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Category: Weird Western

Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo from MGM Limited Edition Collection

Weird Western-on-Demand: The White Buffalo from MGM Limited Edition Collection

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White Buffalo One SheetWarner Archive has so far received all the attention in my recent veer into the world of the manufacture-on-demand DVD, a dazzling universe where the big studios serve the niche movie lovers with titles that would otherwise only surface in North America on bootlegs swiped off Japanese laserdiscs. (Yeah, you own a couple of those.) Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure, The Bermuda Depths, and The Last Dinosaur all come from Warner Brothers’ MOD division. But two other studios have their own extensive MOD programs: MGM Limited Edition Collection and Universal Vault. It’s through MGM that we get the strange 1977 combo of Western and monster movie called The White Buffalo.

My first experience with The White Buffalo, aside from seeing ads on local television stations when it ran during “Charles Bronson Tough Guy Week,” was on an awful first-generation VHS tape I watched during college as part of an independent study of the 1970s Western. The movie was drab and a cruel disappointment considering how exciting the plot description sounded: “Wild Bill Hickok and Crazy Horse team up to hunt down a giant, possibly supernatural, white buffalo on a rampage.” How could such a crunchy high-concept result in such a bland film?

Blame “VHS goggles,” which turned the movie’s photography into mulch. The difference in The White Buffalo experience between VHS and DVD is substantial. Although the MGM Limited Edition Collection DVD is rough compared to today’s Blu-rays, it is about as good as the picture could look in standard definition without undergoing hefty restoration. The movie isn’t a lost classic, but it wins in the realm of atmosphere: eerie and bleak. The artifice of the limited budget, which puts most of the nighttime and snowbound scenes against the Buffalo on obvious interior sets, contributes to the dream-like atmosphere. That may be an accident of filming, but it’s a positive creative accident. The White Buffalo never succeeds as an action thriller, but it remains a fascinating piece of odd Western cinema of the 1970s, a decade filled with plenty of oddness for the grand ol’ American genre. The current popularity of the Weird Western and steampunk subgenres gives the movie a freshness that moves it beyond being only a “Manifest Destiny” take on Jaws.

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The Weird of Oz gabs about Antiheroes

The Weird of Oz gabs about Antiheroes

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100_0347Antihero. A problematic term to begin with, its overuse has further watered it down. Anti- typically means to be in opposition or even to be the opposite; the antithesis of a position is the oppositional position.

So, technically, one might interpret anti-hero to mean a villain. This is rarely, if ever, how the term is used; so what do we mean by an antihero?

Off the top of my head, without resorting to any dictionary definition, this is how I tend to picture an antihero: A person not serving any particular ideal or higher purpose, but generally self-serving, who, while going about his (or her) business in pursuit of fortune, power, pleasure, or whatever turns his crank, is suddenly confronted by a moral choice. And at that moment, not for any dogmatic or religious reasons, any creeds or codes, but simply because of some niggling inner compass — his conscience — he makes the choice that is least likely to offer personal gain, that involves self-sacrifice, that may in fact be fatal. He makes a heroic choice, the choice that allows us to continue to root for him as the hero-protagonist.

Think of the fallen samurai in The Seven Samurai or the lawless gunslingers in The Magnificent Seven. In both cases, when they learn that the threatened peasant village cannot really afford to pay them and that they are outnumbered five to one, they nevertheless decide to make a stand to protect the afflicted. No promise of financial reward and a very high probability of death — an option that the histories of these men would not suggest they would choose. They are neither knights nor saints. Yet they become heroes and, in some cases, martyrs. All appearances to the contrary, deep down they prove to be — when it really counts — good men. Or in that moment they become good men.

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Vintage Treasures: Hong on the Range by William F. Wu

Vintage Treasures: Hong on the Range by William F. Wu

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hong-on-the-range4I admit this one doesn’t seem very vintage to me, but perhaps that’s just because I’m getting a little vintage myself.

William F. Wu’s fourth novel, Hong on the Range, was published 23 years ago. It was originally published in hardcover and has never had a paperback release.

