it’s like to have everything they love stripped away from them, piece by piece.

That speech does a really good job of setting up her character’s direction for the rest of the movie, and providing credible motivation. As yet, I haven’t heard of any series following and that’s a pity, because this has potential and I’d like to know where it might have gone. While it’s obviously much easier to write a film where you don’t have to worry about the ending, don’t let the attached name of Nicholas Sparks (The Notebook, and other sappy romances) put you off, for this is better than many TV movies, and definitely better than almost all Lifetime ones.

Dir: Jon Amiel
Star: Lauren Ambrose, Wes Ramsey, Christopher Backus, Riley Smith

Sweetwater

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★★½
“Sweet but mostly sour.”

sweetwaterLife in the old West was tough. It was particularly tough if you were a woman, such as Sarah Ramírez (Jones), struggling to make an honest living with her farmer husband Miguel (Noriega), having escaped life as a prostitute. This movie shows it to be especially tough, after Miguel has had his throat slit by batty preacher Prophet Josiah (Isaacs) – it doesn’t help he has the hots for Sarah, apparently taking the “love thy neighbour” line very literally, and runs the local area as if it were his own personal fiefdom. Fortunately, she has an unusual ally in Sheriff Jackson (Harris). The lawman shows up, looking for two people who disappeared on a journey which took them right across Josiah’s territory, and is about the only other person willing to stand up to the lunatic religious fringe. Finally, Sarah has had enough, and embarks on her vengeance against, not only Josiah, but anyone else who has wronged her, such as the shopkeeper who spied on her in his changing-room.

That final clause kinda illustrates the main problem here: an unevenness of tone which veers between the deadly serious and the ludicrously comic. That’s even the case for some individual characters, particularly Jackson; one minute, he’s waltzing by himself in the town’s main street, the next he’s carrying out forensic analysis, decades ahead of its time. While an intriguing character, the movie might have been better off concentrating on him or Sarah: they may share a common enemy, yet they hardly share a scene until the end, where Jackson’s sole purpose appears to be to provide a second firearm for our heroine. As for the ending, “Is that it?” will likely be your reaction, though in the film’s defense, I sense the emptiness of revenge is part of the point: once you’ve taken it, bringing to an end something which has consumed your life, what then?

I enjoyed the performances here, however: Jones’s understated style works towards her, while Isaacs and Harris both put over an unhinged air of barely-repressed violence. There are some fine moments, depicting Sarah’s willingness to use any means necessary, luring two of Josiah’s men to their doom by bathing in a river [pics from the scene “leaked” out: in no way was this a shallow publicity grab, I’m sure…]. The look of the film is also well done, with good use made of the New Mexico landscapes, and as the picture above shows, the heroine’s colourful garb is an interesting contrast – must have been hot and uncomfortable as hell to film in that. But the good intentions aren’t enough to overcome the lurches in tone and content, and the result is, frankly, a bit of a mess.

Dir: Logan Miller
Star: January Jones, Jason Isaacs, Ed Harris, Eduardo Noriega
a.k.a. Sweet Vengeance or Sherif Jackson

 

"There are some fine moments, depicting Sarah's willingness to use any means necessary. The look of the film is also well done, with good use made of the New Mexico landscapes. "
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The Dalton Girls

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★★★½
“How the West was wo(ma)n.”

dalton-girls-os1“Oh, you can’t trust a man, ‘cos a man will lie,
But a gun stays beside you till the day you die.
A man is a cheater, with his triflin’ ways,
But a gun’s always faithful, ‘cos a gun never strays.”
   — Holly Dalton (Merry Anders)

The above comes from a rather strange musical number, injected into the middle of this B-Western for no particular purpose. It’s sung by Holly, the leader of the titular gang, consisting of four sisters: the older pair Holly and Columbine (Edwards), are forced on the lam after a sleazy funeral director tries to force himself on Holly, resulting in his encounter with the business end of a spade. Six years later, they have been joined by younger siblings Rose (Davis) and Marigold (Sue George). and are raiding stage coaches around the West.

Things are derailed when one of their targets is carrying W.T. “Illinois” Grey (Russell), a gambler on his way to the Colorado boom town of Dry Creek. Columbine falls for him, and casually suggests Dry Creek as the location for the gang’s next raid. They raid the bank, and get away with $6,000 – which was supposed to go to Grey, and he is shot in the process. He trails them to Tombstone where, rather than tell the sheriff, he blackmails the gang to get the money back, and Holly decides to get revenge by raiding the high-stakes poker game where he is wagering the cash.

