In all likelihood, this weekend’s likely #1 film, “The Expendables,” is not really a movie you need to see before you die. But if you are going to take that long, “Wild Bunch” style, walk to the multiplex, this totally entertaining 15 minute mash-up of numerous gratuitously violent, gun crazy, flicks from Steven Santos, Aaron Aradillas, and good ol’ Matt Zoeller Seitz, sponsored by The House Next Door, is just the thing to get you in the correct spirit.
Lock & Load from Steven Santos on Vimeo.
Pretty magnificent. Also, Nice to Luke Wilson from “Bottle Rocket” in there. Fun coincidence considering the post below this one.
I guess it’s partly because of production code censorship, but it’s interesting that, while guns and movies have always gone hand-in-gunslinging-hand, the extreme fetishizing of the things seems to have begun about the time the production code truly died, paving the way for arguably the first truly ultraviolent big studio film, 1969’s “The Wild Bunch.” It also happens to be, I’m pretty sure, the second oldest film featured here (after ’66’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly”) with one obvious exception from the birth of the movies right at the end. Or maybe I’m wrong. If anyone can think of a movie before 1966-69 in which guns were portrayed in the kind of tender loving detail we’re now used to, let me know.
Finally, get even more in the spirit of, er, gun fun, with this piece from the Bullz-Eye blog celebrating various multi-star manly action fests.
