Earlier this summer, I reviewed a little microbudget mobster film called The Life I Lived, finding it well-acted but a bit confused in the writing. I mention this because that film shares a large portion of its creative team with Cowboy Killer, directed by first-timer Jason Baustin (the earlier film’s director of photography), who co-wrote with Jaymes Camery and Ben Solenberger (the earlier film’s writer-director). And while the newer film suffers a bit from the sense that the screenplay might have been well-suited to at least one more draft – just like its older brother – there’s enough going on to keep that from ruining the movie.
The titular cowboy killer is Roy Thompson (Paul Bailey), who does not, as you might suppose, kill cowboys; he is a cowboy who kills, and then hallucinates that his victims, still alive and hale, have decided to become his best friend ever. Seems that Roy was a bit shunned back in the day, although that becomes clear quite a bit on in the movie. Prior to that, all we know about the character is that he’s a pretty sick bastard who abducts a teenage girl in the film’s opening minutes, and later spends some time making out with her detached head.
As that image probably makes obvious, Cowboy Killer has a fairly nasty exploitation flavor to it, which is of course a huge compliment around these parts. It’s apparent from fairly early on that Baustin isn’t trying to make a serious thriller, so much as a Grand Guignol exercise in grossing the audience out, playfully at times, and in this he is as successful as he could possibly be, given the circumstances. It’s a bit hard to make a completely effective gore picture when the make-up budget only allows for dying corn syrup red and splashing it on windshields, but I admire the filmmakers for even mounting the attempt, and at the very least, they’ve ended up with a good calling card.
The other point at which the low budget reveals itself, I’m sorry to say, is in the cast. There’s hardly a single performance that I’d call “good”, and several which are straight-up terrible, marred by goofy accents and silly mincing around. I’d not be so crude as to name names. Let it suffice to say that it was, at times, virtually impossible to pay attention to the movie, so profoundly irritating were some of the performances.
It took me some time to figure out whether it was the acting or the dialogue that made the characters seem so flat to me, and I think I’d lean towards the former; but it must be said that the writing is generally a bit flabby. The dialogue is heavily indebted to the school of thought which says that lewd things are funny, and the characters tend to sound alike; but the bigger problem, by far, is just the structure of the piece. After a time, we stop focusing on the killer, and more on the attempts to stop him; attempts mounted not only by a pair of standard-issue tough cops, but also by the sincerely irritating duo of comic relief cable guys, who are in the event neither comic nor relieving. This culminates in a seemingly endless scene about 20 minutes from the end, in which something like nine or ten different heroes all end up in a circle talking about how to stop the cowboy; it’s absurdly anti-dramatic, particularly given that not a single member of the audience is there to see the killings stop.
But outside of that one (long) moment, the script never sags so badly that Baustin can’t hide it with a fast pace and generally light-hearted tone (as exploitation goes, this is definitely the goofy kind, not the grimy kind). I’d very much love to see him direct somebody else’s script; he’s clearly got an eye, maybe not so much of an ear, and though his debut is hardly flawless, it’s a lot easier to watch than a great many microbudget horror films.