June 2011
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Inspirography: The Last Rites of Ransom Pride

Let’s just get this out of the way: The Last Rites of Ransom Pride is not what many would call a “good” movie. It wears its Spaghetti-Western-by-way-of-Grindhouse pedigree right out in the open. It’s a grimy, violent road-movie, with over-the-top characters and the most gossamer-thin of budgets. It is also brilliant inspirography for Far West and wicked-awesome.

The basic premise of the film is that Ransom Pride, a gun-running outlaw, gets himself killed in Mexico, and his girlfriend Juliette sets out to bring his body back home. Unfortunately, Ransom happened to kill a priest before he died — the brother of a disfigured bruja voodoo-priestess (yes, you read that right. Like I said: awesome.) who will only give back the body in return for another. Juliette plans on giving the witch Ransom’s brother, Champ. Reverend Pride, the boys’ preacher daddy, would rather see Juliette dead for tempting his sons, and enlists an old war buddy and his killers to help.

It gets stranger from there. It’s a late-period western, so we’ve got automatic pistols, early automobiles and a sidecar motorcycle. The film is full of flash-cutaway images that seem to be taken out of a Nine Inch Nails video. And, if a three-way conflict between an outlaw woman, a deranged preacher backed by hired killers, and a voodoo priestess/crimelord isn’t weird enough, the film throws in a goggle-wearing African-american bike scout, a traveling carnival that was won in a card game, a pair of siamese twins, and Peter “Tyrion Lannister” Dinklage as a dwarf packing twin sawed-off shotguns. Again with the awesome.

Take a look at the trailer and judge for yourself. The Last Rites of Ransom Pride is available on DVD and streaming from Netflix.

5 Comments

  1. RadicalAns says:

    Looks like it could be bad but in an awesome bad kind of way. Took me a minute to realize that picture was of Peter Dinklage. He kind of looks like a mini version of The Undertaker.

    • admin says:

      Yeah, when I first was describing the film to a friend, I said he was like a “miniature Rob Zombie.”

  2. wandering blade says:

    This movie sounds awesome, just my kind of flick, and the kind of campaign i would run with this game.

    We been seeing a lot of your western inspirations, and some of your “eastern” ones (mixtures of east and west such as sukiyaki and the good, the bad and the wierd), but i wonder if we will get to see some of your “straight” wuxia influences?

  3. Chris Bedford says:

    How did I miss this movie?!

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