Damsel (2018)

In the middle of the Utah desert, two men sat at a peculiarly situated stagecoach stop.  The younger man (David Zellner) said he was heading West to make a new start.  The older man, a preacher (Robert Forester), scoffed at that idea.  The West would be just as bad as where he had come from, though perhaps bad in a new way.  He had enough of the West and was returning to the East.  The old man grew impatient for the stagecoach.    Eventually, he stripped off most of his clothes, handed his tattered bible to the other man, and marched into the desert in his long johns.

At a barn dance, Samuel Alabaster (Robert Pattinson) and Penelope (Mia Wasikowska) were partners with wide grins.  The music was energetic and the dancers stamped the ground like an Irish river dance.

On a lonely northwestern shore, a man rowed a boat a shore.  He unloaded a crate that contained a miniature horse!  The man was Samuel and the horse was Butterscotch.  He made his way to a town and sought Parson Henry.  He found the drunken Parson Henry on the beach.  Notably, Parson Henry proved to be the younger man from the stagecoach stop and he wore the preacher's clothes and carried his tattered bible.  Samuel hired him via telegram for unspecified purposes.  After making Parson Henry presentable, the pair rode into the wilderness.  Samuel eventually explained that Penelope was kidnapped and he was on a rescue mission.  As soon as she was safe, he wanted Parson Henry to marry them.

Billed as a dark comedy, there is precious little comedy to be had.  Here is a collection of motley characters who, once you get to know them, are mostly dislikeable or bad.  Parson Henry, who links the tale together, is a coward who has no direction.  He wants to latch onto something or someone.  So, he's a parasite?  Samuel is an unreliable source, painting a picture that isn't accurate.  Props to Pattinson for taking such a role and doing a great job in it, but Samuel gets less and less likeable as time goes on.  Penelope is a sympathetic character but fails to be likeable; she's a very masculine character, destroying all the men she encounters.

What was the point of this story?  Parson Henry is unchanged from when met at the stagecoach stop.  The other characters have been dislodged from the lives they had, but the future is unknown.  It's like a story about a house that burned down that ends with the family staring at the ashes before walking away.  Uh, okay.  Throughout the movie, there are bits that ruin the setting.  That stagecoach stop in the middle of the desert was one such instance.  There is litterally nothing else in sight and it isn't a crossroad.  How would the potential rider get to the stop?  When leaving the town, Samuel had a chicken in a birdcage on top of Butterscotch.  What's that about?  On their first night out, they eat the chicken and the birdcage is not seen again.  Oh, okay.

Hard pass on this one.  Zellner made a much better movie: Kumiko the Treasure Hunter.  Watch that instead.

Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970)

Civil War Veteran Hogan (Clint Eastwood) was riding through Mexico when he heard a commotion.  He dismounted and looked over a rise to see a trio of men pushing a mostly naked woman among them.  Well, that just wouldn't do.  He intervened by killing the trio.  He was quite shocked when, once she was dressed, she proved to be a nun!  Sister Sara (Shirley MacLaine) was also a Juarista out to raise money to fight the French.  As such, Hogan's plan of handing her off to a French patrol was nixed.  As it happens, Hogan was in Mexico to assist the Juarista cause, but he was less than keen on having a nun - especially a pretty nun - around.  The more time he spent around her, the less she seemed like a proper nun.  However, she always had a reasonable explanation for this aberrant behavior.

Clint plays his usual Western anti-hero, though he adds a dash of romance.  His interactions with Shirley are fun and funny.  Much of the fun is that Hogan doesn't know how to interact with her, nor can he get rid of her.  Though she plays her role well, Shirley is a hard sell for a Mexican.  She looks not at all Spanish and is entirely too pale for such a climate.  That said, Sara is a great character, and MacLaine imbues her with just the right combination of reverence and sass.

The scenery is terrific, but much of it is nowhere near the putative setting.  The story is set near Chihuahua, but a lot of filming was done south of Mexico City.  As for the French, they didn't look French.  According to IMDb, the director sought to save money and cast a bunch of no-names for all the roles other than Clint and Shirley.

After the US Civil War concluded, the United States took more robust measures against the French intervention in Mexico, selling tens of thousands of rifles to the Juaristas and threating US action against the French.  The movie Vera Cruz also took place during the French invasion of Mexico.

Good popcorn fun.

Unforgiven (1992)

In Big Whiskey, Wyoming, a cowboy had badly scarred a prostitute.  Where the prostitutes wanted the sheriff, Little Bill Dagget (Gene Hackman), to hang the two cowboys, he opted to have them pay restitution.  To the brothel owner, not the mutilated woman.  Infuriated, the women pooled their money to hire gunmen to kill the cowboys.

