When you’re jawing about the Old West and its history, the first thing that should be dealt with is all the horrid victimization of the Indigenous people assaulted and murdered by “good” white people, something that still happens to this very day.

 So, sorry, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood and Kevin Costner.

That being realized, the second thing most people remember about the Western frontier is the brat-ish fiction and scrubbed nonfiction of the outlaw of outlaws, Billy the Kid. Popularized by mass-media pop culture from the 1930s in movies like The Outlaw to modern-day fare like Young Guns, he has stayed on the hay-baling radar for well over a century.

But leave it to hard-drinking, pill-popping and well-regarded director Sam Peckinpah to have his say about the rough-and-tumble legend-crasher with Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. Although less bloody and violent than Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch or Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, this caustically serene 1973 film has a brutally lackadaisical form that makes it his most misunderstood — and endlessly watchable — picture. Hot damn.

Aided by Bob Dylan’s soul-stirring, beautifully written soundtrack, we meet uneasy friends Pat Garrett (tough son of a bitch James Coburn) and William Bonney aka Billy the Kid (baby-faced son of a bitch Kris Kristofferson), as lawman Pat gives Billy six days to leave the country or he’ll take him in, by hook or crook.

After the initial shootout, Billy is jailed. But, being a total badass, he escapes and guns down the law, making a break for some Mexican freedom, only to find Pat and his peacemakers wanting retribution and reprisals.

Knockin’ on heaven’s door, so the song goes …

And really, that’s the whole story: a barren world of post-apocalyptic lawmen who carry phony badges and the demonic crooks who will, in theory, blow the outhouse hinges off the whole place, while everything just peters out with both sides taking the loss. It’s hell on earth — or just plain hell.

Making a case for the well-meaning travelogue on a consistent tour of the underworld, both Coburn and Kristofferson are well-timed to the hellfire rolls of Garrett and the Kid. The Sweetwater flies surrounding Peckinpah’s production include R.G. Armstrong, L.Q. Jones, Slim Pickens, Jason Robards and Harry Dean Stanton — a real murderers’ row of outlaws, banditos and horse thieves.

But what truly makes this sauntering joyride all more the incomparable is Dylan’s casting as the enigmatic Alias, a no-name seer who has no joy and no pain in the Western setting, singing mournful hymns as the dust settles in the blazing distance. Though his theatrical roles have always been very hit (Masked and Anonymous) and very miss (Hearts of Fire), he always plays the soulful conductor of a soulless orchestra, which always makes him so interesting, and that all fictionally started here. His tunefully rustic soundtrack ruefully ranks up there with his other aural masterpieces.

In the end, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid is the meaty type of transcendent Western that is criminally thoughtful, beautifully violent and, like most of Peckinpah’s films, tragically raw to the bone. It’s all there in the bleeding marrow, taking it all out of cinematic purgatory and into pure filmic heaven. —Louis Fowler

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Two guys I could not tell apart head to Santa Fe for a shared purpose: a burnin’ yearnin’ to kill its sheriff. That’s because the lawman put one behind bars and stole the other’s wife — both valid reasons for a Western, although no longer (?) for modern day. When they meet horny gunslinger El Pistolero (Jorge Rivero of Lucio Fulci’s Conquest), surrounded by bar hussies, they hire him to pull the trigger.

El Pistolero is the perfect man for the job. “Blood calls for more blood. And our crimes leave a long, red chain,” he tells his dual temp employers over a campfire. “That’s why I prefer my whores.” (Recruiting tip: As with references, leave your choice of sexual partners off your résumé until specifically asked for.)

Guys, he really does love those whores, though. When the trio tracks the sheriff (Quintín Bulnes, Isle of the Snake People) to a monastery, El Pistolero sneaks out after supper to play strip poker with a table full of local floozies.

But enough of the ladies; does Guns and Guts have guns and guts? It does! Although I expected more cheesiness from Mexploitation prince René Cardona Jr. (cf. The Night of a Thousand Cats, Guyana: Cult of the Damned, Tintorera: Killer Shark), he delivers, per the subtitles, a fist-thunderin’, men-gruntin’, objects-clatterin’ Spanish-language Western. It’s packed with Sam Peckinpah-style bloodshed, prostitute nudity and at least one spirited round of human piñata. —Rod Lott

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When I was recently hospitalized, I became a fan of the Western genre. It harks back to the time I watched them with my father was I was a kid. Sure, I was more drawn to the anti-hero type, but it was one of the only times I bonded with him. One of his favorites was the 1972’s Buck and the Preacher, respectively starring Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte in the title roles.

