clappaucius

These themes are always pregnant with intriguing plot ideas, especially when the elements of the supernatural or sci-fi are mixed in. Unfortunately, in too many cases these days the opportunity to come up with something truly original and uniquely fresh is often sacrificed for an easy out of following tired formulaic story telling that has more 'human interest' padding than the back seat of a '70s Caddy. What further sours the formula is the genuflection to the unavoidable orthodoxies of our modern pieties of environmentalism, diversity and - of course - the by-now obligatory inclusion of LGBT tropes. It is more and more as ubiquitous as the human feces on the sidewalks of San Francisco - no matter how you navigate your path, you're virtually certain to step into a pile of it sooner or later when you're silly enough to go for a twilight jog on the up-down streets of that Paris of the West.

This is quite a trip down the memory lane: way back in the '60s of last century a series of movies plied their way through the Soviet bloc, in which Winnetou was the noble & brave & wise Apache chief & warrior. His equally impressive sidekick, a white cowboy going by the quaint ridiculous moniker as Old Shatterhand (he was famed for his one-punch K. O. ability), was played by an American actor Lex Barker, while Winnetou was played by a French actor Pierre Brice. The movies were made by an East German production company, shot mostly in Yugoslav locations (not unlike Sergio Leone's spaghetti Western shot in Spain & Sicily). Dialog tracks were dubbed in German, but for local distribution in specific Eastern Bloc countries they got subtitled. The movies and the main characters were based on a series of books written in the late XiX c. By one Karol May, a German pulp writer who had written them mostly while dodging the law, as he was quite a scam artist most of his life. The movies (and the books which were widely available in translations throughout the Soviet Bloc) were a welcome - though quite silly - entertainment fodder in the region where genuine Westerns from America were rarely allowed for distribution, for both monetary and ideological reasons. It was quite funny listening to dialogs between characters spoken in German, and watching the secondary characters (the Apache tribesmen) played by swarthy Serbs and Macedonians.