Anyone else feel like the modern western is in a bit of a funk, lately?
Not to take any potshots at that most noble of movie genres, but it’s seemed like ages since we last had a real solid oater we can really sink our teeth into and in 2023, Michael (Drop Dead Gorgeous) Patrick Jann stepped up to the plate in order to take his shot with the exquisitely named Organ Trail. For anyone slow on the uptake, Organ Trail is a play on words of the Oregon Trail, a central feature of one of the largest mass migrations in American history as settlers blazed a path across the country to score themselves their own bit of land. However, considering that we also have “organ” in the title, you can bet that some rather nasty violence will also occur during the film – either that someone’s going to bang out a tune on an old Hammond organ; but I’m certain it’s the former…
Anyway, can this indie serving of western brutality manage to invoke fond memories of other genre blenders such as Ravenous and Bone Tomahawk, or will this be a Trail not worth following?
The year is 1870 and during a frost bitten storm in Montana, the Archer family pack up their meager possessions and leave their house in order to ensure that they don’t all freeze and starve to death. However, while they manage to escape the unrelenting blizzards, the God fearing Abraham and Celeste and their children Tobias and Abby, soon stumble upon something far more immediately dangerous than snow in the form of a massacred wagon train. But among this sadistic tableu, pinned by her hands by arrows, is Cassidy, a battered survivor and Abraham and Tobias patch up her wounds and take the shivering victim in.
However, that night the family learns the hard way that sometimes being a good samaritan comes with its own down points when the gang that murdered the wagon train comes for them and it’s here that the surviving Abby learns the cruel truth – while Cassidy had actually been beaten and left for dead, before that she had actually been a reluctant member of the sadistic quartet before finally trying to run. However, the leader of this group, the blustering, vicious Logan decided he wanted his “girlfriend” back and along with the cheerful Brody, the young Felix and the hulking Rhys, wasted no time in obliterating thr family to get back the woman he uses as a lure to rob and kill other travellers.
It seems like Logan has the same plan for Abby, but for that to work, he’ll have to break her first; but the girl proves to be tougher than expected.
After performing an audacious (and potentially suicidal) escape, Abby is nursed back to health by kindly ranchers Erik and Nora, but cannot get the idea of getting even with the murderous gang out of her mind. But when Logan sends a still recuperating Cassidy out to track Abby down, soon all these scattered soul will find themselves battling for survival.
If I didn’t know better (and I frequently don’t), I’d have to say that Michael Patrick Jann was using Organ Trail to channel one of the times the Coen Brothers tried their hands at a classic western. All the hallmarks are there; random, disparate characters all linked by the same, meandering journey; eccentric, yet lethal villians; random bursts of heavy handed, mean spirited violence – it’s all there. And yet while Organ Trail seems to be going for a tone that suggests John Ford meets Blood Simple, it just can’t seem to be able to bind all of its aspects together into a cohesive whole and instead feels like a grab bag on influences desperately searching for a story. There’s also a real sense that the filmmakers wanted to tread a Tarrantino-esque balance between straight thriller and outrageous exploitation flick that will try really hard to set a serious, somber tone and then just thrown in a completely random thing straight out of a B-movie horror film.
Usually that sort of thing works a treat with me, but with Organ Trail it stubbornly refuses to gel at all and the sudden outbreaks of gore just prove to be more distracting than anything else. Take for example a scene that has a character shoot numerous bullets in the air as warning shots only for them to come straight back down again to pierce his skull and errupt from his nether regions in spurts of blood. In a certain filmmakers hands this moment could have been shocking, unpredictable and darkly hilarious, but because the rest of the movie has been deadly serious up to this point, it just seems out of place and a little silly and it’s here that we discover Organ Trail’s most fatal flaw.
As I mentioned earlier, the film seems torn between a desire to be a dead straight western (the performances also seem to suggest this), however, the pace of the film often seems to confuse a slow burn with just plain old slow and the gradual unraveling of a deliberately unfocused plot tests your patience to the point where it makes you wonder if the film shouldn’t have been called Organ Trial.
But every now and then, the script will throw in a random spot of weirdness that just ends up being more annoying than anything else. Suddenly, one character has the survival instincts of the Bride from Kill Bill, surviving unsurvivable acts like being trapped under frozen ice for miles, then all of a sudden, we discover that one of the bad guys has the ability to not feel pain and, after an unfortunate meaning with some fire, abruptly turns into the kind of burnt, unstoppable killing machine you’d usually find in an 80s slasher. Now while all this stuff sounds like a great slice of exploitation cinema, nothing in the movie up to these points even suggested that these things were possibly and as a result, the movie just feels uneven and confusing when movies like Sisu and The Quick And The Dead managed to merge exploitative thrills with a more somber genre.
I have to be honest, I wasn’t particularly rooting for any of the characters either, even though the actors are obviously earning their pay by being in such inhospitable surroundings. However, once again, the patchwork nature of the film means that the players in this film also give wildly varying performances that just don’t match with whatever tone the film is going for. Zoé De Grand Maison and Olivia Grace Applegate do well as the beleaguered womenfolk, but then you have Sam Trammell on villain duties, bellowing his lines like Michael Sheen’s been sniffing bath salts and Nicholas Logan doing his burned supervising thing and it all just feels too confused to take either seriously, or as a violent, western knockabout.
From a misleading title that promises B-movie thrills, to a shift to gritty drama with occasional moments of shock brutality that don’t quite land, Organ Trail never really seems to be able to get a good grasp on what it actually wants to be. Is it a straight and exceedingly dry, western with some mismatched horror/thriller-esque stuff lumped in, or are we supposed to clinging on for dear life for a rip-roaring tale of revenge that never quite gets started? The performances are solid and the locations are appropriately harsh, but Organ Trail is missing the guts to decisively pick a lane.
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