William Munny (Clint Eastwood) is a poor Kansas farmer with two kids.  His wife died nearly three years ago.  It is a hard life.  While trying to separate diseased pigs from healthy ones, a rider appears.  The Schofield Kid is off to collect a bounty in Wyoming.  He doesn't want to go alone.  Will was a terror in his younger days, a violent drunkard who killed without compunction.  "I'm not that man anymore," he explains, declining the offer.  However, he soon reconsiders and rides off to enlist his old buddy, Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman).  The pair find the Schofield Kid on the way to Wyoming.

English Bob (Richard Harris) is known as the Duke of Death, at least that is the title of the dime novel on his adventures in the West.  He arrives in Big Whiskey to collect the bounty but soon discovers an old acquaintance: Little Bill.  It is far from a happy reunion.

There are no heroes.  The Old West is a brutal place where self-interest outweighs all.  The tales told by Little Bill, Ned Logan, and William Munny paint a picture of violence and murder.  These are not good men, though they may be men of their time and place.

Recommended.

Gunbus (1986)

Luke (Jeff Osterhage) and Barney (Scott McGinnis) are bank robbers in the southwest United States who use way too much dynamite to bust open safes.  After having left a series of flattened banks in their wake, their luck runs out.  Sneaking into an impressive-looking bank, they encounter multiple gunmen awaiting them.  As World War I is currently being fought in Europe, the pair are forced to join the military and sent to the front.

In France, the pair are marching along in uniform with rifles slung on their shoulders when a German bomber approaches.  The thing is ludicrously immense, a building in the sky with 4 bomb bays and a two-story cockpit with a giant wheel for steering, like on a ship.  Yes, this is Steampunk WWI.  While everyone else takes cover, Luke and Barney set aside their rifles and scrounge through their rucksacks for revolvers.  The pair then proceed to shoot down the bomber by killing the pilot.  Gee that was easy.  Taking advantage of the confusion, the pair jump into an abandoned truck and drive away.  Yes, our heroes are now deserters.

They stop outside an officers' club but they aren't officers.  However, a pair of drunkards wander out of the club and the deserting duo have an idea!  Soon, the two aviation officers enter the club and buy drinks all around.  Apparently, they got to take their ill-gotten bank robbery money with them to Europe.  After entirely too much drinking, Luke bets one of the real aviation officers that he can fly a plane.  Early the next morning, Luke and Barney find themselves in a Vickers FB5 (AKA Gunbus) which Luke pilots into the air.  Of course, he has no idea where he is going and cannot find his way back to the airfield where he took off.  Instead, he crashes into another airfield.  The commander there considers shooting them until they tell him about the bomber they shot down.  It so happens that he is hunting the Moby Dick of the German military, a gargantuan Zepplin that dominates the sky.  Luke and Barney are only too happy to go hunting for it.

Like the ludicrous bomber, the Zepplin is steampunk-inspired and way too big.  It has a submarine aspect to it where it hides in the clouds and peeks at the landscape through a downward facing periscope.  Silly.  Like a battleship, it has multiple anti-aircraft cannons and many machinegun emplacements.  Unlike the real airships of WWI, this one doesn't use altitude to its advantage.  The planes of WWI could not fly high enough to shoot down the giant gasbags, which was why they were used as bombers.

The British and French lack the steampunk aircraft until the final confrontation.  Fritz (Ronald Lacey) is the mechanic at the British airfield and he has built a variety of ludicrous flying machines.  With their normal planes destroyed by the Zepplin bombing the airfield, the flyers must resort to the crazy creations of Fritz that are hidden in the nearby woods.  Who knew a model T could fly?

Extremely campy oddball Western.  It was titled Sky Pirates for the US market.  This is one of those bad movies that prove to be fun anyway.  Just okay.

Fighting Caravans (1931)

Clint Belmet (Gary Cooper) is a scout on the frontier during the Civil War. He is something of a hellion and the sheriff of Independence, Missouri plans to put him in jail for a month. His mentors, Bill Jackson and Jim Bridger, spin a yarn about how he was just married and it would be wrong to jail him now that he is reforming his wild ways. They trick Felice (Lili Damita), a French woman bound for Sacramento, to pose as his new wife. The sheriff relents and Clint escapes Independence with Bill, Jim, and Felice. No sooner has the caravan left for California than Clint and Felice breakup when the trick played on her is exposed. Throughout the long journey, Clint and Felice are repeatedly drawn together and then split. Bill and Jim engineer most of the breakups, fearing that they might lose their young apprentice to a domestic life. Added to the stresses of the trail, it is clear that a combined band of Kiowa and Comanche are trailing the caravan and will certainly attack at some point. This is especially threatening because most of the US Cavalry stationed in the West has been recalled for service in the Civil War.

