A Lifetime of Rewatches (Thus Far)

 

Ms. 38

 

Mystery Cowboy

Grandad shot a photo of a cowboy sometime in 1940. The costume looks pretty professional, and he seems to be on stage. An actor or musician on a publicity tour? 
 

Boardwalk Bandit

Bang
Bang
Ugh, argh
Ya got me
Ya yella bastard
Back-shootin' bandit, go to---ack

 

Harper's Dry Goods

Transforming the glasses wipes into a roof and walls for Harper's Dry Goods wasn't as difficult or messy as I expected. 

I guess it's kind of neat that you can see the frame through the walls and roof. Did dry goods buildings in the old west ever use cloth for walls or floors? Maybe it helped coffee grounds and the like stay dry . . . 

Please don't steal our dry goods! 

Dry Goods, Roofless

I have assembled Harper's Dry Goods for my Old West town, but there's something missing--the roof (and walls). The kit came with three packs of glasses wipes, which I'm supposed to coat in white glue and then spread over the roof and wall frames. That's going to be a messy job, but if I do it right, I may wind up with something more interesting than the typical wooden slats seen on other Old West buildings. 
 

A Red Barn

I put together this MDF barn kit but found the colour unappealing. Barns should be red, but I didn't want to use acrylic paint for fear I'd cover up the lines etched into the MDF that make it appear as though the barn is made of boards. Instead, I used ink wash. You can see the boards, but my application of the wash isn't exactly even. Good enough for tabletop play, though. 

 

Hardware Store Interior

Having built several Old West buildings, I've now started using various odds and ends to give the interior spaces a little verisimilitude. The interior of this hardware store features some extra sledgehammers from Fallout: Wasteland Warfare and a collection of odds and ends left over from a variety of miniature kits. 
 

Mick's (UPDATED WITH APOLOGY)

Today I finished assembling and painting this Old West building. I decided to style it as a hole-in-the-wall bar, run by an Irish immigrant. 

EDIT: Sean rightfully points out below that "Mick" is often used as a slur against the Irish. I knew this, but had somehow completely forgotten it when I painted the building and blogged about it. I apologized for this embarrassing mistake in the comments, but I repeat it here for posterity: I'm genuinely sorry for my thoughtlessness. I'm leaving this post up as a reminder to myself to be smarter about this sort of thing. 

Blood Shed

In a parallel universe, a different version of me is enjoying a successful, if notorious, career as a filmmaker. The latest hit from his Paranoid Productions studio is Blood Shed, currently garnering attention not because of its story, but its unconventional style. In Blood Shed, Paranoid-me grafts modern explicit violence effects to an otherwise mid-20th century aesthetic, creating an uncanny effect disturbing audiences all over Earth-E (for Excessive Violence). 

Blood Shed is a Technicolor western set in a lonely corner of 1870s New Mexico Territory. Horst Horseman is carving farmland from desert scrub, and against all odds, he is on the verge of success. The harvest to come is poised to be his most successful yet, and he is eager to share the bounty with other settlers and their Navajo neighbours. 

But just as his crops ripen, Horst is set upon by a roving band of banjo-strumming bandits who call themselves the Banjo Bandit Band. Horst offers the bandits fresh fruits, vegetables, and water from his hard-won well, but the bandits aren't here for charity--they're here for plunder. After first taunting Horst with a truly dreadful banjo performance, they beat him senseless and toss him into the woodshed, staining it all over with blood--hence the film's title. 

Anytime from the dawn of cinema through the 1950s would generally treat this violence tastefully, either cutting away from the action to let the audience imagine it for themselves or bloodlessly pantomiming the action. In Blood Shed, however, we see every punch, kick, and banjo-clobbering in rapturous slow motion, with every spray of ichor, goose egg, blackened eye, and broken bone captured with intense realism. 

The Banjo Bandit Band leaves Horst for dead in a slowly spreading pool of his own blood as they steal his crops and burn his humble homestead to the ground. Miraculously, the fire does not spread to the titular Blood Shed, and Horst's broken body is discovered by his horrified neighbors. 

Moved by Horst's plight, several of Horst's fellow settlers team up with sympathetic Navajo warriors to chase down the Banjo Bandit Band. As it turns out, they're easy to track, because they won't stop playing their banjos. The rest of the film details the running battle between the bandits and Horst's posse--really just an excuse to create graphically realistic arrow, bullet, and knife wounds in the context of a B-list midcentury western steeped in the production values of the time: some location shooting, canned music, generous use of rear projection, stilted dialogue, continuity errors, and acting ranging from merely terrible to workmanlike. In the end, Horst is avenged and his friends help him rebuild the farm. 

Alternate-Woods would later use the same technique to create similarly dissonant films noir (Teeth On a Midnight Sidewalk, Blood-Soaked Tide*), musicals (The Iced Capades, Xanadoom), comedy (The Three Stooges Go to the Hospital, The Three Stooges in Blunt Trauma), horror (There Is No Anesthesiologist in This Hospital, Castle of Stone Stairs, Brutal Fists of Frankenstein), science fiction (Magnificent Devastation, Attack of the Needlessly Sadistic Saucer Men), absurdism (Who Filled the Washing Machine with Dynamite?), and even the Oscar-winning drama Senseless Violence. 

Poor alternate Sylvia. 

*With product placement of the famous detergent

Villista Rider

 

Leaning Cowpoke

The shifting sands
Shoveled softly
Sublimate and subvert
Slim Sanderson
Sinking slowly southward
Sighing softly

Calamity Jean

 

Bluey Jones

Crusty old coot, but dependable, forthright, and honest. 
 

Villista Bandito

 

Americano Mercenario

 

A Posse of Two

 

Double Draw Down

 

Ambush at Sunset Cliff

 

Rooftop Poker

I painted eight little poker players!