Kill Them All and Come Back Alone (1968)

Original title: Ammazzali tutti e torna solo

During the US Civil War. After demonstrating to the rather annoyed Confederate Captain Lynch (Frank Wolff) that his base security sucks in a fake sneak attack, mercenary Clyde McKay (Chuck Connors) and his gang of weird, violent men are hired to steal some gold belonging to the Union. As is usual in the man on a mission genre, McKay’s men (this is a film completely devoid of women in front of the camera, which on the plus side spares us the mandatory rape scene) are mainly characterized by the way they like to kill people, which can work, as it does here, when a filmmaker actually knows how to hone in on the right details about a killer that turn murder method into character. The best bet to get at said gold is apparently to somehow infiltrate a heavily secured fort and hope the dynamite it is hidden in doesn’t explode.

Further complicating the mission are the fact that McKay and his team are a bunch of backstabbers and cut-throats who can’t even wait with murdering each other until their mission is over, and that Captain Lynch may very well have an agenda all of its own.

Apart from crime movies, the great Enzo G. Castellari was particularly great at directing men on a mission style plots, may they take place during World War II or, like here, the US Civil War. So it’s no surprise that the perfectly appropriately titled Kill Them All makes for a pretty riveting watch, full of very exciting scenes of sweaty men with nasty dispositions first doing pretty unpleasant things only to their enemies but increasingly to their supposed partners too. Castellari’s great at staging the lighter, somewhat humorous action at the beginning, but he transitions just as well to the moment when things become seriously brutal, using the same vigour with which he portrays a brawl meant as a distraction when things step up to a jail break that turns into a massacre.

Speaking of massacres, more conservative critics have often tended to call the Italian Western “amoral” and “nihilistic”, a judgement that usually needs a healthy inability to understand the genre’s actual texts and subtexts. In the case of Kill Them All, that interpretation is for once actually applicable. Don’t get me wrong, Castellari isn’t exactly cheering the characters on, rather he never seems to judge the characters one way or the other, just showing the murderous nonsense they get up to without approving or disapproving. And make no mistake, these men are particularly nasty examples of their type, sacrificing bystanders and so-called friends alike for the tiniest advantage, and often in ways that actually must disadvantage them sooner or later. Which obviously makes perfect sense for the kind of people they are supposed to be.

In the very end, the film really earns the raised eyebrow of moral disapproval though, when it cheers on the final survivor’s acquisition of the gold, as if he hadn’t murdered friends and comrades, and killed hordes of people only for greed. That’s certainly one way to avoid the traditional ending where he’d end up alive and wiser but without gold, but really felt like one step too much for me.

High Desert Kill (1989)

The friends Jim (Anthony Geary), Brad (Marc Singer) and Paul (Vaughn Armstrong) have been making an annual hunting trip for ages. This year’s outing is a rather sad one, for Paul has died in a horrible accident, and Jim and Brad are taking Paul’s nephew Ray (Micah Grant) with them to scatter Paul’s ashes in the high desert, as per his wishes. It’s pretty clear that Paul was the glue that kept this particular friendship together, for the pretty sensitive medical researcher Jim and the ultra-macho Brad are clearly just one honest talk away from being on the outs forever. The presence of the younger Ray – an actor/model who is the national face of one of those pseudo-rugged outdoorsy companies that are neither rugged nor outdoorsy  - doesn’t help calm things down terribly well, either; his not being his uncle probably has a lot to do with that, as does the generation gap between the man and the one between their personalities.

Once they arrive at the place where they want to make their base camp site, the trio meet grizzled hunter Stan (grizzled Chuck Connors). Stan has bad news for them. Apparently, there’s not a trace of game animals – or really any animal – to find in the area, something the experienced Stan has no explanation for whatsoever. It becomes quickly clear that something is not at all right with the place, even ignoring the lack of animals. It is as if some invisible power were watching the group, playing with their moods and emotions in inexplicable ways, as if something were having its perverse fun, or perhaps were experimenting, with the hunters.

TV veteran Harry Falk’s High Desert Kill is a wonderful example of what could be done within the realm of the made-for-TV movie when the stars were just right, and the right script met the right cast and director in just the right mood. The script by Mike Marvin, Darnell Fry and T.S. Cook is about as Fortean as you could imagine, mixing various elements of High Strangeness with a variation on Fort’s “we are cattle”, and coming up with something that is tense, weird, yet also grounded in a believable depiction of a type of male friendship. This depiction makes it easy to buy into the stranger elements of the film, adding an additional frisson of wrongness to moments like the scenes where Brad comes upon the other three men huddled around a fire cavemen-style, bloodied and gnawing on the raw liver of a bear they had to kill off-screen. In fact, there are a couple of important things happening off-screen, perhaps for budgetary reasons; however it came about, the film only showing us the consequences of certain things also very effectively suggests that there is something wrong with time, space, and memory, the characters seemingly not quite living in a linear, observable reality anymore.

