Cowboys: Murder! (1991) ** (out of 4) This entry in Phil Mulloy's "Cowboys" series starts off with a cowboy going around killing various others for no apparent reason. The village is outraged and once the killer is caught, they all turn into killers themselves wanting his blood to spill. Like many others in the series, this one here comes with a clear message but at the same time I found it to be the weakest. I think the message is quite clear but I just didn't think it worked because the entire "killing for entertainment" just doesn't come across overly well. I think it might have worked better had the director came up with something better because I'm not sure what else the villagers were supposed to do with the maniac killer. As with the previous films, the animation is rather crude but it certainly helps build up a nice atmosphere that fits the subject nicely. The film is certainly far from a bad one but I think it falls well short of the others in the series.

Tonight, I watched many of the Cowboys shorts by Phil Mulloy. They are all very similar in that they feature black painted animation and it's very, very, very simple and not particularly attractive and lacks fluidity. Perhaps it was meant to look this way deliberately, but technically speaking this wasn't exactly a pretty film.This film is about blood-lust and is very similar to Mulloy's "Cowboys: High Noon". This particular outing is about lynchings and how much entertainment we get from killing others "in the name of justice". It's all pretty clever, but like so many of these Cowboys films it goes too far, as the characters then start cutting off testicles for laughs as well. This obscures the otherwise good point it was trying to make.