That
Old West wasn’t going to win itself. It needed an expansionist ideology,
cannibalism, and killer Santa Clauses. Granted, this is Astron-6’s beyond
revisionist take on the final days of the frontier, but it surely must be
valid. A campfire story takes an outrageously macabre turn in Astron-6 (Adam
Brooks, Matthew Kennedy, Conor Sweeney, Jeremy Gillespie, & Steven Kostanski)’s
short film, Chowboys: An American
Folktale, which screens as part of the Midnight
shorts program at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, in Park City.
It
is Christmas Eve during the waning days of the frontier. Three cowpokes are
sitting around their meager fire, while their hunger pains lead to
hallucinations. The oldest and grizzliest will act as a peace-maker, sort of.
He also has presents for his riding mates, as well as a macabre story about St.
Nick, sort of like the Louis L’Amour version of Silent Night, Deadly Night. There will also be surprise guests—and not
so surprising, gore.
Say
it isn’t so. Chowboys is billed on
the one-sheet as Astron-6’s final film. That is a shame, because their horror-mash-up-provocations
are getting surprisingly smart, as well as gleefully bloody. Their Giallo
send-up, The Editor, turned out to be
more intense and legit than a lot of the films it was satirizing.
Basically,
Chowboys is engaging with the
wilderness horror tradition often associated with the Frontier era (think
Donner Party here). However, the Astron-6 guys (acting and directing), keep
giving it one outrageous twist after another.