Adapted from a Zane Grey novel, the story is by the numbers and rather predictable. Ernest Torrence is a standout as Bill Jackson, the grizzled scout with a gift for gab. Tully Marshall as Jim Bridger fades into the background, though he has the more stereotypical mountain man appearance. There is a famous Jim Bridger who was a mountain man and scout, but he was in military service during the Civil War. The best thing about the movie are the scenes of the caravan crossing vast prairies, snowy mountains, and wide rivers. The setting is far more impressive than the story.

Good popcorn fun.

Bone Tomahawk (2015)

A pair of bushwhackers flee from a posse and find themselves in a peculiar Indian burial ground.  There is eerie howling that doesn't sound natural.  Suddenly, one is shot in the throat and the other flees for his life.  Eleven days later, he finds himself in the town of Bright Hope.  His manner attracts the attention of Sheriff Hunt (Kurt Russell).  As he tries to run, Hunt shoots him in the leg.  With the town doctor drunk, Mrs. O'Dwyer (Lili Simmons) is summoned to the jail to extract the bullet.  By morning, the prisoner, the deputy, and Mrs. O'Dwyer are missing along with half a dozen horses.  The stable boy is dead.  An unusual arrow is found and a local Indian identifies it as belonging to troglodytes, a savage band of cannibals who reside in the Valley of Starving Men.  Sheriff Hunt, Deputy Chicory (Richard Jenkins), John Brooder (Matthew Fox) and Arthur O'Dwyer (Patrick Wilson) set out to rescue the missing people.

Though the story has a horror element to it, it mostly plays as a standard western until the final act.  The four men who set our are not well-suited to the task.  O'Dwyer has a broken leg, the reason why he was still in town rather than herding cattle north to Wyoming with most of the town's other men.  Though urged to stay behind, he must try to rescue his wife.  Brooder is a dandy who kills without compunction and has a special dislike for Indians.  He is the best equipped of the group.  Sheriff Hunt is competent but has only nominal command over Brooder and O'Dwyer.  Chicory is an elderly fellow who talks endlessly, much to the irritation of his fellows.

As promised, the troglodytes are cannibals who speak by howling and keep their 'meals' alive until it's time to dine.  Their weapons are amazingly crude but lethal.  Of note, they use an animals jawbone as an axe, the titular bone tomahawk.

The movie has one particularly funny bit.  Brooder claims to be the smartest member of the posse.  When challenged on that by Chicory, he states that O'Dwyer and Hunt are married and Chicory is a widower.  So?  "Smart men don't get married."  QED.  :)

The movie is overlong and spends much of its time on the journey to the Valley of the Starving Men.  Though they encounter hazards along the way, it is never the troglodytes.  Imagine Aliens where three quarters of the movie is spent before the characters engage the aliens.  There is a lot of time spent on the interrelationships of the posse and not a lot of fighting the monsters.

Just okay.

Never Grow Old (2019)

Patrick Tate (Emile Hirsch) is the carpenter and undertaker of a small town during the California Gold Rush.  Though he would like to pull up stakes and cross the mountains to where the gold is, his wife (Deborah Francois) would rather stay.  Audrey is pregnant and they are doing well enough.  As they are both Catholic (he's Irish and she's French), they are still outsiders despite having joined the local protestant church.  It's a tolerable life.

One night, Dutch Albert (John Cusack) knocks on their door during a storm.  He asks where he can find Bill Crabtree.  Patrick gives directions to the Crabtree house but also reveals that the man left some time ago.  Dutch insists that Patrick show him the way, making threats when Patrick balks.  Unable to find Crabtree or get information from his terrified wife and daughter, Dutch looks for a saloon.  Closed by order of the reverend; this is a dry town.  Seeing an opportunity, Dutch buys the saloon and populates it with prostitutes.  Unsurprisingly, Patrick gets a lot more requests for his services as undertaker.  However, one of Dutch's goons has taken a fancy to Audrey.  Now she is eager to leave while Patrick - who has seen his income soar - would rather stay.

The building pressure between Reverend Pike and Dutch cannot hold.  The character of the town has changed dramatically, violence abounds, and the cemetery has a lot of fresh graves.  Which side will Patrick chose?

Filmed in Ireland and Luxembourg, this is not a bad Western.  It is odd to see John Cusack as the bad guy.  Emile Hirsch does an excellent job of being the conflicted anti-hero.  This is a very different role from Speed Racer and at no point was I reminded of that role.  Not an action-packed Western but more of a slow burn to a climax.