PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphyscial*
Director Phil Smoot and B-western star Lash LaRue should have quit collaborating after producing the mildly entertaining horror-thriller THE DARK POWER. I don't know if ALIEN OUTLAW made less money than POWER, but for whatever reason, Smoot directed no more feature films (though he remained involved in film production), and LaRue only made three more movies in marginal roles.
The film provides a mild salute to the long-vanished days of Hollywood's B-westerns, both through LaRue's presence and that of Sunset Carson, another toiler in the oater category. But the movie's "high concept" is that a much younger heir to the western tradition, trick-shooter Jesse Jamison (Kari Anderson), gets challenged to a duel by an "alien outlaw." Why does some alien outlaw want to shoot it out with Jesse? The world will never know, for the script is utterly uninterested in developing the ET's motives, even to the extent one sees in PREDATOR (surprisingly, not on screens until two years later).
Unfortunately, what the script is interested in doing is burning up time until the concluding duel, and it does so by having Jesse run into a lot of "funny" characters. I'm going to guess that a lot of these people were unpaid amateurs, because they overacted so horribly, I almost missed the films of Ted V, Mikels. At least when Mikels would turn loose rank amateurs upon filmdom, they were confined to reciting their lines very flatly and dully, with no attempts to "act." Surprisingly, Anderson-- the heroine, whom one might expect to put herself out there-- barely projects any character at all.
OUTLAW is a film of just two curiosity-points: the presence of two B-western actors-- who predictably are better actors here than they were in their old flicks-- and the film's anticipation of PREDATOR.
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