Well-shot but stupid, Six-String Samurai is one of the year's weirdest films. Obviously inspired by low-budget action classics like El Mariachi and Mad Max, as well as more mainstream films like The Wizard Of Oz and Star Wars, Six-String Samurai is the latest product of a still-formative fresh-from-film-school mind. It takes place in a post-apocalyptic future frozen in 1957, the year the Russians dropped the bomb on America. The only safe haven in a vast wasteland teeming with roving gangs of brawling bowlers, nuked-out Neanderthals, jive-talking midgets, and the remnants of the Red Army is Las Vegas, renamed Lost Vegas. When the King of Lost Vegas (Elvis, of course) dies, rogue swordsmen and guitarists head for the city to claim the vacant throne. Yet it becomes clear that there are only two real contenders: Jeffrey Falcon, the kung-fu-fighting anti-hero of the title, and the figure of Death itself. While the former, with his Buddy Holly glasses and vintage ax, is the very embodiment of rock 'n' roll, the latter, looking like Rob Zombie without a face, fights in the name of heavy metal. There can be only one. Or something. Filmed on the fly in Death Valley with freebie film stock, Six-String Samurai looks a lot better than most movies of its ilk, though it's easy to wish that co-writer/director Lance Mungia had spent as much time with the screenplay as he obviously did with his storyboards. Mungia owes a great deal to Sam Raimi, though he doesn't possess Raimi's giddy lack of self-restraint. Still, with many slow-motion action scenes set in a gleaming desert right out of David Lean-land, Six-String Samurai consistently maintains a wild, hallucinatory quality.