Or Sergio Leone’s 1964 spaghetti western, A Fistful of Dollars, which was unashamedly a remake of Kurosawa’s film – although the resulting lawsuit postponed the release of Leone’s film for three years.Īs a Prohibition-era gangster film set far from its usual urban landscape amid an arid unforgiving desert, Walter Hill’s highly stylized, sepia-toned shoot-em-up-in-suits plays at times like a mirage. If the plot sounds familiar, maybe it’s because you have seen Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 classic jidaigeki, Yojimbo. So what if heads can’t explode in a zero pressure atmosphere? It’s still fun to watch.Ī world-weary gunslinger-for-hire, played with a die-hard mixture of brashness and ennui by Bruce Willis, drifts (or, more accurately, drives) smack into an ongoing war between Irish and Italian mobsters in the middle of a ghost town, where he plays both sides against the middle for what we think will be his own gain.
Sean Connery plays the rugged and resourceful Space Marshal William O’Niel, assigned to Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, who finds himself battling Peter Boyle, bigbusiness, and drug trafficking all alone (well almost, thanks to some nifty non-traditional casting of Frances Sternhagen as a feisty company doctor.) The tension builds steadily as the Marshal waits for corporate-hired assassins to arrive via the shuttle (nods here to Shane as well).Īided nicely by its realistically gritty and atypical sci-fi production design, Outland offers a unique blending of Western myth with elements of a police thriller, all transplanted to a sweaty mining colony located at the far edge of the final frontier. These are films whose creators found the right formula when recombining cinematic DNA, taking the best of both worlds (or even three or four) and making movies that not only embraced but understood the essence of each genre.ġ981’s Outland, written and directed by Peter Hyams (who also wrote and directed the mashup space film-political thriller-turned chase film Capricorn One) is an often-overlooked hybrid gem that got lost in the sci-fi shuffle of the Star Wars/Alien franchises at the time of its release.įrequently compared to High Noon (the cold-war Western where Gary Cooper’s stoic sheriff Will Kane single-handedly takes on bigotry and thinly disguised McCarthyism), Outland is a genre-crossing product of its political climate and unapologetically a horse opera in outer space (with shuttle craft substituting for horses.)
#CAPRICORN ONE TWO DIFFERENT NOVEL MOVIE#
With all this in mind, check out the list of movie mashups below, which is itself an eclectic mix of the tried and true and something different. Simply adding another level or two of generic clichés, or haphazardly sampling well-worn tropes does not guarantee that a film will work, however earnest the attempt.Īnd more often than not, the experiment can go horribly wrong (does anyone remember Cowboys & Aliens from 2011?) On the other hand, sometimes the tongue-in-cheek or just plain cheeky approach to cross-breeding genres has produced surprising and entertaining results (1972’s blaxploitation-camp-horror film Blacula comes to mind) although relatively few of these mashups have reached a level of transcendence. So, the idea of combining and recombining popular genres that audiences love and can readily identify seems only natural – or unnatural, as many mashups have proven. Yet despite the fact that studios are always looking for the next new thing, they have historically been reluctant to let go of the tried and true, however tired a trope may be. And while it may be considered an innovation in web design or music, as far as moviemaking is concerned, the concept has been around for a while, even before Jesse James met Dracula or Frankenstein’s Daughter. By now, nearly everyone is familiar with the term mashup – the fusing of seemingly incongruent or disparate elements to create a hybrid of sorts.
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