Rent Six-String Samurai (1998)

Rock Chop Socky - Six-String Samurai review by Count Otto Black

I did try to like this movie. Any film which attempts to combine "Mad Max 3", "The Warriors", "The Bed Sitting Room", "The Seventh Seal", and every samurai movie or spaghetti western you can think of is at the very least going to be wildly imaginative! The trouble, is, it's too ambitious for its own good. Many scenes are played as comedy of the broadest kind, yet the script contains almost no actual jokes. Almost everybody is a one-dimensional live-action cartoon character, and the cast, most of whom don't seem to be real actors, overact wildly, pull grotesque faces, and nearly all talk in silly voices or just make incoherent noises. And since a movie this cheap, even one with a rock'n'roll theme, can't possibly afford to use existing songs by anyone famous, the music is supplied by The Red Elvises, who play almost non-stop throughout the film, even if the scene would have been better with no music at all. Let's just say that, if you don't happen to be a huge fan of The Red Elvises, this may begin to irritate you well before the end.

Is this a comedy? Since it features a car-chase so slow that at one point the pursuers overtake their prey on foot, during which cartoonish savages who talk in ooga-booga noises inexplicably try to stop the hero's car by pelting it with sweeties, one would think so. And then, as in quite a few scenes throughout the film, everybody suddenly realizes that the knockabout slapstick got boring some time ago, and our hero's comically inept adversaries pull out real weapons and are effortlessly slaughtered in seconds. Then again, the violence is almost always bloodless, or if it's supposed to be genuinely nasty, offscreen, and frequently accompanied by an attempt at humor, so there's often a jarring mood conflict.

This kind of thing can be done well - "Shaolin Soccer" and "Kung Fu Hustle" do it magnificently - but it isn't done particularly well here. The fight scenes, of which there are a great many, some of them very long, are amateurish and repetitive, the hero lacks any charisma, and too many of the characters are downright annoying. Also, the symbolism is both overdone - the main villain is literally Death - and confusing. Is the hero a badass reincarnation of Buddy Holly? I think he's supposed to be, but it's never made clear. And although Death constantly talks about Buddy's guitar as if it's The One Ring, it's never revealed why it matters, or even if it matters. So full marks for trying to do something different, but ultimately this is no more than a quirky oddity.