Six-String Samurai: The Post-Apocalyptic Rock Odyssey

The premise takes four sentences and every one of them is a dare. The Soviets dropped the bomb in 1957. America is desert. The one surviving city is Lost Vegas, and it has been ruled for forty years by King Elvis, who has just died. The throne is vacant, so every guitar player left alive is walking across the wasteland to claim it, and the man most likely to arrive is a wiry figure in horn-rimmed glasses and a black suit, carrying a Fender and a katana, who is essentially Buddy Holly.

Lance Mungia made this in 1998, in the Californian desert, for approximately no money, with Jeffrey Falcon in the lead — a martial artist who had worked in Hong Kong cinema, co-wrote the thing, choreographed his own fights and supplied a fair amount of the wardrobe. It went almost nowhere on release. I came to it on DVD, in the years when the format was doing archaeological work that cinemas had declined to do, and it has stayed with me for twenty-odd years for a reason I could not articulate at first. The reason is that it is a walking film, and almost nobody makes those any more.

What it actually is

Buddy walks. That is the film. He walks east across a dry lake bed and a boy attaches himself to him — an orphan credited simply as the Kid, played by Justin McGuire, who does not talk much and follows anyway. Buddy tries to shake him and fails. They walk.

Along the way they encounter the wasteland’s residents, and Mungia’s imagination here is genuinely peculiar: a family of Russian cannibals with domestic problems, a windmill-dwelling clan, a bowling alley operating as though the last forty years did not happen. Behind them, gaining, is Death — a chalk-white figure in a top hat with a metal band at his back, who is hunting every claimant to the throne and has drawn his visual design straight from a certain lead guitarist’s silhouette.

The Red Elvises supply the music and appear in the picture, and they are the film’s secret engine. They are a Russian-American surf-rockabilly outfit, and their sound — cheerful, driving, faintly deranged, absolutely committed — is precisely the tone Mungia is reaching for and cannot always achieve with the camera. When the film works, it is usually because the band has taken over.

The real ancestor

Mad Max 2 is what everyone says, and it explains the sand and nothing else. Miller’s film is about vehicles and velocity. Six-String Samurai has one significant vehicle and it is a joke. The film’s actual DNA is older and stranger, and it comes from two directions.

The first is the lone-swordsman picture, and the route is well-documented enough that I have written about how the spaghetti western looted the samurai film and then pretended it hadn’t. Kurosawa’s Yojimbo becomes Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars; the ronin becomes the Man With No Name; the lawless town becomes the frontier. Mungia takes the next step in that chain and moves the lawless town into the future. Buddy is the ronin, the desert is the frontier, and the film knows exactly what it is quoting — the fight staging is Hong Kong wire-work logic filtered through a Californian budget, and Falcon, who came from that industry, is doing the real thing rather than an impression of it.

The second, and the one nobody mentions, is Zachariah from 1971 — the film that first made the gunfighter and the rock musician the same person, casting actual bands as the outlaw gangs and letting them shoot up the desert with their instruments to hand. That is the exact conceptual move Six-String Samurai is built on. The guitar and the weapon are one object; skill with the instrument is skill with the blade; the duel and the gig are the same event. Zachariah got there twenty-seven years earlier and got filed under hippie curio. Watching the two together is the best evening this desk can recommend, and it reframes Mungia’s film entirely: it is the second electric western, and the first one to notice it was a genre.

Falcon is the reason it exists

It is worth separating Mungia’s contribution from Falcon’s, because the film is usually credited entirely to its director and that is a misreading of what is on screen.

Falcon had spent years working in the Hong Kong industry before this, in the period when that industry was producing more physically accomplished action cinema than anywhere on earth, and he arrived at a Californian desert shoot carrying a skill set the American independent scene simply did not have access to in 1998. He co-wrote the film. He choreographed it. He is in nearly every frame, and the character’s entire physical grammar — the economy of the draw, the way Buddy stands with weight over the back foot, the refusal to telegraph — is a trained performer’s grammar rather than a costume.

