Guns on the Clackamas (1995)

2 Stars (out of 4)

Dead Cowboys

By Jeffrey M. Anderson

For some reason, the brilliantly twisted animator Bill Plympton (Your Face, I Married a Strange Person) decided to make this live-action mockumentary about a troubled film production, and it's not nearly as funny as it would have been had it been animated in his usual style. A reclusive genius of a filmmaker, Holton Jeffers (Ed Townley), goes into production on his latest Western, but everything goes wrong, including the deaths of his lead actors thanks to tainted macaroni salad. There's a safety inspector who is very accident-prone, a leading man with bad breath and an investor (a "bratwurst" king who he keeps a stick of bratwurst in his hand at all times) with a stuttering actress girlfriend. Gus Van Sant appears in one scene and unconvincingly claims that Jeffers was an inspiration. A British documentary filmmaker (Keith Scales) tries to film the entire thing. This is what Ed Wood (1994) would have been like if it had been done wrong. The main trouble is that the industry jokes are terribly na�ve and out-of-place; perhaps it should have been set in the 1950s rather than in 1991. I mean, how many Westerns were made in 1991, and why would their maker be considered a genius? Stick with Plympton's animated films instead. Mircocinema released the 2009 DVD, complete with Plympton interviews and commentary track.