Mescalero!

I picked Young Guns (1988) for the ladies, that is Ms. Spenser. It's famously packed with the cutest guys of 1988. But also she likes Westerns.

It starts with young Billy, Emilio Estevez, running away from the law in a western town and hiding with some pigs. Rancher Terence Stamp picks him up and hides him in his wagon. He is gathering a group of young, wild men to protect his ranch, and he decides to recruit Estevez. The other are Charlie Sheen, Keifer Sutherland, Lou Diamond Philips, Dermot Mulroney, and Casey Siemaszko. He calls them his Regulators. Stamp is trying to teach these ruffians manners, comportment, literacy and honor. It won't all take.

It turns out that Jack Palance is looking to take over the ranch, so he has Stamp killed. Now the Requlators want revenge. They go to Stamp's lawyer, Terry O'Quinn, and after trying to dissuade them, he gets them deputized and armed with warrants for Palance's gang. I think it is here where we get the classic Western movie Gang-of-Cowboys-Galloping-Across-the-Plains scene. One of my favorites.

The first warrant they are going to serve, Estevez sees a cowboy going into the outhouse, follows him there, and shoots him while his hands are occupied. That's technically not how you serve a warrant. But it gives you some idea of what kind of guy he is. Soon he is famous - his young age gets him dubbed "Billy the Kid" by the papers. And now we know who this movie is about.

Let's see, Charlie Sheen thinks he's the leader of the group but he gets shot. Actually, they pretty much all get shot, but Sheen is the one who dies. Philips is the knife expert, and gets a lot of grief as a Mexican and an Indian. Sutherland is a poet and philosopher who falls in love with a Chinese woman that Palance has installed as a prostitute in one of his saloons. And it all ends up in a big shootout at Terry O'Quinn's place.

Oh yes, and in the middle, Philips introduces the gang to peyote tea, and there's an extended trip sequence that comes to nothing, but is kind of fun.

The movie has a heck of a cast, and is a pretty good Western, but I'm not sure it amounted to much. It looks like it was very much based on history, although I only know what I read in Wikipedia. I loved Stamp, of course, and Philip is great as well. I'm not sure anyone else is really giving much, except for Sutherland, who gets to be kind of goofy, although it's Siemaszko who is the real comic relief.

Anyway, Ms. Spenser liked it, because Charlie Sheen gets killed first.