INGREDIENTS
1 Italian executive producer (Sergio Donati, co-writer of Once Upon a Time in the West)
7 cool cast members (Will Patton, Jeff Fahey, Karl Urban, Keith David, Danny Trejo, Tom Savini and Zoe Bell)
1 composer who is related to Ennio Morricone (Andrea Morricone, son of Ennio)
1 Red camera
DIRECTIONS
1. Whisk together ingredients.
2. Have ingredients make a movie.
3. Rotoscope (a la Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly)
Below is a visual teaser of what director Andrew McKenzie has in mind for this recipe, which he calls Hired Guns.
Source: Twitch
hired goons?
The biggest mistake these guys made was releasing this “teaser” to the public because it’s got nothing but bad response. And rightly so cause it looks like shit that was done in 5 minutes in After Effects.
Had they just released the idea in written form interest would be much higher and people would speculate how it would look. Now they have this to go by and it’s horrible.
I also don’t understand the reason for rotoscoping the thing if they aren’t going to go somewhere far out there it terms of visuals. The teaser doesn’t convey that at all.
This looks horrible and Morricone’s son is merely aping his father’s sound and turning it ridiculous. I don’t know if this is overbaked or underdone.
Sergio Donati, Andrea Morricone, Zoe Bell, Tom Savini?
This should be an outstanding film, but if that teaser and the music is anything to go by this is going to completely suck.
Why make a Western with such great talent if you are going to turn them into incredibly bad looking cartoons?
And I think there is a reason that Ennio Morricone’s son is not as famous a composer as his father. The music as it is represented here is monotonous and weak (for lack of a better term). He sounds like he is poking fun at Dad’s work instead of trying to make something emotionally engaging or unique.
Personally, I think this might be best described as a recipe for utter disaster rather than success.
I saw a YouTube video of Sergio Donati talking about this project. I thought it might be pretty good, until I saw this clip and found Andrew McKenzie’s Six Gun Spaghetti website (http://www.sixgunspaghetti.com).
There is a whole lot wrong with the visual style McKenzie wants to use.
It looks like a bad video game from the early 90′s or a slightly updated animated sequence from the Monty Python TV show.
I understand that the clip here and the clips on the Six Gun Spaghetti website are merely tests, but they just are not at all promising in my estimation.
The costuming on the characters in these clips is hilariously inaccurate. The first guy we see in the clip here is wearing blue jeans! Nobody but miners wore blue jeans in the Old West. Also, he looks like the redneck kid next door after he has been on a weekend drunk. McKenzie should try harder to make the characters look more authentic and not like teenagers that just went shopping at their local Shelpler’s Western Wear store.
Being a fan of Westerns, and especially a fan of Sergio Leone’s fine work, I do not feel McKenzie is constructing so much an homage to these types of films but creating a ridiculous caricature of them. Even young Morricone’s music sounds like a parody of his father’s classic work.
In the end, I have to confess to feeling nothing but pity for Sergio Donati and the fine cast memebers that are supposedly involved in this obviously unprofessional project. Granted we all have to start somewhere, but this is just sad.
Andrew McKenzie has been trying to get this film off the ground for over five years. He always claims that it is going to begin shooting in just a matter of months, sometimes weeks, but it never happens.
Sadly, I don’t think this film is ever going to be made in any format.
I would like to see Andrew given the chance to get it made. But, I think his idea of doing it as a semi-animated feature is a very bad move.