It’s a wonderfully grey film, morally speaking: unlike many Westerns of the era (1957), it isn’t black-hatted villains metaphorically twirling their wax moustaches, as they go up against square-jawed good guys in their white hats. Here, there isn’t anyone whom you could truly place at either end of the moral spectrum. The Daltons, Holly in particular, are victims of their family reputation – the film opens with their brothers being hunted by a posse, and gunned down in the desert. [The funeral director who assaults her is displaying the corpses for a 25-cent admission fee, which appears based on the fate of the real Dalton Gang].

On the other hand, Grey is certainly no hero either, a pragmatist whose main focus is looking out for #1. Naturally, crime can’t be allowed to pay, and the ending reflects that. However, the journey is a surprisingly forward-thinking one, with only the doomed Grey-Columbine romance counting as an expected element. There is probably one sister too many, since they do blur together, and absolutely nothing like the tagline on the poster happens [“snared them in their love traps at night”? Really?], though that may not be a bad thing. Apart from the fact that the outlaws are women, the story doesn’t have much new to offer. However, considering the era, that alone is still borderline radical, and plays a good two decades ahead of its time, if not more.

Dir: Reginald Le Borg
Star: Merry Anders, John Russell, Penny Edwards, Lisa Davis

Little Rita of the West

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★★½
“Killing off the Western musical, almost a decade before Paint Your Wagon.”

I came into this almost entirely blind, watching it based on the title and the first three minutes off YouTube. You can understand my surprise, after Rita (Pavone) and her German sidekick (Dalla) take out a gang of stagecoach robbers, finishing off by gunning one down in the back, as he lies dazed on the ground, when they… burst into song? Yep, what I didn’t know was, this is actually a musical, designed around the talents of Ms. Pavone, who was apparently a huge pop-star in Italy in the sixties. Hence the songs. Okay, that makes a bit more sense. But it’s still an extremely odd beast, swinging from obvious spoof to apparent seriousness at the drop of a catchy tune.

The plot has Rita “liberating” gold from various bad guys, in conjunction with her Indian chief partner (Mitchell), with the intention of destroying it, believing it’s the root of all evil. That brings her into conflict with “Ringo” – sharing the same of a popular spaghetti Western character, but really a thinly-disguised Man With No Name – and “Django,” a not-at-all disguised copy of that iconic character, down to him dragging a coffin containing a machine-gun, and possessing broken hands. But she then meets and falls for another outlaw, Black Stan (Hill), who ends up sentenced to death after he tries to run off with Rita’s stash of gold awaiting destruction.

Much of this clearly isn’t intended to be serious, such as Rita’s rocket-propelled grenades which clip on to her gun, the local sheriff (Pavone’s husband and manager Teddy Reno) who’d rather be a lumberjack hairdresser, and the frequent references to “frontier humour,” whenever anyone makes a bad joke. But the confrontations with Ringo and Django are played more or less straight, and Little Rita (who is indeed little, at barely 4’10”) is actually made to look something of a bad-ass, punching above her weight. There are actually some genuinely impressive bits of satire, too, such as one victim asking to die “American style,” which means he gets to tell his life-story before the final breath, unlike “Indians and Japs.” The finale, too, needs to be seen to be believed, and is an absurdist breaking of the fourth wall.

However, for every smart and witty moment, there are probably two really stupid ones, while most of the performances would get their actors fired from Benny Hill for excessive comedic mugging. And the songs don’t help: I’m not averse to the concept (I’m a big My Fair Lady fan, and we’ve also seen enough Bollywood films to be able to cope with sudden jumps into musical numbers), but these are damn near irredeemably-awful. The result often finds its way into lists of the worst spaghetti Westerns ever made: if I can certainly see why, I’ll confess I was generally entertained, if only by the sheer “WTF?”-ness of proceedings. It’s more or less unlike any other GWG film you will ever see, and I’ve not seen any other spaghetti Westerns with a female lead either: for such originality alone, I can’t condemn it entirely.

