Six Guns and Six Legs on SyFy

Six Guns and Six Legs
The SyFy Channel

There's nothing like a "Creature Feature" on a lazy Sunday afternoon!

With a title like "Six Guns and Six Legs", you can imagine what the movie was like. The creatures were similar to the one on the right. More spidery and mechanical, though, with grey metalic skins. They dug burrows like crawdad chimneys, but larger.

 

The setting was very authentic for the times -late 1890's, early 1900's at the latest. The town was muddy, monochromatic, and bleak. The majority of characters were likewise. Having done living history for many years, I must say the costumes were excellent, but drab. The portrayal of the settler woman living out by the mine waa dreary and defeated. Her husband was mining pitchblende, the source of uranium. Both seemed to be affected by radiation.

The Authenticity Police would have been horrified about the weaponry. I once attended a movie we were promoting at a Houston theater, all of us wearing our Old West finest garb. During that movie an usher had to come and get someone to settle down part of our group acting as AP's in one of the screenings. They were pointing out all the "mistakes", weapons showed that were from a future time. Pointing it out loudly enough that people were having trouble hearing the movie!

My favorite AP error was the chrome finished Colt python showed in "Six Guns"-- one hundred years too early. The abrasive female bounty hunter (?????) was carrying something that might have been a double-action revolver common in the 1940's and later. If I'd had popcorn I would have thrown it at the TV. Remember an item called the TV Brick? I needed one.

The space critters were hooked on uranium. They'd flop out their water hose tongues and just suck it up like mechanical butterflies gone wrong. The whole invasion was the fault of the scientist who'd hired the settlers to mine the pitchblende when the last miners died. Mr. Science was hording a ton of uranium, which drew the space critters to their town.

Predictably, aliens shot humans, humans shot aliens, humans shot humans, people betrayed the hero, and the whole town nearly died. Mr. Science baited the aliens with a trail of uranium dust, then set himself up to dynamite the aliens. The alien ship showed up conveniently overhead and the scientist lit the fuse. The hero and heroine galloped off to their new life as the wagon of dynamite, scientist, aliens and their ship exploded in a gigantic fireball. WOW! Nothing like a well deserved explosion to punish evil!

I enjoyed it immensely. I think Art did, too!