Total Misfire From Saddle Tramp Creators

(091924) Wynonna Earp: Vengeance is a new supernatural Western film on Tubi that was spun off from the cult TV series that appeared on and off from 2016-2021 on the SYFY Channel. It is based on the not especially popular comic series created by Beau Smith and various artists which has also appeared in print sporadically; first on Image Comics and finally at IDW. Vengeance acts as a coda for the SYFY Network TV series and it wraps up the stories of several of the characters. Although I was not a faithful consumer of either the comic or the TV show, I saw a few episodes which I remember as being just ok. Unfortunately, this new film spin-off is truly terrible. I thought that Ghost Busters: Frozen Empire would be the worst monster hunter film of the year, but compared to this, it is A Touch of Evil.

The main characters who are faithful to the comic versions are Wynonna Earp, a sharp shooting, gutsy, and beautiful descendant of the original Wyatt Earp, and her partner the tough and dashing Doc Holiday who is also Wynonna’s lover. Both actors look great riding horses and posing with guns but neither displays much in the way of acting ability. And their characters never get to do anything especially interesting. Indeed, the stunt people might actually be more talented than the cast and the actors are barely competent and add nothing special to their roles. The French-Canadian actress, Melanie Scrofano who appeared on a few episodes of Supernatural stars as Wynonna Earp, the great granddaughter of Wyatt who has returned to her family’s hometown of Purgatory to fight monsters. She is equipped with a magic gun just like Sam on Supernatural that can help her kill demons, vampires and zombies (which the show calls revenants). Tom Rozon, who is supposed to be roguishly charming, is Doc Holiday who befriended the original 19th Century Wyatt and then gained immortality through supernatural means. He befriends Wynonna, fathers her baby, and helps her fight the demons. We know he is supposed to be a tough outlaw because he swears a lot, and drinks frequently.

The rest of Wynonna’s team includes her sister, Waverly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley), and Waverly's fiancée, Nicole (Katherine Barrell.) None of these characters are very memorable and they rarely rise above clichéd stereotypes. It is hard to tell if anyone here can act because the dialogue and script are so bad.

This is where I would usually talk at length about the story but there is not much plot here. A very powerful female demon escapes from hell and she blames Wynonna for putting her there. The demon lady kidnaps Wynonna’s friends so she can get her attention to track her. All this leads to an anticlimactic ultimate battle between the assembled heroes and the demon woman plus her Hell Hounds. Hell Hounds (The great blues musician, Robert Johnson wrote a song about them) supernatural dogs sent by demons to retrieve damned souls and bring them back to hell. These creatures also appeared in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Supernatural. But I have never seen them depicted so badly as in this film. They look like a bunch of men wearing rags shot unclearly on purpose so we cannot see them. When the hell hounds come after the heroes we hear “Who Let the Dogs Out” on the soundtrack. How clever!!

It is of course possible to blend the western and horror genres successfully as you can see from the sort of interesting Curse of the Undead (1959), the classic cult film Near Dark (1987), and the wonderful Iranian American vampire western, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014). Even the Ghost Rider comic, which is one of the few Marvel titles I read regularly, often does an excellent job of combining the two genres although the 70s series had more Western elements. But Wynonna Earp: Vengeance never rises to that level or finds the right balance, although it is not as disastrous as notorious turkeys like Billy the Kid vs Dracula or Jesse James Meets Frankenstein’s Daughter (both from 1966), which sometimes played together on drive-in double bill's.

The show was nominated for best drama in the GLADD awards, and it has been praised for its portrayals of queer and female characters. But this show is unnecessarily overcompensating for past gender sins. With the exception of two male characters (Doc Holliday and an old guy serving a role similar to the Bobby character in Supernatural) all the males are either cannon fodder or unnecessary. Films like this will not do much to help gender relations. In one scene the female demon says, “The affairs of men are of no concern to me” because she is a demon and he is a human, and a heroine responds, “You got that right,” because she is a lesbian and a feminist. Get it?

There are ridiculous scenes in which the heroes’ fights with demons are interrupted so that characters can discuss their gender preferences or label someone as sexist and we also get lectures from women who should be concerned about whether they are going to survive on how men should treat their girlfriends better. I do not mind feminist and/or LGBT material in a film, but it should be better integrated than this. Also, it should enhance or deepen rather than take us out of the story.

There was similar dialogue and/or messaging occasionally on the CW Supergirl show and there was way too much of it in Disney/Marvel’s She Hulk. In this film it is completely out of hand, and it deflects from the action and destroys the narrative. The script reads like it was written by an untalented gender studies college student who had never read a film script before and was completely unfamiliar with the tropes of both westerns and horror films. I doubt that an AI program would generate a more pedestrian or more predictable script.

When Joss Whedon’s wonderful Serenity film came out, I thought it was an entertaining and necessary work that did fans a service by providing a fine and much needed ending for a prematurely cancelled Firefly series using a bigger budget to expand the scope of the show, In contrast Wynonna Earp: Vengeance is one of those films that went straight to Tubi with little fanfare probably because it is not good enough to be shown at the theatres. Also there seems to be no improvement in terms of the special effects, if anything, the special effects look cheaper than the ones in the original series.

The filmmakers are obviously beating a dead horse, and the film just seems to exist to squeeze out the last dollars from the final fans of a mediocre show. It is a shame that swill like this gets the green light when a promising show like the smart and clever Dead Boy Detectives which has much better developed and integrated characters gets prematurely squashed before it gets to realize its potential.