It’s hardly revolutionary to note that the American conception of the ‘Old West’ is an extremely romanticized picture of a very dark, bloody period of history, and one that most Americans have yet to come to terms with.

The fact that there’s even a *debate* over whether to acknowledge the genocide(s) of the various indigenous nations of North America indicates that we have a long way to go before we can deal with that period honestly.

Still, the shine has come off it quite a bit in popular culture. Gone are the days when children were indoctrinated into concepts of American masculinity and nationality by watching an endless parade of sanitized White Hats vs. Black Hats western action heroes on television every evening. Nor does contempoary Hollywood churn out a procession of feel-good movies about the noble iconoclastic gunslingers of the Old West, bringing ‘law’ to the lawless; in fact, if anything, the backlash against that whitewashed imagery has produced some of the greatest Western films, like ‘The Good, the Bad and the Ugly’.

Given all that, it’s worth noting that Westerns have been revived a bit recently by fusing them with ugly Anti-Zombie prejudice. I saw a Ken Foree Anti-Differently Animated Spaghetti Western called ‘Dead Bones’ at The Dark Carnival a few years ago now, and Marvel Zombies 5 featured a Zombie Apocalypse set in the Old West, for example.

It’s an uncommon marriage, but not unheard of.

We have a new entry in this Anti-Zombie Western subgenre today, it seems:

It’s 1849, and a bounty hunter in the old west’s Jamestown, gets more than he bargained for, when he finds the town over-run by zombies – victims of a virus unleashed by a meteor found in the gold rush.

Cowboys and native Indians unite to fight the undead horde, as guns blaze and mutants growl in this showdown for survival in the weird wild west.

Yes… I guess they thought it might make for a feel-good take on the Old West if you could contrive a situation where white settlers aren’t slowly annexing the entire continent away from its indigenous inhabitants; reasoning roughly along the lines of: “I know, let’s have BOTH sides pick on some Zombies!”

Repulsive. You can’t fight prejudice with prejudice! This isn’t catharsis or even black comedy, it’s just shifting the ‘acceptable’ target of cinematic massacre to its current boogeyman, the Zombie. In the 60s, it was Cowboys & Indians, and today, it’s ‘Cowboys & Zombies’.

For shame, people. For shame.

We’ve embedded the trailer below so that you can be equally appalled:

Tags: Movies

This entry was posted by John Sears on Wednesday, June 15th, 2011 at 2:44 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.