9 of the Weirdest Classic Westerns & Where to Watch Them
A lot of the appeal of the Western comes from the straight-ahead storytelling: A good guy has to figure out how to stop a bad guy from destroying a small town — a problem usually solved via a gunfight on Main Street. Saving a fair maiden is optional, but preferred.
However, in the century-plus since the release of 1903’s The Great Train Robbery, generally considered the first Western film, plenty of filmmakers have opted to experiment with the formula. The classic genre has been mashed up with vampires, cannibals, time machines, Bible stories, and T-Rexes (naturally). Here are eight Westerns that truly pushed the limits of the frontier tale.
It’s often believed that Westerns only got weird after the genre began to fall out of fashion in the ’60s. But in 1938, right at the beginning of the Golden Age of Western films, we got perhaps the genuinely weirdest Western of all. The Terror of Tiny Town is a standard Western musical, following the tale of a bad guy who wants to steal cattle and seize power in a small town, and a good guy who just wants to kiss the girl but keeps getting pulled into all kind of trouble. The twist? Every cast member is a little person, a fact reflected in the film’s unfortunate tag line, “These Tom Thumbs are colossal!” and even more unfortunate sight gags (actors walking under saloon doors, riding Shetland ponies instead of horses, etc).
A perennial entry on “worst film of all time” lists, The Terror of Tiny Town was actually a hit at the time of its release, and was supposed to have sequels, but perhaps luckily, those never came to fruition.
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Cowboys and vampires have proven to be an enduring combo, in movies like Kathryn Bigelow’s 1987 Near Dark, John Carpenter’s 1998 Vampires or the 1966 horror flick Billy the Kid Versus Dracula. But it all began with Curse of the Undead, which tells the story of a Western town whose citizens are beset by a strange wasting disease… right around the same time a mysterious stranger shows up… a stranger who seems to be invulnerable to bullets. Supposedly thought up as a joke by husband-and-wife filmmaking duo Edward and Mildred Dein, the film is now thought to be the very first horror-western.
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The Wild, Wild West
Following an era where traditional Westerns were omnipresent on the tube, this show brought in hints of Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. For a series that was supposedly described by its creator as “James Bond on horseback,” it stood out. Each week, Secret Service agents James West and Artemus Gordon had to keep President Ulysses S. Grant safe from harm — a situation that often involved time machines, the search for mythical objects, and the evil contraptions created by their nemesis: mad scientist Dr. Loveless. With its combination of Western visuals and science-fiction-tinged storylines, the show is often credited as one of the major inspirations behind steampunk. In 1999, it was adapted into a film starring Will Smith and Kevin Kline, which is perhaps most remembered today due to its use of a giant robotic spider at its climax.
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Often called “the weirdest Italian Western ever” (and that’s saying something), Django Kill combines many of the classic tropes of Western movies, like singing saloon girls and outlaw gangs, with mystical plot points, like a resurrected stranger coming to town to punish depraved evildoers with golden bullets. Viewers were shocked by the film’s violence upon its release, and some of it is still quite hard to take.
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You likely know Ray Harryhausen from his brilliant stop-motion animation work on films like Jason and the Argonauts. But lesser known is his work on this film about a traveling rodeo that comes upon a hidden valley filled with ancient creatures. There’s some romantic and horse thief subplots, but let’s get real: if you’re watching this movie, it’s to watch Harryhausen’s awesome dinosaur animation, which culminates with a Western gunslinger faceoff against a T-Rex on Main Street.
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El Topo
The first movie from cult filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky is the brightest light of the countercultural “acid Western” movement of the ’60s and ’70s. In the film, the titular El Topo comes to town and engages in a series of unusual situations, such as finding a rock that gives out water, fighting a woman with a man’s voice and finding eggs hidden in the ground. Full of bizarre imagery, El Topo was big on the cult movie circuit, and John Lennon was such a fan he bought the rights to the film and gave Jodorowsky $1 million to fund his next film, The Holy Mountain.
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Greaser’s Palace
Robert Downey Sr. directed this oddity about a stranger who shows up in a small Western town, tap dances on water, raises the dead, bleeds from his hands, and is on his way to Jerusalem. Yes, Greaser’s Palace transferred the story of the life of Jesus to the Old West and filtered it through a psychedelic sensibility, with… let’s say, debatable success. The film is perhaps most notable for its appearance from a seven-year-old Robert Downey Jr., who plays a dead child resurrected at the film’s end.
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Ravenous
As vampires and cowboys have proven a winning combo, so have gunslingers and cannibals. In this black comedy-horror-Western (yes, that’s a lot of genres!), an Army captain at a remote outpost (played by Guy Pearce) investigates reports of a missing wagon train. If you’re thinking “Donner party,” well, you’re half right — though the film takes that idea to some freakier, more supernatural places. Fun Fact: Damon Albarn of Blur and Gorillaz fame did the score.
The idea of a cannibal attack in the Old West was so good it came back again in 2015’s gruesome Kurt Russell/Patrick Wilson film Bone Tomahawk.
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Cowboys & Aliens
Based on an idea that had been in development with various studios since 1997, this film attempted to update the classic Western tale by having Daniel Craig’s mysterious stranger take on Harrison Ford’s evil small town boss… until an alien invasion requires all Earthlings to band together (even the ones that the rules of Western films say should really, really hate each other). Directed by Jon Favreau and executive produced by Steven Spielberg and Ron Howard, the film was expected to be an enormous hit, but disappointing box office receipts killed any hope for planned sequels to see the light of day.
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Do you know any we missed? Let us know in the comments.
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