And that’s too bad, since it’s the kind of off-the-wall science fantasy that I think would really appeal to a modern audience. Set in a post-apocalyptic American West where cities have decayed and the surviving towns cling to the railway, where most people have cyborg enhancements, meat is harvested from cows without harming them, and a young man named Louie — a “control-natural” forbidden by law from enhancing himself, and who is shunned and misunderstood by others — heads West to find his fortune.

The Old West Was Never This Wild! In a New West filled with cyber-enhanced cowboys and mechanized singing steers, Louie Hong must make his way through hostile territory filled with cattle rustlers and bank robbers, and a passel of cyborg bounty hunters who think he’s both! A story about coming of age in a strange and dangerous land where a young man’s most faithful friend may just turn out to be a computerized steer named Chuck.

While it’s the only novel in the sequence, Hong on the Range is part of a series of stories written by Wu that began in 1985 with “Wild Garlic.” Most of them were published in Pulphouse magazine; the last one, “In the Temple of Forgotten Spirits,” in 1993.

Hong on the Range was published by Walker & Co in 1989. It is 286 pages in hardcover. It has never had a paperback release, but it was re-released in a digital edition for $2.99 last October.

New Treasures: Dead Reckoning by Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill

New Treasures: Dead Reckoning by Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill

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dead-reckoning2July is a special month in the O’Neill household, and not just because it’s summer. All three of my children were born in July, which means it’s a month of birthday cake, party planning, and a lot of exchanging gifts.

My kids are readers, and one of the gifts they traditionally receive from aunts and uncles is book store gift certificates. So every year, at the end of July, we trek to the local Barnes & Noble where my children each bring home a stack of books. For Tim, the oldest, it’s usually manga — this year as many Fullmetal Alchemist volumes as he could find. Taylor is harder to predict, although she’s developed a fondness for manga herself, especially Inuyahsa and Hollow Fields. The middle one, Drew, is a little more adventurous, and this year he parked himself in front of the teen section and spent long minutes agonizing over the selection.

One of the titles he picked out caught my eye as well: Dead Reckoning, a zombie western from two much-loved fantasy writers with a history of successful collaboration. This one looks like a lot of fun, and I might read it as soon as he’s done.

It’s 1867. And something truly monstrous is breaking loose in West Texas.

Jett Gallatin expects trouble in Alsop, Texas, but not zombies. She’s looking for her lost twin brother when she enters a dusty saloon that suddenly is attacked by an army of the undead.

Together with her new friends — one a brilliant inventor, one a clever and good-looking young scout — it’s everything she can do to keep the zombies from killing or taking every living soul in their path. But who could possibly desire to control such an army? And what is it they want from the wild Texas frontier?

Mercedes Lackey & Rosemary Edghill have written more than a dozen books together, including the Shadow Grail novels and six volumes of the Bedlam’s Bard series.

Dead Reckoning was published in June by Bloomsbury. It is 324 pages in hardcover for $16.99 ($13.99 for the digital edition).

The Bloodlands Novels of Christine Cody

The Bloodlands Novels of Christine Cody

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bloodlands2I’ve been having fun with the Bloodlands novels of Christine Cody. Her website calls them “a post-apocalyptic Western fantasy series,” and that’s probably the best way to describe them.

Technically they’re science fiction, since there’s a near-future SF vibe and a post-disaster setting. “The New Badlands” is a vast and devastated American West where a handful of survivors retreated underground to escape changing and deadly weather, and a sequence of unrelenting apocalyptic events that have ravaged the country.

But at heart they’re really fantasy as the Badlands aren’t just filled with lethal storms, desperate survivors and brutal gunslingers — they’re also crawling with monsters, including vampires.

The marketing copy from Ace Books left me in mind of Deadlands, the weird western role playing game from Pinnacle Entertainment that breathed new life into the RPG genre in the 90s. But the author credits her inspiration to classic westerns. This is from the dedication to Bloodlands:

A big shout-out goes to all those Westerns that provided us with High Plains Drifters, Shanes, and Pale Riders, plus all the greedy ranchers and gunslinging villains, feisty homesteaders and rugged pioneers. I wanted to twist and reshape those wonderful tropes into something new while recalling the old. Most important, though, I wanted to pay homage to the mysterious cowboys who have wandered across dusty landscapes to face down the bad guys.

