‘Six-String Samurai’ Hits The Wrong Chords

Remember Alex Cox?

Mid-‘80s filmmaker?

Directed a couple of interesting movies titled “Repo Man” and “Sid & Nancy”?

Self-destructed and then was banished from Hollywood after making a glorified home movie called “Straight to Hell”? Condemned from that point on to making foreign films bearing lurid titles such as “El Patrullero” and “La Muerte y la Brujula”?

Cox came to mind the other day as I sat through something called “Six-String Samurai,” a low-budget kind of post-holocaust study that could be described as “Mad Max” massacres “The Buddy Holly Story.”

Here’s the difference: Cox showed some vestiges of talent before he began making self-congratulatory tripe. In only his second effort out of film school, one-time Loyola Marymount student Lance Mungia already has made a movie that is equal parts quasi-coolness and incomprehension.

The setup is simple. In 1957, Russia takes over the United States. Elvis is elected king and “Lost Vegas” becomes the new capital. Now, 40 years later, Elvis is dead and “Vegas needs a new king.”

From every corner of the country, anybody who can play guitar and fend off the forces of darkness - bowling gangs, Russian bands, cannibal families, “windmill people” and Chicano dwarfs, yo - make the trek to the new Oz-like desert paradise.

Among those seeking the throne is Buddy (Jeffrey Falcon), a bespectacled loner who is as handy with a samurai sword as he is his “hollow-body six-string.”

We see Buddy from the eyes of the Kid (Justin McGuire), an orphaned survivor who latches onto the would-be King with all the tenacity of a teenybooper groupie.

And like an ongoing ‘50s sitcom, the movie follows our mismatched heroes as they travel from spot to spot, taking on the likes of those foes mentioned above and barely keeping ahead of Death (Stephane Gauger) and his Munchin-speaking trio of sidekicks.

“Six-String Samurai” plods along, Buddy dispatching everyone in sight with his sword (actor Falcon is a talented martial artist) to such dialogue as, “Where you go, death follows like a blown-out ‘52 Plymouth.”

Writer-director Mungia (who shared writing duties with Falcon) knows his genre. One scene effectively apes a sequence from, you guessed it, “Planet of the Apes.”

But his blend of slo-mo action, dubbed soundtrack, plotlessness, third-rate costuming, amateur acting, home-movie stylisms and the ongoing rockabilly musical score (irritating at first but gradually the best thing the movie offers) quickly grows tiresome.

It says something about the quality - if that’s the right word - of Slamdance, the Park City, Utah, alternative to the Sundance Film Festival, that “Six-String Samurai” won two prizes at this year’s event.

Mungia’s film would seem to be better captured in one line of bad-guy dialogue.

“If I were you, I’d run,” a character tells Buddy.

I wish he’d issued that warning at the very beginning.

To me.

“Six-String Samurai” * Location: Lincoln Heights Cinemas Credits: Written and directed by Lance Mungia, starring Jeffrey Falcon, Justin McGuire, Kim De Angelo, Stephane Gauger Running time: 1:31 Rating: PG-13