SPECIAL VHS EPISODE: BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

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VHS EPISODE: BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA

**TRIGGER WARNING** THIS FILM HAS  A SCENE OF ATTEMPTED SEXUAL ASSAULT WHICH IS ADDRESSED ON THE EPISODE

VHS, in its heyday, was the best way to watch movies. They opened up a generation to movies previously impossible to see if they weren't circulating in movie theaters years and decades after release. You could argue our current nerd culture, where everybody has seen everything, was kickstarted by GEN X getting their hands on previously obscure movies (they definitely gave us Tarantino, anyway; a lot to answer for!) But the technology, compared to our current 8K restored and improved versions was not the best (BETA also kicked its ass). A lot of transfers of older movies to VHS were crappy. Too dark, pan-and-scanned, compressed, color resolution sometimes bordering monochromatic. But in 2022 it IS a visual  aesthetic filmmakers try to recreate to give their films a grimy, unwashed and somehow dangerous feel.

BRING ME THE HEAD OF ALFREDO GARCIA (1974) was Sam Peckinpah at his most exhausted. Fresh off the disappointing studio theft of PAT GARETT AND BILLY THE KID, always drunk, high or hungover, he decamped to Mexico to make the one movie he would later say was the only one the studios didn't butcher. It was the movie he set out to make. Old comrade Warren Oates plays what is known to be a clear impersonation of Peckinpah himself, down to even wearing Peckinpah's own dark-as-a-black-hole sunglasses. Sounds great, right?

Garcia stands as one of the grimiest, nihilistic movies of the 1970s, itself a decade filled with grimy nihilistic films borne of social unrest, disgust at our institutions and a studio system that had no idea what movies people wanted to see.  One of the miracle movies of the decade.  Desperate people desperately trying to escape their desperate situations.

Jack had never see it before and Ken's memories of the film are so entwined with the look of the 1988 VHS version, it makes for a hopping episode.  Garcia may be a film of extreme moral exhaustion and of clear-eyed cynicism of human nature but there is sweetness buried under the muck.  We think? Jack and Ken discuss the making of the film, its legacy, and, most importantly, how the primitive technology of VHS might improve the effect this movie has!

Sam Peckinpah is who opens every episode now on our theme song so we had to get one of his movies on here at some point.
 
THEME SONG BY: WEIRD A.I. (ft. Sam Peckinpah)

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Ken: Ken Koral
Jack: jackk1096