It’s always been a mystery to me why the Far East developed such intricate forms of fisticuffs, while the round-eye laowai gwailo foreign devils never progressed much further than fancy pants fencing and swinging battle axes. The Eastern arts have the lame ass Queensbury rules beat down.

From the beginning, Asian cinema has taken full advantage of colorful and confusing history of martial arts, and elevated it to mythic status. So, the trick with most martial arts films is finding an excuse for a good fight. The old standby…the cheeseburger and fries of martial arts films if you will…is the Han Chinese resistance against the Qing Dynasty of the Manchurians. Martial arts filmmakers are obsessed with the premise, and Lord have mercy, it seems half these fu flicks are a variation of this theme.

Filmmakers occasionally break away from this premise in the never ending quest to find excuses for a punchfest. So you get your subgenres of Hong Kong Police procedurals, the old avenge my master but first train at the Shaolin Temple narratives, folkloric tales involving kinky ghosts and wacked out Daoist priests, the never-ending battle of the “Martial Arts World” (sort of a World Wrestling Federation thing that was going on during the Tang and Song Dynasties), the tournament to prove once and for all Chinese kung fu is better than everyone else’s fu, and the Chinese versions of Westerns, set in the western Chinese suzerainty of Xinjiang. You can combine any of these premises, throw in a dash of Manchu tyranny, and you’ll have even more plots that will give you plenty of excuses for your characters to start beating on each other.

The resurgence in the late 1980s of Hong Kong action films brought martial arts films into the mainstream, yadda yadda Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon yadda yadda…

Whatever. We’ve been watching fu flicks since we were kids…for me, it was KABC Channel 7 Black Belt Theater, which featured the “finest” in early 70s fu flicks from the redoubtable Shaw Brothers studio. The first time I saw the Shaw Brothers masterpiece Master of the Flying Guillotine, and I was shocked, appalled, and completely hooked. The trademark of these early 70s fu is bad English dubbing, which in itself forms a fascinating and compelling cadence and vocabulary. But when you start getting into the 80s and beyond, the natural soundtrack is mandatory, preferably in the original Cantonese. (Who wants to listen to bad Mandarin dubbing?)

Going beyond cliché icons Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan, you will find the exotic weaponry of Jimmy Wang Yu, the intricate but brutal stories of Chang Cheh, and the thoughtful and graceful Donnie Yen. But I’m saddened how lame and weak Jet Li and Jackie Chan became once they started making American movies. Stick to their wonderful HK works, such as Tai Chi Master and the Police Story series. Speaking of crap, that brings up Western martial arts film ala Steven Seagal, Chuck Norris, and the slew of American Ninja movies and what have you. Well, once you’ve seen the HK real deal, it’s hard to get into this arthritic and feeble offshoot. You Must Be Drunk to appreciate these films. I’ll leave those reviews to my colleague Kevin, who’s a far more accomplished expert in this genre. Indeed, I suspect Kevin drinks Steven Seagal’s Lightning Bolt Energy Drink before he writes his reviews, which would explain a lot of things.

Outstanding examples of martial arts films include 8-Pole Diagram Fighter, Fist of Legend, Magic Cop, 18 Legendary Weapons of China, Swordsman 2, Tiger Cage, Storm Riders, and Drunken Master 2. Of course, that’s just scratching the surface.

Your kung fu is good. But mine is better. Kung fu is the art of self-defense. I just want to show you how bad your kicks really are.

As a kid, I almost never watched westerns. They were so LAME. I always found John Wayne to be an insufferable prig, and had about a five-minute tolerance for his presence on screen. The stories were so constrained and didactic. Basically, here’s this isolated boondock that has one focused source of anarchy, usually some dudes running around stealing cattle or starting gunfights or what not. So some other dude, who’s all about law and order, comes in and sorts things out. And it’s all done with 19th century technology. The end. There was something so inherently square about the western that I might as well been watching something educational. Like all those old-time towns needed was a competent police force, and some proto-industrial proto-suburb was the result. It was dreadful, and it was false, and made my bullshit alarm go off. I was convinced that the western, like romantic comedies, was a genre best avoided.

Then I saw The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. I cannot exaggerate what a sea change that movie made for me, not just in merely my perception of the western, but film structure and development in its entirety. Like many impressionable youth, I ran out and bought Ennio Morricone’s original score, which soon became a bong circle favorite.

It was all downhill from there. I knew precisely what I wanted out of westerns. Not some goddamn morality play about how the White Man civilized the Wild West, which any first year history student can tell you is horseshit anyway. After the Dollars trilogy, I discovered the wonderfully insane world of Spaghetti Westerns, and then the so-called Revisionist Westerns…and finally, the Acid Western. I had Drifted to the High Plains, and there was no turning back, amigo.

