Here’s some backstory on how I got myself roped into this. One week I was left on my own to tend to things. On the first night of my five day bachelorness I made some pork chops and sat down to eat them and promptly jacked up the WiFi on the dining room area tv. I thought I knew the password but apparently I was wrong and the big city cell traffic was too much to get through for help so I was faced with a quiet, lonely dinner with no sound or heaven forbid eating in a different room so I did the smartest thing I could think of and grabbed my iPad. My iPad doesn’t have much on it since I only really use it to play a game when I’m sitting outside when I take the dogs out so I had to go bare bones and just launched plain ass YouTube and went to “movies” and this thing came up suggestively showing a woman’s alluring backside and floating the words “action” and other things so I went with it because 1) I’m a sucker and 2) my pork chops were getting cold.

And I like westerns in general – although sometimes I do prefer them with a little more action and not necessarily like the 3:10 to Yuma remake or even Bone Tomahawk which I loved both, but not quite as actiony-less as this one but in the end I have to say I liked it and I’ll always have good memories of eating my cold pork chops and this being my only sad entertainment. Of course I could have moved my body to somewhere else but then I would have had to adjust the way I would have been sitting and the way I would have had to use my knife and fork which also would have given a straighter line to my dinner I worked so hard on to the food stealer Rocky, the youngest of the pack at home. Not too long before all of this happened, I was sitting on my couch and I unwrapped a sandwich from this place called City Bites and while I was reaching for a napkin or something he came up and stole it like some sort of turkish alley thief and i turned around and there was my sandwich on the floor being picked apart and there went my seven bucks and all i had to eat was chips and a cookie which eventually lead me to the place I was when I turned this on and started my dinner which also included a can of lukewarm whole potatoes. Not the can, mind you, but the contents of them that I had also heated up on the stove, just so i have it on the record that I don’t have to sit around eating cold soup out of a can like I used to have to do in the old, hard times days. And not eating cans like we used to do when we were in our 20s and starving.

But The Deputy’s Wife or She Was The Deputy’s Wife was what I went for and well yeah. I usually stick to horror out here and usually the shitty ones and usually not anything too mainstream because lots of good writers write about those things and last year I dug myself into a never ending hole watching and talking about movies about evil nuns. At one point I called it an ecosystem and I don’t know if that’s right or wrong or just me using a big word but there sure are lots of them and when I was sitting there watching this I wondered if there was a subset of the Western genre – something like the cheap, independent, small cast and crew job kind of like maybe Splinter was but out in the dust. And if there is should I cover them all was what I was thinking when I was washing my pork down with another beer and then I answered myself with a “no” and eventually reflected back that I liked this thing kind of with its simplicity and lack of things like action or foley sound.

In this movie the deputy’s wife is writing a letter while the deputy eats. Elsewhere, a male youth climbs on the roof of a church. Elsewhere, a man is set to be hanged. How does that sound to you? Exciting? Does it get your arm hairs tingling and your breeches unhooked? If so – yay! Otherwise that’s really all there is. A woman writing a letter, a dude climbing a roof and some people walking a man down a dirt road. There’s no music, really. No real atmosphere or tension, just that – and maybe that’s what they were going for and trying to portray. Maybe who knows? Contrary to belief, I wasn’t alive back in the 1860s so I don’t know how boring it was but I lived in a small town where not everyone had a tv when I was a kid so we read books or played cards or – yep – climbed on the roof of the barn.

So they’re gonna hang this horse stealin’ son of a bitch and erase every memory of his family existing so help them and the power of evil but not that last part and right when they’re going to pull the trigger or drop the floor I guess they get a note from the Marshall to keep him alive until he can talk to the no good, thieving, murdering snake in the grass. So they begrudgingly take him down from the rafters and plop him in the jail where he is visited by – dum dum dum – the deputy’s wife while somewhere else someone reads that letter we were talking about some time ago.

Such as it goes through flashback and storytelling, not only did the deputy have a wife but he also had a brother (I think?) who lived out somewhere in the desert-y hills with his horses where – dum dum dum – the deputy’s wife would go to brush them. On her last visit – queue ascending bass drums in my head! – there’s a bearded stranger and a very good looking white horse there this time around and BONG BONG BONG BONG!! – he’s a horse thief!!! And as it turns out —— the CRESCENDO!!! – he owes that big white horse to the marshall!!!! AAAAAGGGHHH MY INSIDES!!! I think my stomach is emulsifying in excitement. Meet me down at Bootleggers Gully and we can make a plan to steal some livestock or maybe see some people boning out in the thickets and burrs.

I’m going to get into spoiler territory here so there you go but after some of the “why do you steal a horse you don’t own him’s” and “no one owns a horse’s” and “you should set animals free’s” she bones the guy or I guess he bones her and then the Marshall kills everyone while they’re off boning in the dirt somewhere and getting burrs and sand in their openings and hairs and later the horse thief guy is blamed for it all and is going to hang but by god she’s in love and there’s gonna be a bust out of the literal one horse town by hell or high water root hog or die to leave ain’t believin’ home is home GET OFF MY LAND and set my people free and all of that good stuff and yeah yeah the movie is all right if you’re in the mood for something like that. You might not get excited at this one bit where a guy throws a lantern and by excited I mean it’s slightly something more than boring and I don’t mean you’ll get horny from it.

I wouldn’t think so anyway.

There you have it and now it’s up to you to decide if you want to pull the noiseless trigger and watch this thing. The way I do things out here is I watch something like this maybe a month or so ago and then I find some minutes to vomit a bunch of words with no punctuation to be seen and then I set it aside so I can think about it later and proof read my shit and put some pictures in here so I don’t forget and see if it’s even suitable as we know i’ve set the bar low and schedule it to gout. And not gout like I just typed but I think that’s funny but I mean go out. So now my brains are firing memories of this thing and I remember even watching the making of special features and I saw some tricks I’ll probably never use to make my movie because it will never get made and yeah hey good memories.

FILED UNDER: DEFINITELY NOT A NERVE STIMULATING MOVIE UP TO AND INCLUDING YOUR OPTIC AND SEXUAL NERVES MEANING I WOULD BE REALLY SURPRISED IF THIS GOT YOU THERE OR ANYWHERE FOR THAT MATTER UNLESS MAYBE YOU GREW UP IN A SMALL PLOT OF LAND IN THE DESERT AND SEEING SOMEONE WALK AROUND IS THE GOOD STUFF