At the New York Comic Con, we were lucky enough to get a chance to step in to the closed off Rockstar booth and get exclusive hands on time with Rockstar’s Nick Patterson on the upcoming Undead Nightmare DLC pack for Red Dead Redemption. Now a lot of people have been vocal about the fact they didn’t think zombies belonged in the realistic Red Dead Redemption world. Well luckily for those people, it is a DLC pack that they aren’t required to purchase. For those a little more open minded about the plausibility of zombies coming back to unlife in the old west, Undead Nightmare is their golden ticket.

During our hands on, we got to experience one of the graveyard missions. In this instance, a player must go into a graveyard and set five coffins ablaze. In doing so, the undead awaken from the ground and try to take them down. Much like the classic zombie theme, headshots work best and players can be quickly overrun if not careful. One great addition is the use of the blunderbuss as a weapon that players can shoot looted pieces of the fallen undead with literally explosive results.The DLC pack has great visual additions like a constant fog over the land as well as new skins on the animals roaming the desert.

Though we only got a short time to play, it was a great demo that peeked our interest. Take a look at some screens below as well as the trailer. Stick close to the Flickcast for more on Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare as it closes in on its release.

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As if we weren’t excited enough when the first trailer for the Coen Brothers’ upcoming remake of True Grit hit last week, a brand new, full-feature trailer has hit the web, and not only does it have more Jeff Bridges as US Marshall Reuben “Rooster” Cogburn, but a killer Johnny Cash tune, and even some kind of man-bear riding a horse.

The film comes from Ethan and Joel Coen, who made their stamp on visually stunning Western-style dramas with No Country For Old Men. The cast is rounded out enough with Bridges leading the charge, filling in the shoes of John Wayne, while Matt Damon and Josh Brolin fill out the supporting cast.

Between this film and his upcoming dual roles in Tron Legacy, it looks like the next year will be pretty big for Jeff Bridges, and could bring him another Oscar for True Grit.

Check out the full trailer for the film after the jump, and catch it in it’s full Western glory in theaters on Christmas Day.

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Way back in February we brought you some casting news about the Coen Brothers remake of the John Wayne classic western True Grit. And now, thanks to the magic of the Interwebs, we can bring you the first teaser trailer for the film.

With a cast that includes Matt Damon as La Beouf, Josh Brolin as killer Tom Chaney and Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn (the role made famous by Wayne) the trailer brings us a bit of the flavor of the film and brings to light the fact that this film is going to be pretty amazing. The original film, based on a 1968 novel by author Charles Portis, starred Wayne in a role so popular it earned him his only Oscar.

In case you’re not familiar with the story, it concerns 14-year-old farm girl Mattie Ross who sets out to capture her father’s killer. To help, she hires tough yet abrasive U.S. Marshall Rooster Cogburn, a man with “true grit.” Over Cogburn’s objections, Maddie accompanies him on the quest and they are joined by another Marshall, La Beouf, who wants Chaney for his own reasons.

True Grit hits theaters on December 25th. Check out the trailer after the jump.

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In the new movie Red Hill starring True Blood’s Ryan Kwanten (aka Jason Stackhouse) he plays young police officer Shane Cooper who relocates to the small country town of Red Hill with his pregnant wife Alice to start a family. And if that’s where the story ended, we probably wouldn’t be talking about it today.

Instead, when news of a prison break sends the local law enforcement officers into a panic, Shane’s first day on duty rapidly turns into a nightmare. Enter Jimmy Conway, a convicted murderer serving life behind bars, who has returned to the isolated outpost seeking revenge.Isn’t that the way it always is. Those darn convicted murders.

Now caught in the middle of what will become a terrifying and bloody confrontation, Shane will be forced to take the law into his own hands if he is to survive. I’ll bet he probably does but still, looking forward to this movie anyway. It sounds pretty good.

Plus ladies, I believe Kwanten takes his shirt off at least once during the film. So see, its not just a movie for guys. Check out the trailer after the jump.

Red Hill will play Chicago International Film Festival, the Mill Valley Film Festival, Fantastic Fest, and the Philadelphia Film Festival before its November 5th release.

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The moment I started up this crazy column, people have been asking me when I would write up The Wild Bunch.  It’s not my intention to snub Sam Peckinpah (though he has been poorly represented here) at all. When I started this column, it was meant to inspire discussion of older films, and encourage people to seek out classics they hadn’t seen.  With online streaming, it’s easier to do than ever, and I tried to focus on films that were on Netflix or Hulu because the format removed any excuses you had not to watch The Searchers or Stagecoach.

