Jethro Compton's Frontier Trilogy: The Rattlesnake's Kiss

The last instalment in Jethro Compton's Frontier Trilogy is easily his most ambitious. His script does its best to tear down the wooden walls of his immersive chapel set to present scenes on a Mexican pig farm, in the depths of a coal mine, and flashbacks to his outlaw protagonist's childhood in mountain country.

Jack Mason's name was turned to muck during a career as the most feared member of brutal Western gang the Venenos. Now, he and his wife Elena (Bebe Sanders) have turned their backs on their gun-slinging family, but it's not so keen to see the back of them. Chris Huntly-Turner spouts his tough guy platitudes with unflinching sincerity, and Sam Donnelly shows new range as jeweled outlaw Leon, like Jack Sparrow with double the eye-liner. But with this much ground to cover, emotional subtleties are lost on prairie trails.

Compton is a pretty lonesome cowboy himself, as the sole writer, director, set designer and lighting designer of this trilogy. It's an impressive feat, but it's hard not to wonder what leaps in artistic, as well as logistical, ambition he'd make with a creative partner to ride out with.

This year's trilogy more than delivers on excitement: the thrill of having sweating, bleeding rough men charging through an audience who can see every bead of sweat as they navigate questions of life and death. But the muddled plot and mine of Western clichés in its final adventure unearths the weaknesses, as well as the strengths, of Compton's approach.