Custer's Last Stand: A Dusty, Chaotic Mess

Is it worth your time?

Honestly, only if you have a soft spot for 1930s serials that feel like they were stitched together with twine and hope. If you need a tight, logical plot, you’ll probably want to turn it off before the first reel finishes. But if you like watching bizarre, low-budget history rewrites and people riding horses in circles until the cows come home, you might get a kick out of it.

It’s not exactly a history lesson, and calling it a western is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The whole thing hinges on a 'mystical medicine arrow' that apparently everyone in the territory is obsessed with. It’s like the writers just needed an excuse to have people point guns at each other for ten chapters straight. 🤠

Oddly specific details

The pacing is… frantic. Not exciting-frantic, just 'we have to get through this scene so we can get to lunch' frantic. There’s a moment where a character hides behind a rock that is clearly made of painted canvas. It wobbles when they lean on it. Nobody acknowledges it, of course. It’s just part of the furniture now.

• The extras in the background of the fort scenes look like they’re trying to remember if they left the stove on back home.
• The sound design is mostly just loud, sudden gunshots that sound like someone clapping two wooden blocks together.
• You can spot the same patch of desert in about five different 'locations.'

I found myself thinking about Clash of the Wolves while watching this. At least in that one, you have a dog doing most of the acting, which is infinitely more charming than watching people yell about an arrow. Custer's Last Stand is much louder and much less focused.

The vibe

There’s this weird, disjointed energy to the whole production. One minute they’re in a serious life-or-death chase, and the next, everyone is standing around in a circle looking slightly confused. It feels like a rough draft that somehow ended up on screen. It lacks the polish you see in something like Lena Rivers, which had a little more heart behind the lens.

I’m not saying it’s a disaster. It’s just… thin. If you cut out all the scenes of people staring meaningfully at the horizon, you’d probably have a solid twenty-minute short film. But as a feature-length experience? It drags. It really, really drags. Sometimes you just have to admire the sheer audacity of someone saying 'yes' to this script.

Anyway, I probably wouldn't watch it twice. But it’s definitely a time capsule of a certain kind of 1930s laziness. Take that for what you will.