Fish are getting addicted to meth and are starting to prefer waterways with a little ice in them. Yes, that’s a real thing that’s happening. The fun thing about drugs consumed by human beings — legally or otherwise — is that they’re never ...
The Lasting Horror and Adventure of ‘Jaws’
In the mid-1970s, few thought a one-word-titled horror-adventure flick from an unknown director would eventually become a staple on “best movies of all time” lists — and it actually doesn’t sound much more believable today. But Jaws (1975) undeniably ...
The 7 Best Guns in Clint Eastwood Movies
Clint Eastwood has used a lot of guns on screen. He’s been an avid shooter since the 1960s and cut his teeth on the TV Western Rawhide before making the jump to the big screen. His form isn’t great, and you won’t ever catch him using a two-handed ...
The Death of Big Jake, the World’s Tallest Horse
Remember on Parks and Rec how everyone in the little Indiana town was in love with a miniature horse named Little Sebastian? It was kind of like that for the past 20 years, but in reverse, for residents of a little town in Wisconsin and their beloved ...
John Wick: Chapter 4 Starts Filming – Full Details So Far
It has finally happened. John Wick: Chapter 4 officially began filming this week. It’s been a long wait for fans who'd rejoiced in the pre-pandemic days at the prospect of two huge sequels from Keanu Reeves debuting on the same weekend: JW4 and ...
The Powerful Treatment That Could Help Heal Our Wounded Vets
A bed in white linens sits in the center of a wood floor, lit by soft daylight streaming through large windows. Outside is a still desert landscape pockmarked with scrub brush and cactus. A veteran is on the bed, tattooed, laying still as a ...
Knife Steel: How To Choose the Best Blade for You
Choosing a knife steel is one of those things that if you go down that rabbit hole and get super into it, you're certain to form bizarrely strong opinions and develop weird loyalty for certain alloys. A lot of people fumble around with different ...
Deadwood: Fact vs. Fiction in HBO’s Epic Western
Deadwood is arguably the best Western TV show ever produced. It focuses on the early years of a real gold rush boomtown established from a prospecting camp in the Black Hills area of South Dakota in the 1870s. It was a lawless place, loosely ...
The Coolest Retro RV You’ll Ever See
If there’s an ’80s child hiding inside you somewhere, this photo probably made them squeal a little bit — I know mine did when this killer retro RV popped up on my Reddit feed. There are vibes of the A-Team van on steroids, with hints of the van the ...
Sylvester Stallone Is a National Treasure, and You Can’t Change My Mind
Sylvester Stallone gets a lot of shit. People have been using him as a punchline for years, either because of the way he talks or looks or because of the roles and action movies he’s made famous. I grew up on Stallone and his ...
10 Movies Not To Watch Before Going on a Road Trip
Summer is coming. The sun is out. Temperatures are rising along with gas prices. Millions of Americans will soon hit the road, spinning the wheels on the family truckster, and looking for adventure — or just an affordable vacation. Road ...
‘Sasquatch’: An Outstanding Docuseries That Isn’t Really About Bigfoot
Even if you don’t give a crap about Bigfoot, the new Hulu documentary series Sasquatch is worth watching. We’ve all been sucked in before by the first few minutes of those horrible History Channel “documentaries” about supernatural and mysterious ...
Understanding Knives: Blade Shapes
Cutting implements were among the first tools human beings ever created. Throughout history, we’ve created an impressive number of blade shapes fashioned from bone, stone, and steel. A whole lot of blade shapes have been created over the past few ...
The Best Shotgun Moments in Westerns
Shotguns were the first small arms. The fairly ancient blunderbuss was a smoothbore, muzzleloading firearm that fired little pieces of pretty much anything — rocks, nails, arrows, bits of iron, and, yes, shot. Muskets mostly morphed into rifles as ...
Incredibly Dumb Moments in Survival Movies
Sometimes, characters in movies make inexplicably stupid decisions, the kind that make you scream at the screen in fury. In survival movies, when the stakes are incredibly high, dumb characters making dumb choices is even more infuriating than it ...