Having been through emancipation, slaves try for a better life during westward expansion. Buck (Poitier) is a wagon master, trying to take a party to the west. However, they cross paths with a cadre of dirty racists — creeping parties of white pissants who try to take them down, maiming and killing all. Buck teams with the Preacher (Belafonte), doling out two-fisted vengeance along the way, with help from an Indigenous tribe. Out of sight!

Poitier and Belafonte are a dynamite duo, giving a new spin on the slightly unmatched platonic couplings; despite being a gruff loner, Poitier is no-nonsense, trying to get these people to their new home, while Belafonte is a religious huckster who goes against type.

What I really like is the film’s score by jazz musician Benny Carter. His twanging riffs have a real lustrous sheen in the wah-wah category, giving the whole soundtrack a real chugging atmosphere. Much like the film, I can’t say enough about it. —Louis Fowler

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If America had a wild west, then Australia had a fuckin’ wild west, mate, one that seems to continue in the barren outback to this very day. And like our own outlaws such as Billy the Kid or Jesse James, they have their own bloody versions as well, most notably the legendary Ned Kelly.

Having seen various on-screen incarnations of Kelly by both Mick Jagger and Yahoo Serious over the years, I’m gonna say both were heavily fabricated, while director Justin Kurzel’s apocalyptic interpretation in True History of the Kelly Gang seems closer to the real story, Oedipal subtexts and all.

In the film, Ned’s parents were a drunk and a prostitute — always a perfect recipe for a Down Under ne’er-do-well, if you ask me. His father’s inability to find the family food leads Ned to slaughter a random cow for beef, but Dad is taken away to the notorious Aussie prisons and ultimately killed there for his crime.

In need of money, Ned’s mom sells him to rotund Russell Crowe (Unhinged) — almost resembling Denver Pyle here — who promises to turn him into an outlaw and, true to form, lands him in jail within a few minutes. Growing up in the hud, Ned (George MacKay, 1917) becomes a two-fisted rabble-rouser prone to psychotic delusions of grandeur, all of which he writes in his diary, apparently the basis for this film.

Clad in women’s frocks and calling themselves the “Sons of Sieve,” this gang of proto-punks takes on the damned English one bullet at a time, leading to a final showdown with the colonial bastards where Ned dons his famous “iron man” suit, fighting the oppressors like a true hero of the people.

Gritty and grimy, dirty and dank, this anarchist retelling of the Kelly story is a steel-toed kick to a koala’s groin, giving the man’s mythology the revolutionary style it probably needed. It’s an Aussie tale of revolt and rebellion that even the Americans — on film and in real life — couldn’t compete with, and thank God for that. —Louis Fowler

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Takashi Miike (Audition) has always been an extremely divisive filmmaker, so it makes sense this ramen Western’s opening scene features Quentin Tarantino — America’s own cinematically disruptive director — gutting a raw egg fresh out of the belly of a snake before gunning down a few overacting varmints.

And even though this whole introduction does little for the rest of the film, it does provide a red-stained and sin-staged sense of Japanese theatrical weirdness that anyone with the drawn-out wherewithal will experience over the next 98 or so minutes, Gatling gun and all.

A cynical homage to Sergio Corbucci’s Django — and the many nameless spaghetti flicks that came before it, as well as their Japanese originals — Sukiyaki Western Django stars Hideaki Ito as the nameless gunman who wanders into a small Nevada town ruled by two gangs: the white-clad Genji and the red-emblazoned Heike, both obsessed with the area’s gold and the power it brings.

Both sides want the expert marksman for their own purposes, but he’s playing them for his own vengeful needs and purposes, with Miike borrowing from the best of Western flicks and samurai films to tell his head wound of a tale. As you could guess, it all explodes in an extended final battle that practically tears the town to bloody shreds, save for a little boy who becomes … Django.

The only thing about this film is you have to have a bit of cooled patience to get to that bombastic ending. At times, Sukiyaki can drag itself down under the pitch-black weight of its own gory self-importance, but for me at least, that’s somewhat typical of many — and I do mean many — of Miike’s films. But here, it really seems more deserved than others. —Louis Fowler

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