Western

Ghosts of Mars

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  • Title: John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars
  • IMDb: link

Not exactly the best of John Carpenter‘s career, Ghosts of Mars gives us Natasha Henstridge as the lone surviving member of a squad (which also includes Jason Statham and Pam Grier) on a terraformed Mars sent to retrieve a prisoner (Ice Cube) from a small mining town. Told mostly through flashbacks, with inserts for Lieutenant Melanie Ballard’s deposition, the officer tells an outrageous story that somehow doesn’t seem to raise any red flags for the tribunal who offer few questions, and even less skepticism, about her tale of miners possessed by Martian ghosts slaughtering an entire town.

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Hang ‘Em High

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  • Title: Hang ‘Em High
  • IMDb: link

Hang 'Em High

Flashback Friday takes us back to the Old West. Set in the middle of Clint Eastwood‘s cowboy phase, Hang ‘Em High starred Eastwood as a rancher who becomes a hanging victim, then a criminal, then a marshal, then a vigilante, and then back to a marshal again. A few years after completing the Man with No Name Trilogy and before High Plains Drifter and The Outlaw Josey Wales, the film doesn’t rank among the best of Eastwood’s time in the genre taking a little too long to get the lynched man, wrongly assumed guilty by a posse and left for dead, back on the road of vengeance and revenge.

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Calamity Jane

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  • Title: Calamity Jane (2024)
  • IMDb: link

Calamity Jane

A low-budget Western more notable for the reunion of Arrow stars Emily Bett Rickards and Stephen Amell than anything else, Rickards stars as Calamity Jane out for revenge after Wild Bill Hickock (Amell in pretty awful wig) is killed in a Deadwood saloon while she’s cooling her heels in a jail cell. After breaking out, Jane hunts down the man responsible (Primo Allon) who hires a crazy murderer (Priscilla Faia) and her brothers to provide protection on his way through the lawless Badlands.

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The Magnificent Seven

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  • Title: The Magnificent Seven
  • IMDb: link

The Magnificent Seven

While not on the level of the film which inspired it, The Magnificent Seven amps up the humor to provide one of the most beloved Hollywood westerns which itself has been remade, adapted, and repackaged in TV and movies ranging from Three Amigos to Ocean’s Eleven. Adapting Seven Samurai to the Old West, we get an outlaw leader terrorizing a small village just south of the border. Heading north to buy guns, instead the three villagers return with seven gunmen to fight off Calvera’s (Eli Wallach) men.

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The Quick and the Dead

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  • Title: The Quick and the Dead
  • IMDb: link

The Quick and the Dead

Sam Raimi knows how to make a B-movie. While 1995’s The Quick and the Dead was seen as both a critical and box office failure, Raimi’s revisionist western has earned some respect over the years coming to be classified as a cult classic. Sharon Stone stars as The Lady, a gunfighter who arrives in the town of Redemption to enter a gunfighting competition. However, her true motives lie more with an undisclosed vendetta against the town’s owner John Herod (Gene Hackman) than winning any competition.

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