Jimbo: The Thinking Barbarian - 17. The Amazon-Skeleton War (Part 2)!

Previously...

Theme: Guardians of the Tomb - Saxon

Mad Max Ripoffs: Six String Samurai!

Calling the greatest movie of all time, Six String Samurai, a Mad Max ripoff is a bit of a stretch as, like Albert Pyun's Radioactive Dreams, it seems to owe more to Streets of Fire than Wheels of Fire. In 1957 there was the usual nuclear war, but this time none other than Elvis Presley rose up from the ashes to become King of Lost Vegas, the last bastion of hope in the wilderness. Now the King is dead and our hero, referred to as Buddy, is marching to Lost Vegas to claim his throne.

Buddy's look could be described as "disheveled", but I'm not sure he was ever sheveled to begin with.

The movie opens with a young boy witnessing a massacre and following our bespectacled swordsman as a substitute for his late family. Buddy spends the first part of the movie trying to ditch the kid before (spoilers!) eventually warming to him (somewhat). For he knows that death is on his trail in the form of villain Top Hat.

In an inversion of ZZ Top logic, he is in fact the one in the top hat.

Few post-apocalyptic movies play as fast and loose with style, tone and logic as Six String Samurai, which slips deftly between MTV surrealism, 90s camp and neo-western cool, features a colourful array of characters ranging from cavemen who pursue our heroes in the slowest car chase ever filmed to gas mask wearing cultists who worship a wind farm, and by its final stages boldly commits to unapologetic supernatural shenanigans as Top Hat really turns out to be Death himself, or the spirit of heavy metal, or something.

You should not be permitted to attend rock concerts short of this level of drip.

My limited research (I read a couple YouTube comments) leads me to believe this gem was made on a small budget and still flopped, with no one involved in it going on to do much else, except the composer, who seems to have scored gigs in the Fast and the Furious and M*rvel C*nematic Un*verse series. But in a way this gives it a doomed cult classic cred that feels appropriate to the material. I can't see it playing the same if any of the actors had gone on to be recognisable stars.

The guy who plays Buddy is in fact great, and his anonymity in movie history makes him a real man-with-no-name archetype.

If you pay to go to a film festival you'll come away with the impression that indie productions have to be black-and-white dramas about gay cowboys eating beans. Six String Samurai shows the world what they could be instead. The fact this isn't in that 1001 Movies To See Before you Die book is a travesty typical of the state of publishing. Watch Six String Samurai.

Post-apocalypse checklist:

MOHAWKS: 0.

SHOULDER PADS: nah.

CUSTOM CARS: the cavemen drive one.

MUTANTS: there's a hip hop dwarf who leads a gang of fishing net clad guys who gargle their lines, so your guess is as good as mine.

GOGGLES: I guess the gas mask guys count.

TOTAL: 3/5 - mid post-apocalypse of the day.

Greatest Movie of All Time of the Week: Girl Shy!

While Safety Last is by far his most famous film, for me the greatest Harold Lloydkino is 1924's Girl Shy. Lloyd plays a kissless handholdless supreme gentleman writing a book about his totally fictitious love affairs in which he fantasises himself as an alpha Chad seducing such 1920s archetypes as "The Vampire" and "The Flapper". I don't know what the fuck those are supposed to be either but I'm sure it was biting social commentary at the time.

I think "The Vampire" is supposed to be like a goth girl but more theatrical.

Our hero's life improves when he meets Mary, played by semi-regular Lloyd costar Jobyna Ralston, whose name was Jobyna Ralston, which is the most 1920s name I've ever heard. Harold and Mary hit it off over a dog-concealing train ride (not an euphemism) and soon get to talking. She's soon rooting for him to sell his book but the publisher and his staff ridicule it for the /r9k/-tier greentext that it is, causing Harold to self-sabotage by dumping Mary in the fear that he's a failure and unworthy of her love. Although the movie has a happy ending, it's striking how close it comes to being 2019's The Joker instead.

Lloyd and Keaton basically invented the literally-me protagonist, but in the 1920s there was still enough hope they could plausibly make out OK - a detail that dates these pictures far more than the lack of sound.

Fortunately the publisher is persuaded to put out Harold's book as a comedic piece, so maybe Tommy Wiseau of The Room fame is a more apt comparison. This prompts the final act in which Harold must race against time to stop a heartbroken Mary from marrying a douche even the intertitles describe as forgettable, because presumably this sort of rom-com plot was seen as stale and predictable even then. No matter, though, as this self-conscious contrivance only serves as a pretext for the best high-speed action sequence in movie history, only arguably rivalled by The Road Warrior's tanker chase (yes), in which Harold burns through at least four cars, three horses, a fire engine, a tram, a motorcycle and a carriage to get to the wedding venue in time to defeat the douche and save his oneitis.

No greenscreen, no CGI, just an absolute madlad living in the moment.

Were this movie made today, a character like Harold would most likely be vilified as a hash-tag-toxic incel unworthy of love, but in the 1920s people were still permitted to be human, so Harold joins Vincent Gallo's character from Buffalo 66 in the pantheon of unreconstructed shitlords who shrugged off the grey sludge of modernity to claim their waifus in that constellation over the rainbow.