io9: western

Life is Tough for an Atomic Cowgirl

Lauren Davis — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 16:00:00 PST

You would think that being an atomic cowgirl in the Old West would be a breeze. After all, you have awesome, nuclear-powered weapons, and you're superstrong to boot. But that doesn't mean you'll be taken seriously.

Winston Rowntree's text-laden webcomic Subnormality frequently features demonic ladies, a world-weary sphinx, and the drunken bonding between Metroid's Samus and Tomb Raider Lara Croft. In this installment, he introduces us to Shango the Atomic Cowgirl, whose most fearsome foe is prejudice and society's strict adherence to traditional gender roles.

[Subnormality]

How Jonah Hex's Deformed Face Could Have Cost Brolin His Eye

Meredith Woerner — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 07:00:00 PDT

So exactly how does one recreate the hideous brow of Western anti-hero Jonah Hex? Josh Brolin, who wanted to do it "au natural," talked about how recreating a comic book in real life can turn your eye into a raisin.

At the round table for Jonah Hex Brolin talked about the difficulties of becoming a mutated cowboy, with tape and prosthetics:

"It was a horror story, within itself. Three hours in a make-up chair, a day. We figured at the end with 46 shooting days, that I had spent five and a half full days in the make up chair. It's great for the first five days, but then after that it starts to get a little old. We're very lucky, because I did a couple prosthetics in Louisiana for [George Bush biopic] W, and we had some problems with it. This is how it worked [for Jonah Hex]: there was a piece of tape on my cheek, there was also a piece of tape behind my ear, which we fastened to the back of my neck. We put a prosthesis over that. Then I had a mouth piece that held my mouth all the way back as far as it could go, and then I had another prosthetics over that.

"Then the eye thing, that was — I wasn't going to bring that up. Jonah Hex is a comic book, it's drawn. In reality if Jonah Hex had an eye like that, it would be a little raisin somewhere back in his brain, you know what I mean? We thought about [making a computer-generated eye], but we didn't have the money to CG and all that stuff, and we really didn't want to.

"I tried is, I pulled it down, and within an hour my eye started to get infected, before I realized I'm not that committed of an actor...that I was willing to lose [an eye]... actually, I fought for it, for a little while."

The Look:

James Marsters Saddles Up For Alien Western

Meredith Woerner — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 07:00:00 PST

Genre workhorse James Masters is getting back into harness one more time. Our beloved vampire and gay time traveler will be killing big fat alien bugs out West amongst the coyotes and dirt roads in a new Sci Fi Channel original movie. Marsters plays an outlaw who escapes death thanks to some dangerous aliens, but mostly the whole business seems like an excuse to have the awesomeness of Spike in a cowboy hat. Details and spoilers below.

According to Muse Entertainment the movie is described as as:

Alien Western, a sci-fi television film about giant, vicious, alien bugs that come to earth to gorge themselves on the uranium deposits found in the ground of an Old West town, began principal photography this week in Romania starring James Marsters as Sam Danville, an outlaw who is about to be hanged when the aliens land.

Sounds like a Tremors rip, which is fine by me. You can't have enough scifi Westerns, especially when you get old cult character actors involved (yes sorry he will always be Spike to me).

[Muse Entertainment via Whedonesque]