Just what is the acid western? Film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum first coined the term in his lengthy 1996 deconstruction of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man. Eh, that movie is fine, but starting there is seriously putting the cart before the horse. And honestly, Jim Jarmusch is a lightweight director, and Dead Man is a lightweight film. I need a stronger shot of whiskey, if it’s all the same to you. (To be fair, Mr. Rosenbaum does mention the predecessors to Dead Man in the last paragraph).

Let’s go ahead and put the horse back in front of the cart, and say that Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns were the first acid westerns. To be sure, the subgenres of Spaghetti, Revisionist, and Acid westerns all blend together, and are arguably the same thing. But it was in the late 60s when the acid really started to kick in, so to speak. The floodgates that Sergio Leone unloosed led to darker and more nihilistic visions. The first truly acidic western is perhaps Monte Hellman’s The Shooting (1966), and the most literal “acid western” (in the tripped-out sense of the term) is Alejandro Jodorworsky’s El Topo (1970). Other prime examples include the genre-killer The Wild Bunch (1969), Bad Company (1972), McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), and the disturbing and magnificent Four of the Apocalypse (1975). And there were certainly predecessors to the acid western; these worthy forebearers include The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and The Big Country (1958). Though these proto-acid westerns might seem quaint compared to the excesses of acid westerns, they paved the way for the darker, more nuanced visions of the Old West.

Acid Westerns are generally bleak, gritty, and nihilistic. The story usually centers on a dubious hero or an outright anti-hero drifting across a wilderness of horror and anarchy, nature despoiled and raped by greed, hatred, and madness. These films all have an anxious, palpable sense of dread about them, and take the lawless west to its logical extreme.

But the strangest thing about the acid westerns, for all their often heavy-handed 60s-70s counterculture overtones, is that they just feel real to me. And herein lies the great irony of the Acid West. Judging by how harsh, violent, and insane the real Old West really was, it’s my speculation that the acid westerns could very well be the most accurate depiction of the time period. There were no legions of heroes spreading the American Dream across the untamed wilderness. These so-called pioneers were really just colonists and conquerors. The decentralized Native American culture was being annihilated by the war machine of paid professional soldiers and relentless breeding. There was no law out there, no court of appeals, no real moral standards to hang your hat on. John Wayne and the Lone Ranger, my ass. This is the time when human scalps…human scalps, for God’s sake…were viewed as trophies, and were bought and sold like some such curios. Given the history of horror that was Manifest Destiny, acid westerns are probably a lot more realistic than your standard western.

So, saddle up and come with us to explore the Acid West…if you’re drunk, desperate, or insane enough to do so. But fair warning, Blondie…you’ll never be able to return home. But then again, you never had a home to return to anyway, did you?

Welcome to Hell, Stranger. Population: You.

Lysergic acid diethylamide. Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds. Good old LSD-25. Tasteless and odorless with an unforgettable sensory punch. Colors are brighter, smells are stronger, “White Rabbit” is E-P-I-C, floor and ceiling textures silently crawl in spiral patterns. The fibers in your carpet are swayin’ like grass stalks in a Terrence Malick film, and there’s no wind. Surely you know the feeling, as did many, many creative types in the 60s and 70s. Cinematic experiments conceived under Lucy’s influence varied wildly in quality but were most always completely fucking bizarre. Serious Freakouts like Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider received widespread attention, putting the genre on the cusp of legitimate importance. Then the zonked out idyll came to an ugly end sometime between Altamont and Hopper’s legendarily atrocious Rider followup The Last Movie. Freakouts remained firmly entrenched in the underground thanks to radical visions like El Topo. Jodorowsky divided his audience into the Squares who hated its violence and illogical plotline and the Cool Kids who dug the metaphysics and (anti)hero’s function as All Purpose Allegorical Religious Figure. It’s still up in the air as to what the hell The Holy Mountain is really about, but that’s another article for another date.

Freakouts often sacrifice conventional narratives for extra time spent on visuals. Often lazily paced and heavily tangential, with bright colors and loud, vibrant music (especially sitar twangs). This encapsulates the oeuvres of David Lynch, Jim Jarmusch, Terry Gilliam, and, yes, most of Kubrick’s later work prior to Full Metal Jacket. Whether these directors are veteran trippers or not is beside the point, just that their styles are suited for viewing through your “third eye”. So long as hallucinogens continue to be available, there will always be (limited) demand for Freakouts.