Dudes is one of her early films and is an almost unclassifiable oddity – a punk-road movie-Western-ghost story. It’s certainly bizarre and odd. It can be seen as an aggressively deconstructed collage of cinematic myths – constant references between the Arizona landscape and its cinematic counterparts is made, including everything from Jesse James (1939) to The Andromeda Strain (1971), characters have frequent dreams in which they are Indians, while the revenge plot itself is really an ironic modernized Western. But for all that it feels somewhat hollow and self-conscious in its willful oddity.

The good parts about it are the viciously evil performance from Lee Ving. Jon Cryer and Daniel Roebuck are respectively precocious and stolid but the one thing that Spheeris does build into the characters through it all is a sense of growth – the journey taken from punk losers to, in the end, cowboy heroes is something that quite surprises one with its strength.