The past few installments haven’t been on Netflix Instant due to the luck of the draw — if The Great Silence or Hannie Caulder arrives in the mail, how can I not write it up? — and time constraints. One of the reasons I had put off The Wild Bunch was that I was hoping it, like The Searchers, Stagecoach, and much of Sergio Leone, would pop up on Instant Watch.  But it hasn’t.  Instead, it played on TCM.  A more savvy writer may have timed this piece to go up prior to its airing.  Oh well.  Chances are, this is a film you’ve seen. But it’s always a film worth talking about.

The Wild Bunch is a significant Western, obviously. It’s the first American western to get as down, dirty, and violent as they had in Italy.  (Vera Cruz paved the way though, remember?)  Sergio Leone considered Sam Peckinpah his only rival in the genre. That said, it’s not one of my favorites — I prefer a cool flip of the serape to scorpions being eaten alive, because I like my cathartic violence to be a little more stylish. But that’s just me.

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When you discuss the Western, there’s three shadows that loom over the main street at noon — John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Gary Cooper.  The sturdy Randolph Scott (who made dozens upon dozens of Westerns) doesn’t warrant much of a mention except in exhaustive compendium books about the genre.

I suspect this is because a lot of his Westerns were the muddled, bloodless movies most people associate with the genre. He didn’t really have a script that would allow him to stretch out and strike an iconic pose like Wayne or Eastwood. The makings were there, though.

To quote THE BFI Companion to the Western (by way of Scott’s Wikipedia page):  “In his earlier Westerns … the Scott persona is debonair, easy-going, graceful, though with the necessary hint of steel. As he matures into his fifties his roles change. Increasingly Scott becomes the man who has seen it all, who has suffered pain, loss, and hardship, and who has now achieved (but at what cost?) a stoic calm proof against vicissitude.”

It’s true. Scott was, in a weird way, his own icon or character — this stalwart and sad survivor of many a gunfight.   I think this is what makes Ride the High Country so affecting. Like The Shootist or Unforgiven,  Scott is looking back at the long and dusty trail, and wondering what it all meant and whether it mattered.  It seems particularly poignant for him since he was so overshadowed by successors and competitors.

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The Western genre has plenty of subgenres. There’s deconstructionist Westerns, post apocalyptic Westerns, spaghetti Westerns, classic Westerns, and so on. I’ve found you can also split the entire genres into two character categories — the young gunfighter, or the aging lawman / gunfighter.   It seems to me that you don’t see a lot of the latter in the heydays of the classic Western — the 1940s and ’50s — but as the stalwarts of the era aged, we started seeing more elegiac  tales come into vogue.

While John Wayne and Gary Cooper still maintained their crackling or saintly demeanor in movies like The Train Robbers or Vera Cruz, the stories still reflected that they were a little older, a little slower, and much grayer.  Movies such The Professionals and Lonesome Dove or even the recent Appaloosa spend a fair amount of plot wistfully thinking about the good old days.

Sam Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country falls in the same vein. Aging lawman Steve Judd (Joel McCrea) is hired to escort a shipment of gold from a mining camp. The film gently pokes fun at his age (he’s utterly bewildered by the modernizing town) and the townsfolk are pretty blunt about it. He has a great reputation, but is he too old for the job?

By chance, Judd meets up with his pal Gil Westrum (Randolph Scott) who works for dimes as a gunfighter in a circus sideshow.   Westrum agrees to lend his gun to the mission, and brings in a young partner named Heck Longtree (Ron Starr) to assist.  What Judd doesn’t know, however, is that old age and circus living have changed Westrum for the worse.

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In The Pardoner’s Tale, three drunk scallywags stumble out of a pub in the middle of the Black Death.  In their alcohol inspired brilliance, they decide to go looking for Death so they can kill him in retaliation.  A strange old man hears their request, and informs them they can find Death beneath a particular tree.

When they arrive, they find not the Grim Reaper figure they (and readers) were expecting, but a bag of gold.   Greed overtakes them, and they wind up killing each other.

MacKenna’s Gold is that story. It’s also a remake of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I would argue that Geoffrey Chaucer was able to get “Gold is death, greed is bad” a lot more effectively and simply than either film, but that’s just me. Besides, if MacKenna’s Gold stripped the movie down to its essentials, you wouldn’t have a corny theme song (which was at the heart of long running David Letterman gag), ponderous narration, psychedelic effects, and terrible miniature work.

