Ed. Note: This article was written by Sonya Harvey.
Guns. Knives. Ammo. Mexico. Prisoners. Hunchbacks. Hermanos. This is the stuff of spaghetti-Western legend in the making, which can only be thought up by Johnny Falstaff and Hank Schyma.
The Honky Tonk Blood brothers and Houston musicians are up to their old movie-script tricks again, this time trading in their six-strings for six-shooters. Their latest offering, The Hunchback of Mexico, is set in the 1840s Wild West, just south of the border.
The film was shot in the barren wastelands of West Texas and Arizona, with a plot that goes something like this: A highwayman flees to a remote Spanish mission where a prisoner has escaped. With a hunchback in tow, the highwayman goes off in hot pursuit hoping to redeem his mangled past.
Hunchback stars everyone from local rockabilly singer Falstaff and Southern Backtones front man Schyma to Carmen Pool, Scot McMahon and Breaking Bad's Patrick Sane. It has the markings of an even more grandiose shoot-'em-up caper than Honky Tonk Blood, the 2011 campy B-grade slasher flick created largely by Schyma, Falstaff and John Evans.
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Hunchback's props and costumes are period pieces specially designed by McMahon, the chief costume designer and a living historian with Texas Parks and Wildlife.
The movie is of course loaded with a killer soundtrack, with Falstaff twanging up a haunting guitar, Two Star Symphony lending some harmonic eeriness and the Backtones adding in their own dark, twisted melodies.
But as grandiose film projects go, bigger budgets must follow. Actors, costumes, livestock and horses all add to the cost of making a movie, so Hunchback production company Death Western Entertainment has set up an Indiegogo campaign to help bring the wild frontier to the showrooms of Houston.
There are 31 days left to donate, and with these boys living off canned beans, we're thinking they need all the help they can get.
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