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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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