As an old TV hand, Falk’s not the most stylish of directors, but he does make excellent use of the eeriness of the high desert, suggesting the presence of the thing that is haunting the characters through colour filters, sudden absences of sound, and other tricks of that sort. It’s really effective work, particularly in combination with a minimal synth soundtrack by Dana Kaproff that provides additional low budget otherworldliness, and performances that are over the top in just the right way, suggesting the mental pressure and the malignant outside influence on the characters, while also adding a suggestion of complexity to the men.

The ending’s not quite as great as the rest of the movie, explaining things a bit too pat, and resulting in a clever yet not completely convincing finale of dramatic shouting that seems to come right out of an episode of the original Outer Limits (which is not a bad place to come from). The traditional horror movie bullshit ending is very effective, suggesting all kinds of nasty things in the future of the protagonists.


High Desert Kill is a fine movie, using most of the deficits that come with a low budget and a short shooting schedule as ways to add eeriness and weirdness to the whole affair, resulting in one of the best Fortean horror films I know.

The Deserter

aka Devil’s Backbone

aka Ride to Glory

When US cavalry captain Victor Kaleb (Bekim Fehmiu) loses his wife in an Apache attack on a catholic mission, he holds his superior Major Brown (Richard Crenna) just as responsible for her death as the people who killed her. So, after an altercation with Brown that just barely ends with Kaleb deciding not to kill his superior, he deserts, going native in the desert bordering Mexico.

There he probably would have stayed, if not for the arrival of General Miles (John Huston) at Brown’s fort. Miles is convinced that the apache war chief Durango (Mimmo Palmara) is staying in the border countries of Mexico preparing an attack that would drench the whole Southwest of the US in blood – Native American and white alike. Of course, Miles can’t just waltz an army over the border of Mexico to try and stop Durango, and has decided on an alternative plan of attack. To fetch Kaleb – a man made for guerrilla war – give him a handful of men, and use him and these men to scout out and perhaps resolve the situation.

So Kaleb soon finds himself working for the US cavalry again, turning the obligatory rag-tag bunch of fighting men – among them his old Native American scout friend Natachai (Ricardo Montalban), British import Crawford (Ian Bannen), explosives-loving chaplain Reynolds (Chuck Connors), big angry black man Jackson (Woody Strode) and professional asshole Schmidt (Albert Salmi) – into an effective guerrilla force. Afterwards, the bloodshed starts.

Burt Kennedy’s The Deserter (going by the IMDB with directorial contributions of Yugoslavian Niksa Fulgosi, but I wouldn’t know) is yet another of those early 70s international co-productions – this time under the auspices of Dino de Laurentiis – that finds itself trying to mimic many elements of the Spaghetti Western, probably on a budget much superior to most anything Italian and Spanish productions companies who didn’t have a leg in Hollywood like Dino did could come up with. At the very least, there was enough money involved to lavish it on quite a cast of actors who mostly never quite made the big time but are – at least in my home – always a pleasure to watch. Bekim Fehmiu was quite the star in his native Yugoslavia and across Eastern Europe, though, and this film was a fruitless attempt to give him a foothold in Hollywood or at least Western Europe.

Of course, this being a de Laurentiis film, it then goes and doesn’t really do much with these actors, using a script that is decidedly one-note in characterisation, with the little character development that is there so underwritten it’s often difficult to make out why the film thinks the characters act like they act, or change when they do. Fortunately, the ensemble consists of men (and this is as much of a sausage assembly as you’ll ever find) quite used to, if they aren’t given much to work with, at least making the little they have count, always giving the impression the viewer is watching quite interesting people, even if there’s never anything visible on screen that would actually make them interesting.

Characterisation really is the weakest point of The Deserter’s script, though it is generally more serviceable than strong, providing a Man’s Adventure style men on a mission western. From time to time, writer Clair Huffaker – who was responsible for quite a few better scripts for westerns – does add some interesting flourishes to the proceedings, though. While the Apaches are the enemy of the day, and not given luxuries like characterisation or names, the film does more than once suggest that their grievances are very much justified. The film even, as much as a film very much in love with its own violence can, the way the conflict between Apache and post-settlers is fought: full of atrocities committed by both sides, one cruelty always leading to the next, with no side seeing itself in the position to ever stop escalating. Men of peace aren’t to be found on both sides anyhow, so the only thing they’ll use to resolve their conflict will be violence. Moral right and wrong don’t ever come into play. In the film’s world, a morally decent action can lead to as horrible consequences as a morally abhorrent one. In the very end, after quite a bit of slaughter, the film does suddenly start to argue doing “the right thing” might be important and worthwhile in itself even when the consequences are dire, but then it’s a bit too underwritten to really convince me of anything more than its good intentions. Which, come to think of it, is more than a lot of films bother with showing, so it’s still a point in The Deserter’s favour.

If you take the film for what it is, though, you can have a good time with it. Even though Kennedy is the archetype of a hired gun director never bringing any visible personal touches to anything he’s working on, he does his job well enough here, pacing things well, often letting the actors’ faces and the impressive landscape of Arispainia speak for themselves, getting the action done in professionally exciting manner. The resulting film is not exactly one of the greatest pseudo-Spaghetti Westerns ever made but it’s an entertaining time, if you can cope with a lot of unpleasant violence in your entertainment.

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