You also wouldn’t have gotten to see Omar Sharif or Julie Newmar naked. What? Yes. And you thought gratuitous nudity didn’t exist before the 1970s.

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There’s something a bit sad in seeing a grimy spaghetti western after Quentin Tarantino has already had his way with it. This is a film I would have liked to have discovered at 1am on a cable channel, the better to marvel at its split-screen flashbacks and Morricone score.  But that was not to be. Instead, I saw this film by way of Kill Bill, which lifts best parts, and runs with them.

The plot of Death Rides a Horse is exceedingly simple and familiar.  Bill Meceita (John Phillip Law) watches his family butchered by a gang of outlaws, and grows up vowing to avenge them.  A few dusty canyons away, Ryan (Lee Van Cleef) has just been let out of prison, and is hunting the gang with dreams of extortion dancing in his angel eyes. Ryan refuses to work with Bill, but they end up crossing and recrossing paths anyway.  Sometimes they help the other out, sometimes they double cross, but it always ends with one of them being stranded in the desert.

Death Rides A Horse is not a great spaghetti western.   It wears its Leone homages heavy on its sleeve — the relationship between Ryan (Lee Van Cleef) and Bill Meceita (John Phillip Law) is a pale imitation between Manco and Col. Mortimer in A Few Dollars More, with lots of “old man!” and “boy!” thrown around.

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Forget 1980s action films, forget 300.  Westerns are the genre that set the highest and hardest expectations for manhood. I hesitate to say they’re unrealistic ones, though, since these are all things people actually did to survive.

Which is a very roundabout way of saying that I’m going to amend my “Dream Man” to be a Clint Eastwood kind of guy who can also survive the uncharted forests of the West with just a piece of twine. And one leg. A Zachary Bass, Man in the Wilderness kind of guy.

Man in the Wilderness takes place in 1820, and no further West than some dim point past Missouri and the Mississippi.   It’s not a period you see visited very often in the genre, and I suspect it’s because just contemplating it — vague regions still known only as “Spain”,  “Oregon Territory” and “Missouri Territory” — is rather terrifying.

Reading accounts of the first settlers is pretty harrowing, Heart of Darkness stuff.  There were forests back then, forests so thick you couldn’t get your wagon through without hacking for hours on end. And then you died of diphtheria.

If a bear didn’t get you first. That’s what happened to Zachary Bass (Richard Harris), and he knew what he was doing.

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Welcome back to Western Wednesdays!  I apologize for losing sight of the trail last week — but let us be stern frontiersmen and women, and not dwell on past failings.

This past week, everyone (including myself) has been eating up the wild wild West in the form of Red Dead Redemption.  I’ve spent hours herding cattle, taming mustangs, and shooting horse thieves, thoroughly enjoying the experience of playing in this genre rather than simply watching it.   So when it came time to pick a film for this week, it was tempting to go for one that reflected the gritty nature of the game.

But then I thought hey, why not go for the exact opposite of Red Dead Redemption? Why not delve into a corner of the genre I’ve dodged thus far, and visit the singing cowboys?   Surely, there was no one more unlike the scarred John Marston than Gene Autry.  So, I selected Tumbling Tumbleweeds and prepared for some wholesome, musical fun.

Now, I had a very specific image of the singing cowboy. They were squeaky clean guys in pretty, fringe decorated shirts and ornamental gunbelts. They had horses with cute names.   They never got dirty, and their movie plots centered around rescuing lost little dogies or kids who wandered onto the prairie. If they shot a gun, it was never to kill, but to startle or warn.

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When your work spreads as far across the  digital range as mine does, it can occasionally provide a nice bit of synergy. Or repetition.  It depends on which word you want to use, I suppose. After watching Hombre last week, I resolved I would seek out as many of Elmore Leonard’s Western adaptations as I could. The first on my list was the original 3:10 t0 Yuma, which I’ve never managed to watch in its entirety.

And what happens? I joined Matt Raub on The Flickcast this week, and was called upon to recommend a movie. With Russell “Robin Hood” Crowe on the brain and Leonard queued up for Western Wednesday, only one came to my screen-burnt brain: James Mangold’s remake of 3:10 to Yuma.  I promptly kicked myself after. Talk about beating a dead horse, and using up your good material.