Fair warning to those looking for a pure-blooded adventure series: these books have an outcast female protagonist, and a brooding and misunderstood vampire named “Gabriel.” And there’s kissing.

The technical term for books containing both kissing and vampires is “paranormal romance,” and that’s exactly what these are. If sweaty make-out scenes with the undead make you uncomfortable, then back away now.

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Cowboys & Aliens: Aliens, Go Home

Cowboys & Aliens: Aliens, Go Home

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cowboys-aliens-posterCowboys & Aliens (2011)
Directed by John Favreau. Starring Daniel Craig, Harrison Ford, Olvia Wilde, Sam Rockwell, Keith Carradine, Clancy Brown, Paul Dano.

Thunderation, aliens. We was havin’ ourselves a fine little Western show here in this town of Absolution. Then you come riding in, a-blastin’ and burnin’ everything like it was a Saturday night after the cowpokes got paid and the whiskey gone dry. You turned our durned movie into about as interesting a place as a salt flat. Hell, we had almost made this Ford fella entertaining again, and it ain’t been since the War of the Southern Rebellion that folks enjoyed anything that city slicker’s done.

So thanks fer nuttin’, alien varmints. Ain’t you got plenty a’ other moving pictures this year that you’re blowing your cannons in? Now stay on yer side of the barb-wire fence, and if we catch you branding one of our cattle again with those laser doohickies, we’re pulling leather on you and leavin’ you for the buzzards and worms who ain’t particular about what their chow is.

The “Weird Western” genre has found its niche along with other subsets of steampunk in literature and comics — but it has never caught fire on the big screen. Wild Wild West and Jonah Hex were failures, and deservedly so. There are also far earlier examples, like 1971’s Zachariah, a rock musical Western based on Siddhartha with music by Country Joe and the Fish and Elvin Jones, and starring Don Johnson. That sounds fun, right? Sorry, it isn’t. Cowboys & Aliens, from Iron Man director John Favreau and based on the Platinum Studios graphic novel, fares better in the quality department, but it is still an inert bore that fails to merge its two genres into anything entertaining. Mostly, it’s a slog.

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Ken Rand’s Pax Dakota

Ken Rand’s Pax Dakota

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pax-dakota-ken-randPax Dakota
Ken Rand
Five Star (265 pp, $25.95, May 2008)
Reviewed by Bill Ward

In 1899 the United States shares an uneasy peace with its western neighbor, the Dakota, a confederated nation of Native American peoples that had joined forces to defeat the US in a war almost three decades earlier. The Pax Dakota, the peace that governs these two competing powers, is ever in danger of breaking as racism, ambition, and old animosities on both sides threaten to plunge the US and Dakota nations back into a bloody war. Into this mix steps the Old Enemy, a malignant spirit that seeks enough souls to power its return trip back to heaven — back to the side of Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit that had exiled the Old Enemy to the Earth in the time of the First People.

In Pax Dakota Ken Rand gives us an immediately compelling alternate historical setting seasoned with a Native American flavor that gives it an exotic, unexpected quality. But primarily this is an action story, a Weird Western with horrific elements that quickly ratchets up the action and never lets up until the final scene.

The book opens with the death of Iron Shield in 1883, great war leader of the Dakota and architect of their new nation. Upon his death an entity known as the Watcher is released to find a new host — the benevolent Watcher is a guardian spirit of humanity, a being that imprinted Iron Shield with the idea for the Pax Dakota while still just a boy. The Watcher’s plan had always been to contain the prison housing the Old Enemy within Dakota territory so that the Dakota could maintain a vigil there. However, the prison of the Old Enemy, a region know as Devil’s Clay, remains in US territory after the peace, and the Watcher must quickly launch a plan that will bring about the final confrontation with the Old Enemy.

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