Film

Waterhole #3

A 1967 Western comedy about a slick gambler racing to find buried Confederate gold in the desert, pursued by a sheriff, his nymphomaniac daughter, and various ne'er-do-wells. It's anarchic and bawdy, full of slapstick and sexual innuendo, played with deadpan charm by a game cast. Ideal for anyone who likes their Westerns weird and their humor crude.

TMDb rating3.0

If you liked this

Support Your Local Sheriff!1969

James Garner's charming lawman navigates a gold-rush town with wit and improvisation, balancing comedy and genuine Western mechanics with effortless style and warmth.

But It's gentler and more whimsical than Waterhole #3—less interested in pushing boundaries, more interested in being universally likable.

Support Your Local Sheriff! poster

Cat Ballou1965

Lee Marvin steals the show as both a drunk gunslinger and his prissy twin brother, delivering slapstick Western comedy that's anarchic enough to make you forget you're watching a mainstream film.

But The tone is all over the place—part musical, part slapstick, part romance—and not every pivot lands.

Cat Ballou poster

Little Big Man1970

Dustin Hoffman's elderly survivor recounts his picaresque odyssey through the Old West with pitch-black comedy, genuine brutality, and a willingness to interrogate Western mythology itself.

But It's three hours long and swings wildly between tones—sexual comedy, graphic violence, philosophical meditation—in ways that can feel exhausting.

Little Big Man poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Waterhole #3

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

M*A*S*H1970

Both are ensemble chaos-comedies where the system (the frontier, the military) is the real antagonist, and individuals scramble for advantage and survival with humor as camouflage.

Altman's sprawling military comedy uses overlapping dialogue, improvisation, and anarchic energy to capture the chaos of a system grinding down individual will—the same underlying machinery as Waterhole #3, just in a war setting.

But It's very of-its-moment '70s in tone and politics, and the anti-authoritarianism reads differently now; also, it's about suffering, not just hijinks.

M*A*S*H poster
More like this (8)

Johnny Guitar1954

Nicholas Ray's delirious Western obsesses over a powerful woman running a saloon, with strangled emotion and visual obsession that makes it feel like nothing else made before or since.

But It's bizarre and emotionally overwrought in a way that reads as camp now, and the plot barely matters compared to its fever-dream atmosphere.

Johnny Guitar poster

Blazing Saddles1974

Mel Brooks detonates Western tropes with sledgehammer satire and a cast committed to every crude joke, racial provocation, and meta-joke at the genre's expense.

But It's juvenile and offensive by design, which works as satire but can feel tiring, and some jokes land harder than others.

Blazing Saddles poster

The Ballad of Little Jo1993

Maggie Greenwald's quiet, matter-of-fact film about a woman who passes as a man to survive the frontier treats its subversive premise with realism and dignity rather than spectacle.

But It's slow, understated, and deliberately unglamorous—nothing like the brash comedy of Waterhole #3, which might disappoint if you're craving that particular energy.

The Ballad of Little Jo poster

Paint Your Wagon1969

Lee Marvin and Clint Eastwood stumble through a gold-rush musical with committed absurdity, songs that shouldn't work, and a genuine sense of frontier chaos and loose morality.

But It's wildly uneven, weighed down by its own ambition, and the songs will either delight or torment you depending on your tolerance for Eastwood singing.

Paint Your Wagon poster

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs2018

The Coen Brothers' anthology series opens with a deadpan Western about a sharpshooter outlaw, rich in dark humor, moral rot, and visual storytelling that respects your intelligence.

But It's austere and deliberately paced—nothing like the raucous energy of a '60s comedy—and the anthology format means you need to settle in for multiple tones.

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs poster

Rustlers' Rhapsody1985

Tom Berenger plays an impossibly earnest singing cowboy navigating a world where Western clichés manifest literally, creating deadpan absurdist comedy that worships what it's parodying.

But It's obscure for a reason—the concept is clever but doesn't sustain itself for ninety minutes, and the execution is scrappier than the ideas deserve.

Rustlers' Rhapsody poster

Deadwood2004

Same setting, same premise: desperate people scrambling for gold and advantage in a place where law is a suggestion. Waterhole #3 finds it funny; Deadwood finds it tragic.

David Milch's HBO series takes the lawless frontier of Waterhole #3 seriously—language unfiltered, morality compromised, civilization fragile—and spends five seasons building a town from chaos into precarious order.

But It's grim, verbose, and relentlessly violent. If you want the comedy and anarchy but not the weight and suffering beneath it, this will feel like the joke turned inside out.

Deadwood poster

Gentlemen Broncos2009

Both films are sexual, crude, anarchic comedies that trust the audience to enjoy chaos without needing a redemptive narrative or likable characters; both are driven by bad behavior as comedy fuel.

Jared Hess's deeply weird comedy about a teenage sci-fi writer and a predatory author is plotless and deliberately antagonistic—absurdist comedy that cares nothing for your comfort but delivers genuine strangeness and commitment to its own logic.

But It's aggressively quirky to the point of alienation, filmed in a deliberately ugly aesthetic, and has almost no mainstream appeal—it requires you to surrender to its peculiar worldview.

Gentlemen Broncos poster

People

Cast

Directing

Writing

Production

Recommended by

Oceans of Fire