Alex Cox's 'Dead Souls' Gets Brutal Review at Premiere
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- Alex Cox premiered his self-directed Western "Dead Souls" at the Roxy Cinema in New York after festival play; the reviewer calls it "not really" a good movie and yet another "arid didactic put-on Western" almost no one will see.
- "Dead Souls" stars Cox himself as Strindler, a mysterious figure who rides into an 1890 Arizona border town to gather the names of dead Mexican laborers, loosely adapted from Gogol's 1843 novel of the same name.
- Cox crowdfunded the film via Kickstarter and shot it in Almería, Spain — the spaghetti Western backdrop — and Arizona, with co-stars including Zander Schloss as his Sancho Panza sidekick Borracho.
- The reviewer anchors Cox's legend on "Sid and Nancy" (1986), his shattering Gary Oldman–Chloe Webb punk biopic called "one of the greatest movies ever made" and the film that launched the indie revolution alongside "Blue Velvet," and on "Repo Man" (1984), the cult L.A. punk comedy that made his name.
- "Walker" (1987), Cox's $6 million studio Western starring Ed Harris as the mercenary filibuster William Walker, grossed just $300,000 and effectively ended his mainstream access, per the reviewer.
- After "Walker," Cox relocated to Mexico and has spent nearly four decades making what the reviewer calls "sloppy absurdist 'punk' japes" — including the 1991 Spanish-language crime drama "Highway Patrolman" — that never recaptured his early creative juice.
Why it matters: The review frames Cox's trajectory as a deliberate self-sabotage: two of the most influential American indie films of the 1980s followed by the $6M-to-$300K box office collapse of "Walker" and four decades of deliberately marginal, crowdfunded Westerns. For film historians, "Dead Souls" is less a new release than a marker that the auteur who shaped indie cinema's punk wing is now premiering films at a single off-the-beaten-track theater on Kickstarter money.
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