This matters because the film’s central conceit only works if you believe the man. The joke is that Buddy Holly is a swordsman; the joke collapses the instant the swordsmanship looks approximate. It never does. Falcon fights like someone who has been paid to fight on camera, and the horn-rimmed glasses stay on, and the tension between the ridiculous silhouette and the entirely credible violence is the film’s best sustained effect. Mungia framed it well. Falcon supplied it.

Why it works: the walking

The craft argument is about pace, and it is counter-intuitive, because the film’s reputation is for being fast and it is not.

Mungia’s structure is picaresque — a series of encounters strung on a road — and the connective tissue between encounters is long, wide, unhurried footage of two figures crossing an enormous empty frame. Most low-budget films cut that material, because it costs screen time and appears to deliver nothing. Mungia keeps it, and it is where the film lives.

Here is why it lands. The wide shots establish scale that the budget cannot otherwise buy: the desert is free, it is genuinely vast, and by holding on it Mungia gets production value out of geology. They also do the emotional work. The relationship between Buddy and the Kid is built almost entirely without dialogue, in the space of these walks — who leads, who follows, how far behind, when the gap closes. By the time the film needs you to care, you have watched them negotiate a hundred miles of it. And the rhythm creates the appetite. Twelve minutes of dust and then a fight in a bowling alley is a feast; back-to-back fights are a chore.

There is a corollary the film understands better than its imitators. Because the walking is real — actual miles of actual dry lake, two people genuinely small in a genuinely large frame — the wasteland never needs explaining. No voiceover establishes that America is empty. You watch two figures fail to reach the horizon for a while and the exposition is done. This is the oldest trick the western has, and it is free to anyone willing to point a camera at Nevada and wait.

The other technical achievement is the sound. A film with this little dialogue rests on its mix, and Mungia’s is confident — wind, footsteps, the case knocking against a hip, and then the Red Elvises detonating. Silence is being used as a currency and spent deliberately.

The case against

The tone wobbles badly. Mungia wants sincerity and absurdity in the same shot, and a director with more experience would have known that the two require different lighting. Some encounters — the cannibal family in particular — play as sketch comedy that has wandered in from a different picture, and they puncture the myth the walking sequences have spent so long inflating. The film is dead serious about Buddy’s quest and cannot resist mugging at it, and the whiplash costs it.

The Kid is also a problem, and it is the standard problem: the silent-child-companion is a device that requires enormous care, and McGuire is asked to carry long stretches on a performance he was not equipped to give. When the film needs the boy to be a character rather than a symbol, in the last act, the seam shows.

And the whole thing is a shaggy dog. The picaresque structure means the middle is negotiable — you could remove two encounters and lose nothing, which is a real criticism of a film that already asks for patience.

The verdict

It is one of the great American cult objects of the 1990s and it earns the status honestly, through invention rather than through failure. Everything interesting in it was arrived at by people with no money working out what the desert would give them for free, which is the same discipline that got Carpenter a dystopia on a shoestring fifteen years earlier. The idea — that after the end of the world, the last contested office is Elvis’s — is worth more than most films manage in two hours, and Falcon’s physical performance is the real article.

Watch it for the walking and stay for the band. Then chase it with Zachariah, which will make you feel you have found a secret. It has been available on disc for years and turns up on the streaming margins; the desert wants the widest screen you have.

Spoilers below

Buddy reaches the outskirts and Death is waiting, and the duel is the film’s best-staged sequence — Falcon working at full capacity against an opponent whose whole design is theatrical excess.

Buddy wins. Then he dies of it. The wound has been carried longer than the film let you notice, and he goes down within sight of the city he crossed a continent to reach, having never once said why he wanted it.

The Kid picks up the guitar. He picks up the sword. And he walks the last stretch into Lost Vegas alone, a small boy carrying an instrument he cannot play towards a throne he has no claim to, and the film ends there without telling you whether he gets it.

That ending is why the walking mattered. The whole picture has been a transmission — a man moving something across a wasteland and handing it on, which is what the ronin story has always been underneath the swords. Buddy was always the courier. He was carrying the guitar to whoever came next, and the film spends ninety minutes teaching you to watch the gap between two figures on a road so that the last shot, with one figure in it, lands as loss.