Sunday, January 06, 2019

343. Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold

343. Yellow Hair and the Fortress of Gold aka Yellow Hair and the Pecos Kid (1984)
Director: Matt Climber
Writers: John Kershaw and Matt Climber from a story by Matt Climber
From: Cult Cinema (only 1 remains!)

A Western adventure of of Yellow Hair and the Pecos Kids searching for fabled gold mine of a lost tribe.

From the writer/director of Hundra and Single Room Furnished, I initially thought this would be a sequel to Hundra. The title, as a reviewer on IMDB notes, suggests a sword-and-sorcery story and the glace I had at the capsule description made me think it was following up that movie. Instead this is trying to style itself as an homage/pastiche of the old western serials. That seems like an odd choice for a film in 1984, but remember that Star Wars had mad all kinds of money by revamping the Flash Gordon serials as full features and Indiana Jones, based on post-WWII adventure serials, was about to come out with its second feature. Mining the nostalgia for serials looked like a money-making prospect. What the producers failed to recognize was those movies featured, in some combination, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fischer, Steven Spielberg, John Williams, and amazing special effects.

This movie does not, although the action set pieces do feature some nice stunt work. Too bad they weren’t filmed with any panache. Also too bad that the hero (who shouldn’t be the hero) is dressed to look like Han Solo minus the vest.

We see you movie. We know what you’re trying to do. It’s not working.

Since this movie is trying to ape Star Wars’ serial affectation, it has to invoke the same genre. Star Wars uses the crawl. This has the silhouettes and sounds of a rowdy crowd of kids in a movie theater sitting down to watch the Yellow Hair and the Pecos Kid serial. The main characters are introduced on-screen as we hear the crowd reacting (including uproarious laughter at one of the villains being coded as gay). After watching the movie, this opening added nothing. We don’t have any additional necessary context especially since the character notes in the opening are all personality traits. We can tell what the characters are like by the actors’ performances. Telling us someone’s “charming” doesn’t tell us they’re charming. Seeing them be charming does.

Anyway, I’m descending into a rant which would be at once easy in response to many aspects of this movie as well as unwarranted—the movie isn’t substantial enough to maintain a good rage. In other words, there’s plenty to get mad at, but what’s the point?

We open with some bandits trying to find the lost tribe. The tribe instead finds them, injures the bandit leader, and captures everyone else (doing real injury to horses in the process. Not stunts, actual horses actually getting hurt. Fuck you movie). Two of the men are tortured in pretty grisly ways and then have their heads dipped in molten gold while still alive.

The bandit leader returns to the Mexican base where the evil gay Colonel is holding the Pecos Kid, our hero (cause he’s the white guy). The three of them were in cahoots to steal all the gold, but had locked the Kid up in an act of betrayal.

Back at the Apache camp, Yellow Hair is talking to her mother. Yellow is so named because she’s blonde, born as a result of a white man raping her mother. Or so her mother told her. Later we learn that Yellow is actually the lost princess of the lost tribe, product of the union between the tribe’s princess and a Texan, kidnapped by her Apache mother. I don’t know how the rape figures into it—if it’s just part of her cover story or something that also happened. The movie invoking it and shrugging it off is kind of gross.

Yellow’s mother reveals that the Kid, who she also raised as a son, is in jail. She asks Yellow to save him and Yellow agrees when her mother realizes the Kid stole a deer horn with a map to the tribe and a gold nugget that she needs to pass into the other world upon her death.

To be clear, our hero stole not only a relic from an old woman who raised him as her own but also a religious item that she needs for her funeral ceremony. What a dick.

Yellow saves him while the bandit leader sneaks into the Apache camp and kills Yellow’s mother. The Kid gave the gold to a prostitute at some saloon so the pair head there to retrieve it. Stuff that’s supposed to be exciting but instead is aggravating goes down and Yellow learns that she’s actually the lost tribe’s lost princess and the pair set out to find them. Eventually Yellow gets captured, the Kid finds his way into the temple, and Yellow tells him she’s going to marry the leader. The Kid can take his gold and leave. He does, but then Yellow learns that she’s going to be sacrificed. Just before her heart is cut out, the Kid returns, shoots the gun out of the leader’s hand, and the underground temple starts to cave in.

By the way, all those action set pieces that got kind of aggravating were aggravating because of the Kid. He’s useless and Yellow is a badass. Constantly. So of course the end of the movie has to correct for that by having him save her because she wouldn’t be able to do it otherwise. She’s completely incapable of saving herself up to and including sitting up and getting off the altar before a rock falls and crushes it. This is an example of ideology. There’s nothing wrong with her getting into a situation she didn’t anticipate and him coming to save her. Earlier there’s a sequence where she falls off a stage coach and is balancing herself between some of the horses. The Kid helps her up (and then falls into the same space himself). That’s not ideology, that’s an action scene. Where ideology comes in is that final sequence where she can’t do anything herself. Cause she’s not the hero cause she’s not the guy. Her being threatened by the tribe and him coming back to initiate the escape scene is fine. Again, that’s just an action scene. That she can’t even sit up and then be a party in her own escape is where the ideology becomes plain: women need men to save them.

Remember when I said it’d be easy to rant? I’m leaving out the killing of snakes on screen and the problematic elements of the Western in general. If I were inclined to write a longer piece about this movie, which I’m not, I’d be focusing on how it’s sort of critical of colonialism, but paints white people—the colonizers—as the victims of colonialism, but not in a Kipling-esque White Man’s Burden way. The movie’s a mish-mash of odd concepts that they didn’t intend to have there. You can read this flick as being a series of Freudian slips.

But, yeah, they get away, get cornered by the Colonel and the bandit leader (who’s constantly getting injured and persisting in increased states of disrepair. It’s something that’s obviously supposed to be a joke but never comes off as a joke, which is strange in and of itself. It’s never an issue of the joke failing, it just never seems like it’s supposed to be a joke even though it’s obviously a joke a la the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail). The movie ends on a serial-style cliffhanger showing scenes from the next episode and asking variations of “Will our heroes…?” THE END

Obviously this was not the worst movie I’ve seen. It moved along well enough and the action sequences, as I said, had some good stunt work. The movie just missed the mark in so many ways and in such strange ways. Like the running gag of the bandit leader never being played as a gag. I spent a lot of the movie watching with a tilted head and raised eyebrow—I was just confused.

This wasn’t helped by the Kid who’s supposed to be a roguish poker-playing, gun-slinging, swindler. I have no beef with that kind of character; I like a lovable rogue. However he’s responsible for the plot’s inciting incident: robbing his surrogate mother of part of her funeral rite for the sake of a deal that leads to her murder. And he’s never called out for this. Yellow never jumps down his throat to tell him he stole mom’s crucifix and got her killed! Characters can make morally reprehensible choices and even be heroes after making those choices, but they gotta show remorse and work to make things right. He’s never even told he’s a piece of shit—and then he rides his horse through her funeral!

I’m not recommending this movie because it’s just not that special, but I also need to emphasize that it’s not worth seeing even for shock value. Despite what I’ve written here and how I am gobsmacked by a lot of what I’m thinking about, the movie is not full of WTF moments. This isn’t a case of seeing-is-believing, it’s a competently-made Crown production designed to run as a B-feature in drive-ins and cheap theaters. It’s nothing special. Upon reflection, there’s plenty of “wait, what?” going on, but that doesn’t make for a fun viewing experience, just fun ranting with friends after you’ve finished watching. Don’t take the time, though. See something good instead.

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