But it couldn’t have worked out better. Delmer Daves’ 3:10 To Yuma is an entirely different animal than Mangold’s, and neither of them have much in common with Leonard’s original short story. If you’re a film nerd (and especially if you’re an aspiring director or screenwriter), you couldn’t find an easier compare and contrast exercise than this.

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One of my biggest misconceptions going into this feature was that Westerns never tackled the topic of racism. (You may call me a brainwashed and judgmental liberal if you like. I don’t mind.)  I lumped them all in with The Searchers – which, incidentally, wasn’t as racist as I remembered but isn’t exactly condemning its characters’ biases either.

But a lot of Westerns tackle it.  They just tend to examine it through the dewy and sad eyes of the white man such as Jimmy Stewart’s Broken Arrow.    Hombre ups the ante by showing discrimination through the painfully blue eyes of Paul Newman.   How can anyone look down on those pool colored irises? You’d have to be really evil.  And boy, are the white people of Hombre evil.

Based on a novel by Elmore Leonard, Hombre introduces us to John Russell (Newman), a white man who was raised by Apaches and considers himself one of them.  When his adopted father dies, and leaves him a boarding house, he bristles at the suggestion that he relearn to walk and talk as a white man.  He sells the boarding house, and is on his way back out via stagecoach, but he can’t escape prejudice that easily.

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Some kids find a magical creature — perhaps Frankenstein’s Monster or an extra-terrestrial — who sends them on a wild and magical adventure where they learn life lessons. Other kids find Lee Marvin, and embark on a wild and wacky adventure where they become bank robbers. Only one of these youthful scenarios has a happy ending. But what do you expect when you find Marvin copiously bleeding outside of your barn?

The Spikes Gang initially sells itself as a lighthearted, Cat Ballou type of Western. Will (Gary Grimes), Les (Ron Howard), and Tod (Charles Martin Smith) decide to be kindly and patch Harry Spikes (Marvin) up. They do the typical teen thing, and hide him away from their parents, bringing him clothes, food, and money.

He generously turns down the money, revealing that he’s a well-padded bank robber, and sells the boys tales of silk shirts, women, Cuban cigars, and expensive bourbon. They’re drooling. Who wouldn’t? Marvin could use that raspy voice to tell me the sky was green, and I’d ride off with him in a heartbeat.  (Or live in polygamy — but that’s another Marvin movie.)

But these are better boys than I, and they morosely watch Spikes ride off.  The damage has been done, though, and those tales of bourbon and babes prey on their young, impressionable minds.  Their grubby, poor, and sternly Christian lives seem more unbearable than before, and it takes only one belt-whipping before they ride out into the sunrise.   For farm boys, they’re woefully unprepared, and it isn’t long before they’re starving and desperate enough to do like Spikes would do, and rob a bank.

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“What did you expect? ‘Welcome, sonny’?  ‘Make yourself at home’? ‘Marry my daughter’? You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know . . . morons.” — Blazing Saddles

But dang, did they cut a dashing figure in a gray uniform. I’m talking about you, Rock Hudson. Look at the rakish bend of your hat brim! Aren’t you just the handsomest Confederate I’ve seen since Bill Compton traded his uniform for a pair of fangs!

One of my new cinematic fascinations (if you’ll forgive such a pompous label) is the way Hollywood and pop culture imagines the Civil War. It’s not something I ever thought about beyond Gone With the Wind,  Firefly, and True Blood, but it’s an intriguing subset of American culture.

Since no cannonball has been left unturned when it comes to the War Between the States, I’m sure there are already twelve books about this very topic. If there’s not, well, maybe I will write one when Western Wednesdays is through.

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Before there was Avatar, before there was even Dances With Wolves, there was Broken Arrow.

I wasn’t expecting much out of this film. I picked it solely because it had Jimmy Stewart, and he’s been missing from this feature for too long. I knew from the description that it was about the wars with the Apache, who have always been the genre’s favorite villainous redskins. Again, I wasn’t expecting much.

If there was one thing that was pounded into my head in college, it was that no movie ever portrayed Native Americans fairly. They were all John Wayne propaganda pieces that justified our rape and pillage of the land over and over again. It was one of those little facts that justified my disdain for Western movies for years.

But it turns out my American history classes weren’t entirely right, at least in the case of one film. Broken Arrow was the first film to actually portray the Native Americans in a sympathetic and fair light, and while it stumbles in authenticity, it deserves an A for effort. The fact that it comes from one of Hollywood’s stauncher Republicans (Stewart was a proud conservative) is a nice surprise.

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