Dir: Ferdinando Baldi
Star: Rita Pavone, Lucio Dalla, Terence Hill, Gordon Mitchell
a.k.a. Crazy Westerners

Hannie Caulder

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★★★½
“Iconic imagery, but not really too convincing a heroine. “

If genre entries produced in Italy are “spaghetti Westerns”, what does that make those produced in Britain? “Fish and chip Westerns?” “Roast beef Westerns?” Shot in Spain, but made by Tigon Film, and including such quintessential Brits as Christopher Lee and Diana Dors in supporting roles, this is nicely-photographed and hits all the right notes. But as the titular character, who seeks revenge after her husband is gunned down, and she herself raped, by the Clemens brothers, Welch perhaps has too much cinematic baggage. While responsible for one of the all-time absolute classic images of the genre, it’s an association which leaves the viewer struggling to look at the heroine without seeing fur bikinis or even Fathom, rather than a widow, hellbent on and dedicated to vengeance with an almost psychotic obsession and lack of self-concern.

Still, there is plenty to enjoy, not least Culp as the bounty hunter who, reluctantly, agrees to take Caulder under his wing, largely realizing that she’s going to get herself killed otherwise. He delivers exactly the right air of world-weary wisdom, and Hannie’s training is covered in enough depth, and with enough bumps in the road, to be credible. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of the Clemens (Borgnine, Martin and Jack Elam): for some reason, they are portrayed almost as comedic jesters or harmless buffoons, characters in great contrast to the vicious rapists and killers we first see. It’s an odd combination, that doesn’t work. Much better used is Lee, as a gunsmith who has retired to Mexico to raise rug-rats, and it’s there Caulder’s mettle is first tested.

I did suspect that she wouldn’t be able to complete her mission without significant male help – this was made in 1971, after all. I was somewhat right, but only somewhat. The ending is both fairly satisfying, in that it avoids the obvious get-out in this direction, but also unsatisfying, in that it merely replaces it with a different one, which is likely too much of a deus ex machina to be acceptable. However, there’s no denying Welch’s credentials as a screen icon, and if this could never be called a classic of the genre, there’s enough here that does work, to make this more than an acceptable entry in the field. Even if one which, thanks to its Anglo origins, perhaps would be best accompanied by a nice cup of tea.

Dir: Burt Kennedy
Star: Raquel Welch, Robert Culp, Ernest Borgnine, Strother Martin

The Last Rites of Ransom Pride

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★★★
“Well, at least it’s different…”

Though nominally a Western, this perhaps has more in common with the surreal works of Alejandro Jodorowsky, in particular El Topo, with mystical elements and downright weirdness. Ransom Pride (Scott Speedman, from the Underworld series) is killed in a gun-battle while trying to broker an arms deal with the locals. His corpse is kept by the local bruja, or witch (de Pablo), because her brother also died in the fight, shot by Ransom. That doesn’t sit well with his lover, Juliette (Caplan), a half-breed who has been raised in blood since slitting the throat of the Mexican general who killed her parents, while still not yet a teenager. She returns to Ransom’s home, and recruits his brother (Foster) to help recover the body, on the way back to Mexico, meeting a bevy of strange characters and situations. Their mission doesn’t sit well with the Pride patriarch (Yoakam), a gun-fighter turned preacher, who sets loose a pair of hunters, but is prepared to get his own hands dirty in pursuit of that “whore of Babylon.”

In terms of visual style, it seems almost as if the appeoach was to try and irritate the hell out of the viewer, with frequent interruptions of scenes with a few frames takes from other sequences, past or yet to come. It certainly keeps the audience on their toes, but is both overused and outstays its welcome. That’s a shame, as there are other elements worthy of credit, not least the overall look, which has a bleached tone that is quite effective. Caplan is undeniably impressive, as is de Pablo – both come over as women with whom you do not want to mess. That’s impressive given both are probably best known previously, for fairly bland TV fare. Here, they are genuinely disturbing, and it’s a mix of the generally decent performances, and weird sense that anything could happen, that kept me watching.

On the downside, as well as the opaque visual sense, the audio is not infrequently as muddied as the picture, though it’s harder to say whether or not it was deliberately so. The script also has a tendency to drift off into areas that are probably not necessary – there’s too much backstory involving Ransom and his brother, when the film should instead have been moving forward. Finally, the editing during the action scenes is disappointing fractured, to the extent that you largely have to wait for the dust to settle and see who’s still alive. The negatives and positives end up just about balancing, and the end result is something that you don’t mind watching, yet will likely not have much interest in seeing again.

