PROJECT 60: Settlers Are Arriving and The Town Is Growing

My first collection of painted gunfighters for Dead Man's Hand

PROJECT 60 - and particularly my plans for the Wild West skirmish game, Dead Man's Hand - is really gaining momentum now.

Today, I received back my first batch of painted miniatures from my painter, Matt. You can get a taste of what they were like unpainted here and check out the pictures in this post to see what an amazing transformation Matt's skill with a brush has brought to them.

They are posed outside my latest building acquisition: a completed and painted MDF Western blacksmiths (with stable), a great purchase from eBay.

This will sit nicely with my nameless saloon, and the other buildings I have yet to build myself (those that came in the Dead Man's Hand Redux starter set and a couple of others I was unable to resist).

I'm pretty certain I already have enough buildings to create a small town, suitable for play.

I just need to boost up my number of miniature gunfighters - and innocent civilians - and (once again) tidy up the games room, so I can display all this material and do it justice.

Luckily, I am already assembling a second wave of miniatures to dispatch to Matt as soon as possible, but there are so many lovely 28mm Western miniatures out there that it's easy to keep getting distracted.

In the front we have Cullen Bohannon, Jonah Hex, Timmy The Flea, and The Man With No Name 

Beside The Man With No Name, we have Django (complete with coffin) and General Custer

Beyond this fantastic development, I've also been tinkering in the garden room, rebasing some old Western miniatures in my collection with the flatter Great Escape Games bases instead of the chunky Games Workshop ones that were my default setting more many decades.

A quartet of characters in the process of being rebased

I also need to summon up the courage to start assembling a couple of gangs from the multipart gunfighters that came in the Dead Man's Hand starter box.

I have ideas for themes: one based upon my own Hole-In-The-Head Gang, led by Timmy The Flea, and another based upon the main characters of The High Chaparral TV show.

I'm just slightly reticent because of my stroke-addled lack of manual dexterity and the minuteness of the parts for the figures.

Django and Cullen Bohannon Have Moseyed On Up To My Door

Okay, so I treated myself to this swanky blu-ray release of the original Django this week.

According to one of my older review posts I first saw Django when I was at university, but I have absolutely zero recollection of that.

However, I guess, if you squint you can see some traces of influence in the Western movie script I wrote for my degree course.

I watched Django again, for the first time, the other week and was entranced by the violence and mud so prevalent in this once-banned spaghetti Western classic.

At the time, on Facebook, I wrote: "Oh, this was so good! [It] took a couple of unexpected turns along the way".

I'll probably write a full review of the legendary 1966 film when I see it next, now courtesy of this new blu-ray rather than Prime Video streaming. 

What I particularly love about this release is the inclusion of a Quentin Tarantino documentary - almost as long as the main attraction - in which the director sings the praises of Sergio Corbucci and explains elements and inspirations he drew from this work for his own.

On the gaming front, Django (complete with coffin) is available from Wargames Illustrated as one of its 28mm Giants In Miniature figures. Mine is off with Matt the painter at present, but I look forward to sharing him with you in due course.

Django - A Giant In Miniature figure

The blu-ray box set of the first season of Hell on Wheels arrived the other day.

My plan is, once I’ve finished my latest rewatch of Deadwood, to follow that up with Brisco County Jnr then start Hell on Wheels - which I haven’t seen since it first aired on TV.

I'm nearly at the end of Deadwood's second season - taking a break to watch other things when I finish each disc of the collection - so then it'll be the final season followed by the movie.

When it comes to 1993's The Adventures of Brisco County Jnr, the Bruce Campbell-fronted steampunky comedy-western, I'm not even sure I've actually seen the whole 27-episode season of that show before.

I'm looking forward to that as I seem to remember that while it lacks the horror elements there's a distinct Deadlands-style liberty taken with history (kinda giving it a Xena-like feel, but in the Old West).

The Beach House (2019)

In an attempt to patch up their relationship, opinionated, deadbeat, college dropout - and runner-up in a Skeet Ulrich-lookalike competition - Randall (Noah Le Gros) takes his supersmart girlfriend, Emily (Liana Liberato) to his family's beach house.

As it's out of season, they're expecting to have the place to themselves.

However, due to a breakdown in communication with Randall's dad, they instead find a couple of old family friends - Mitch (Hell on Wheels and Dawn of The Dead's Jake Weber) and his sick wife, Jane (Maryann Nagel) - are already staying there.

As the house is big enough to accommodate everyone, after a few awkward moments, they agree to "get to know you" meal that, having exhausted the alcohol supply, ends with the consumption of some edible marijuana.

Senses heightened by the drugs everyone is awed by a blue luminesce that clings to everything around the beach.

And the next morning, things start to get even weirder as people start to feel violently ill.

Having witnessed an apparent suicide, Emily - the only real candidate for the title of 'final girl' - stumbles across something vile and gelatinous on the beach, and soon finds herself trying to escape an unnatural fog that's rolling in as well.

For all intents and purposes, The Beach House is another reimagining of HP Lovecraft's Color Out Of Space, only this time the alien infestation is coming from the bottom of the ocean, rather than the cold depths of the cosmos.

Mixed in for good measure is a flavouring of Stephen King's The Mist and John Carpenter's The Fog, and maybe a soupçon of Quatermass.

There's no denying that all the ingredients are there for a quality horror film, and it was trailers for The Beach House that originally got me thinking about subscribing to the Shudder streaming service.

If you're coming to this cold, you should be aware that it's a really slow burn. Pretty much nothing  really happens for the first half of this 88-minute movie, except Mitch and Jane being a bit odd.

But then, suddenly, the body horror cranks up and we're off to the races.

There are some deliciously gross-out moments around this time when you can't help wondering if this is going to be "the greatest film of all time", but sadly it isn't.

Like Emily herself, the plot stumbles all over the place, trying to figure out what's going on.

Having a lead character's obscure area of study - and interests - corollate almost exactly with the nature of the random, apocalyptic, scenario  that she has fallen into is rather heavy-handed, even if Emily doesn't really call upon her area of expertise once everything starts to hit the fan. 

Instead, it is simply sown in as ominous exposition during the meal with Mitch and Jane, and like a lot of the set-up is more or less a red herring. 

That said, I have no problems with stories - horror ones, in particular - where the audience isn't spoon-fed an explanation of what's occurring (if nothing else, it helps you sympathise with the struggles of the central characters), but I'm not sure writer/director Jeffrey A Brown's script gave us as much information as he thought it did.

But, perhaps, my biggest bugbear - which kept pulling me out of the moment - was the total absence of mobile phones.

There was no indication that The Beach House was a 'period piece', but nobody had a mobile phone (which, of course, would have been very useful and would have almost certainly changed the direction of the story). Nobody even mentioned the idea of finding one.

Communication-wise, all we saw were a couple of disconnected landlines and a CB radio.

Where were the mobile phones? I'm annoyed at myself over how much this bugged me, but mobiles are ubiquitous in modern society and their absence was as big a mystery as what was actually causing the water-borne infection.