Rare Westerns on Netflix Instant Watch Capsule Reviews, vol.16

Dakota Incident (1956)

Courtesy of Northbreed1

Another “stagecoach ambushed by Indians” tale that begins with our hero being doublecrossed by his two partners and seeking revenge. When the movie finally gets around to the evil Indian plot, our hero is joined by Linda Darnell and others, including great character actor Ward Bond in a thankless role as a pious liberal senator who repeatedly sermonizes that Indians are human beings and that violence doesn’t solve anything. Of course, he is scoffed at at every turn and is proved a fool in the end, as the movie does indeed make every Indian out to be a total scumbag. If you can get over this character and the portrayal of native Americans, this is a decent B stagecoach ambush flick, with a surprising (for 1956) scene where a victim is found in a pool of his own blood.

Very good color transfer, and previously available on VHS.


Taggart (1964)

Tom Young’s parents are ruthlessly murdered by a rancher and his son, and Tom kills the son in a duel. The father, wounded and on his death bed, hires Dan Duryea (doing his smiling slimebag act very well) and his two compadres to take out Tom. Dan’s cohorts are quickly killed by Tom, and he chases Tom to a mission in Apache country. While there, Tom Young (his usual wooden self) tries to help out a prospector with a gold claim, who has to deal with Apaches trying to steal the gold. He also has a hot redhead daughter, which certainly helps. Oh yeah, the prospector is married to a double-crossing Mexican named Consuela, who hits on both Dan and Tom at different points. The results are an interesting back and forth between all of these characters and their various motivations, instead of the obvious revenge path the movie could have taken. Very nicely photographed, with stylish splashes of color and an interesting script. A very nice surprise. David Carradine’s first role.

Never released on home video in the U.S., although it was released on DVD in France. However, the transfer suffers from bad interlacing, probably due to a terrible frame rate conversion from a PAL master (maybe the same master used for the French DVD). Basically, everything looks jagged and weird during movement. Other than that, the transfer is excellent and colorful. All together, it’s certainly watchable. Young and Duryea also starred in He Rides Tall (1964), another rare western also on instant watch.


Gun Street (1961)

A bank robber and killer escapes six years after the sheriff tried to see to it that he was hung. The killer terrorizes the town (including his ex-wife) while the sheriff tries to find him and finally bring him to justice. Sort of an anti-High Noon, in the sense that it takes a vaguely similar setup, but completely lacks suspense (and interest) despite a surefire premise to do so. Resultingly, the movie feels like a guy waiting around for someone to show up, and feels endless as a result, despite running a shade over an hour.

Great black and white transfer, and never released on home video.

FRIDAY THE 13TH (1980) - ironically the definitive camping movie

You should already be familiar with the movie, so I'm not going to post the trailer. Instead, here's the Angry Video Game Nerd's take on the Friday the 13th NES game, which I of course own, because I am a loser.

If Halloween is the story of an evil force infiltrating the suburbs, Friday the 13th substitutes a town setting for a rural one. The film is correspondingly raw and rustic, while maintaining the stripped down structure of John Carpenter’s earlier film. There is something primal about being in the woods and suddenly feeling as if a stranger is stalking you from afar.

The sleek steadicam point of view shots in Halloween, stealthily intruding in on the space of the characters, is replaced here by a hand held point-of-view camera that is vague in its approach. It doesn’t stalk with efficiency, but rather, wanders and lurks, its location and purpose not clearly defined. This lends itself more to an atmosphere of menace, rather than being strictly suspenseful.

The other big difference between the two films are the scores. Where as Halloween has a very effective, stark keyboard score, Harry Manfredini’s score here reworks Bernard Herrmann’s Psycho score, adding his own creepy, avant garde sounds. While the “kill, kill” vocal sounds are far more well known, the other sounds (keyboard bits, screeching violins and cellos, etc.) are effective and distinctive. The stalking sequences rely heavily on the Psycho score blueprint, but the rest is tantamount in creating the atmosphere of an unforgivingly brutal, natural landscape, where death may only be a moment away. I would rank it as one of the most effective scores in film history, in terms of what it add to the film. Without it, much of the film would be lifeless, reduced to young people standing around talking with the occasional cutaway to a shot of trees.

The later sequels attempted to be more dependent on suspense than atmosphere (I did say "attempted"). The body counts also increased, as well as the novelty factor (not to mention the trash factor). Of course, Jason’s mother is the killer here, and Jason starts up in part 2 (minus a twist-ending detour in part 5). I’m not going to go through and talk about every film in the series, listing everyone that Jason hacks into schmuck fillet, as it would get redundant and boring real quick. I’ll just add that I only consider the first eight made at Paramount to be the real series, and view it as a single twelve hour epic, sort of a longer version of Shoah with a much smaller body count.

*

My parents took me to see Cronenberg’s The Fly at a drive-in when I was six years old. While I’m currently a big Cronenberg fan, back then I became quickly bored with the initial drama and characterization, having expected to see a film with a fly monster running around ripping people’s limbs off. I told my mom I was going to the official drive-in playground, but looped around to check out what I really wanted to see all along: Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. After all, I had to see where this saga was headed, having already seen parts 1-4 through the magic of illegal cable. I just stood next to a car speaker, and soon I was watching Jason decapitate three people with one machete swipe. I was royally stoked. Later, Alice Cooper would close out the show with the song “Man Behind the Mask”, a synth laden tribute to the big fella. This song would also show up on the Constrictor album, along with:

A. a song about Jason Voorhees
B. a song about someone attempting to bang schoolgirls
C. a song about some mongoloid loser (not Jason, but some other asshole)
D. a song about evolution
E. a song about banging whores (presumably no longer in school)
F. a love ballad where Coop proclaims that a girl has “grabbed his heart by the throat”

Yes, the man is a fucking genius. Oh yeah, his guitar player on the album (Kane Roberts) played a machine gun guitar. Fucking genius.

Anyway, I was in the ideal situation to enjoy these films. I believed that the victims were three-dimensional human beings, didn’t notice that the scripts were borderline retarded, and didn’t think to deconstruct them in terms of forms and clichés and genres. These were real people I could identify with (at least in a visceral sense), in settings I could identify with, having frequently gone camping as a child. I joined them in their feeble attempt to escape a brutal, unstoppable force, whilst being enveloped by the unforgiving maw of nature.