Dir: Tiller Russell
Star: Lizzy Caplan, Jon Foster, Cote de Pablo, Dwight Yoakam

Hell’s Fury: Wanted Dead or Alive

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★½
“There’s nothing like a good Western. And this is nothing like a good Western.”

Eryn Cates (Hague) returns home to Texas from finishing school in New York, to find her family farm teetering on the edge of foreclosure [maybe if they hadn’t spent all that money to send her to finishing school in New York…]. In a misguided attempt to help things, her brother tries to rob a stagecoach carrying payroll, but is injured. The attempt fails, but local mogul Mortimer (Harris), who holds the loan on the Cates farm, sees a chance and pockets the loot. Two Texas Rangers, including the young and handsome Flint (Hagenbuch) show up to investigate the robbery, but it’s up to Eryn to save the family property, take on the mantle of the bandit, fend off the unwanted advances of Mortimer and engage in pseudo-romantic banter of the least interesting or convincing sort with Flint.

It’s not very good, and the problems start right from the format: it was shot on low-definition video, which gives everything a harsh, modern look that really doesn’t suit the genre. Hague is equally unsuited for the role, and never succeeds in putting across any significant degree of emotion. And quite why there’s a kung-fu master in an early scene, I have no idea: he crops up once, and then is never seen again. It’s not as if Eryn exactly wields nunchakus against Mortimer’s minions. There are some cheap laughs to be had, not least the town dance where the band appear to play the same eight bars of The Streets of Laredo for six minutes straight, but most of this is just terribly pedestrian.

The DVD cover blurb claims, “The Quick and the Dead tips its cowboy hat to True Grit in this action packed Western gun battle.” Hmm. The tubes of the Internet deny any such phrase, though since Independent Film Quarterly [or “Quartly”, as the blurb has it] appears to be that endangered species, a print magazine, we can’t definitively claim fabrication here. What I can say with certainty, is that the apparent provider of the quote, Stuart Alson, has crafted a far greater work of fiction in that single sentence, than anything the writers here manage to conjure up in their 72, almost entirely tedious minutes.

Dir: Alan Chan
Star: Hannah Hague, Adam Hagenbuch, Ron E. Harris, Richard L. Olsen

Gang of Roses II: Next Generation

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★½
“Why? No, really: why?”

There are films which get a sequel because they’re successful. There are films which get a sequel because they are good. And then there’s a sequel to a film which was sub-mediocre, and appeared to vanish without causing even a ripple after its straight to video release in 2003. As a measure, nine years later, it hasn’t even reached 750 votes on the IMDB. Yet, we get this: a sequel that is neither needed, nor demanded by the public, and which manages to be even more boring and badly-constructed than its predecessor. Most movie-makers acquire at least a measure of technical skill as their career progresses, bur La Marre seems to have forgotten what little he knew a decade ago.

La Marre and Lamont Clayton are the only returning names from the original here – there’s a claim that Cassie is an member of the gang of female outlaws there, but neither actress Charli Baltimore nor her character seem to have been in it. She’s sitting in jail with the combination to a military safe, and for some reason, divulges the plan to break the safe to her cellmate Collette (Pratts), about two minutes after they’re introduced. Cassie is killed during an escape attempt, but Collette, with her knowledge, slides in to the gang, who then sit around a hotel room for what feels like ever. Eventually, they head to the town of San Juevo, and prepare for action, not knowing they are being stalked by Lee (Casseus) and his gang, out for revenge on the women. Yes, even though they are completely different ones from the first film. That’s the level of coherence you can expect from this.

Somewhat of a troubled production, apparently, with Taylor and La Marra getting into a brawl on set. Sure that improved the creative atmosphere immeasurably. But even the cheapest publicity stunt couldn’t have saved this wretched mess, which has exactly two decent scenes: one with one of the Roses speaking to the pastor of the San Juevo church, and another interacting with a little girl. That’s it. The action is horribly staged – the film budget couldn’t even run to fake blood, it seems – and it’s a merciful release that the film runs 15 minutes less than I was braced for. The balance is made up with La Marre’s entry to the 2012 World’s Least Amusing Out-takes competition. It’s a sure winner there: the only possible award for which this possesses any chance.

Dir: Jean-Claude La Marre
Star: Teyana Taylor, Eurika Pratts, Claudia Jordan, Gabriel Casseus