Can a mediocre French western really be the most psychedelic movie ever made?
I got an e-mail from a friend of mine telling me to check out Renegade, a fairly bland western with the dubious distinction of having the best psychedelic scenes ever laid down on film. Don’t believe me? I didn’t believe it either until I watched the movie. But they are there, count them, not one, not two, but three full-on Native American shamanic rituals, some lasting ten to twenty minutes at a time, complete with cosmic snakes, hyperspatial centipedes, black morphing thousand-eyed demons, and that’s just for starters. The shamanic scenes are intense beyond intense, ranging from the shifting world of coming on and going all the way into the deep realms of the transcendental peak. In short, this film nails the psychedelic experience in all it’s glory and horror, the first movie to ever do so, that I have seen. The plot of Renegade revolves around Mike, a sheltered young lad from Louisiana carted out to the frontier by his family to toughen his hide. Before long he’s in a deadly shoot-
