yumm yumm .. i seem to be getting all the worst shit these days.
i watched
Soldier Blue -
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066390/
There's a small cinema d'essai near where i grew up, where both me and my father used to go a lot. He was a film distributor, you see, so he would go a couple of times a week. I saw many good films there, but none of them were mainstream films. Lots of foreign film, weird avant-garde movies, minor productions that didn't have a big distributor. Nothing terribly obscure, but in the 80s that was as close to art film as you could get.
He did go to see Soldier Blue and when i asked him how it was, he was very abrupt and said he was shocked at "the violence".
Soldier Blue is a 1970 film, but this was a re-release, around 1985 or so. I was young, and the movie poster - showing a nude, tied indian girl - had me intrigued. But i was worried about watching something so violent, that it shocked my dad that much.
Weeeelll it turns out he was full of shit.
Soldier blue is a lame-ass "revisionist" western, although it's revisionist in only painting the white guys as bad, but forget any semblance of realism. After a brief introduction a'la Hateful Eight, the indians massacre a convoy carrying a blonde lady, and the only survivors are the two leads, Peter Strauss (the Soldier Blue, apparently a US Cavalry regiment soldier) and Candice Bergen (Cresta Lee, "blonde object of sexual desire"). They have to "escape", crossing dangerous indian territory to bring back the blonde.
The soldier is a dumbass. While every other soldier in this film is reasonably normal, Strauss plays a hyper-puritanical, quasi-pacifist that is more out of place in this setting than a UFO would be. Bergen obviously plays the wise-to-the-world, provocative sex object with a keen mind, and, while she does overact quite a bit, she's not bad, nor bad looking.
They have to Stick Together(tm) despite their differences.
They cross the place-to-escape-from, where both are tested, Strauss is more of a complete dumbass, Bergen is .. not terrible, and eventually they get there, where the other soldiers kill a bunch of indians while Strauss looks for a moral of sorts.
Essentially it's a classic western pewpew the cowboys kill the bad indians except that PLOT TWIST both are bad. wow. Such innovation. Acting, costumes, sets, direction, camerawork, all are awful. The story is bland and boring, the action is ridiculous, i'm talkin' Kirk vs The Gorn ridiculous, and Bergen doesn't even get her tits out, which is a disgrace if you ask me, after titillating my 14yo fantasy with that movie poster. There is one indian lady getting her clothes ripped off at the very end but it's plot irrelevant.
And it's a film that has no cultural value, has aged badly, and doesn't even have the shock value it may once have had. Not after you've watched Bone Tomahawk.
My vote: a lame
5/10