10 of the Best River Misadventure Movies Ever Made
The thing about taking a river trip is that it’s kind of a one-way affair, and once you’re committed, you have to just take the ride or hike out. Most river adventures in movies go bad when a group either accidentally navigates into unexpected rapids ...
PBS Hemingway Documentary Gets to The Man Behind the Legend
An ordinary man has many limitations, especially in the way of ability and longevity. A legend, however, continues to grow and reshape itself, uncaring of the passage of time. The bigger the legend, the more it evolves as it grows, often becoming ...
30 Action Movie References in ‘Tropic Thunder’
Tropic Thunder (2008) is a comedy about a fictional award-winning movie, which was made about the ordeal behind the making of another fictional movie, which was never actually finished or released. See, there’s the real movie Tropic Thunder, and ...
How ‘Dances With Wolves’ Changed Westerns Forever
The evolution of a film genre usually happens gradually, with different films offering incremental innovations or outside-the-box thinking until they all add up to a significant gear shift. After all, genre fans are genre fans for a reason: They like ...
Process a Moose Solo: Here are the Tools You’ll Need
Trevor Thompson told the Free Range American podcast recently about the time he was able to process a moose by himself on a hunt in British Columbia. He ended up filling his tag with a great bull early in the week, so he had the time and ...
Survival Knife: Understanding Blades
There is no such thing as a survival knife. Knives have been called that and have been marketed that way — as some kind of magical tool that will save your ass in some unlikely situation. But that idea is inherently flawed. Sure, some ...
2 Contemporary Movies That Get Hunting Right — Mostly
For the many unfavorable, unrealistic depictions of hunters and hunting in movies, you’ll find only a small handful that feature more positive, truer-to-life examples. Two films from the past couple of decades stand out in this regard, and believe it ...
Meet Cal Fire’s Pranay Manghirmalani
It takes a special kind of person to stride into the hellscape of a raging wildfire and do battle with an actual force of nature. Pranay Manghirmalani is one of those people. He talked with Free Range American about where he’s from and why he does ...
Why Hollywood Never Gets Hunting Movies Right
In trying to think about great hunting-focused movies, I came up woefully short, and the few movies I could conjure were mostly period pieces specifically about hunting in Africa. The most current movie I could muster is Wind River (2017), though ...
10 of the Best Archery Movie Moments of All Time
A bow is a great weapon for a movie hero to wield. It connects them to warriors throughout time and allows them to take advantage of a bow’s stealth and accuracy (in the right and experienced hands), the same reasons hunters value them today. While ...
Mountain Lion and Other ‘Bad’ Meat is Actually Delicious
In a recent talk on the Free Range American podcast, hunter, biologist, and filmmaker Donnie Vincent talked about a mountain lion he’d arrowed in British Columbia and how much everyone in camp had loved the meat from the big cat. “We’d cook a ...
The Real Hugh Glass Versus What We Saw in ‘The Revenant’
When The Revenant came out in 2015, it made a big splash for a few reasons. The film’s star Leonardo DiCaprio earned a best actor Oscar for his depiction of a legendary mountain man: the real Hugh Glass. The bear-attack scene made headlines, too. But ...
Do a 7-Day Smartphone Detox This Holiday Season
When times are tough — like pretty much every day of 2020 — a lot of us reflexively retreat into our phones and the alternate reality of social media. It’s a dopamine hit that’s immediate and conditioned. But deep down, we know we spend too much time ...
Becoming the Squirrel: Hunters vs. Vegans on Social Media
Maybe hunters and vegetarians — and even vegans — aren’t all that different? Biologist, explorer, and filmmaker Donnie Vincent raised this question in a recent chat he had with Evan Hafer on the Free Range American podcast. “I don’t like the ...
Why ‘Unforgiven’ Is the Best Western Movie Ever Made
It’s painfully easy to romanticize the Old West. Whether reading stories or watching them unfold on a screen, people can’t help but gravitate toward the idea of a righteous gunslinger with a dusty brand of chivalry — or at the very least, a loose ...
