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.

I’ll Sell My Skin Dearly (1968)

Original title: Vendo cara la pelle

The Italian American West. Years ago, local sadist black hat boss Ralph Magdalena (Dane Savours) and his henchmen led by sadist gunman Benson (Spartaco Conversi) murdered most of a family whose name I never managed to catch – father, mother and kid daughter – to get at their land, where the father had just found gold. Only teenage son Shane was away, working in another state to keep the family fed. Now, a decade or so later, he has grown up to be played by Mike Marshall, and returns to his old home to slowly shoot and stab his way through Magdalena’s henchmen. He’s frightfully good at killing, though, clearly relishing every man he murders with uncomfortable intensity.

Despite being really rather great at murdering people, Shane is eventually wounded by one of his enemies, finding himself saved and taken in by young, pretty widow Georgiana Bennett (Michèle Girardon) and her son Christian (Valerio Bartoleschi). These two manage to remind Shane of his humanity, but will of course be in danger when he still can’t stop his vengeful ways.

Depending on the cut you see, Ettore Maria Fizzarotti’s I’ll Sell My Skin Dearly shows a stronger influence of the sentimental parts of traditional American western movies than is typical for the often rather more cold-blooded Italian version of the genre; as a matter of fact, the film gets the kind of full-bodied Hollywood happy end quite a few American westerns concerned with vengeance deny their characters.

This results in something of an awkward contrast with Marshall’s portrayal of Shane with the kind of full-on crazy eyes you usually see from serial killers and the henchmen of the bad guys in the movies (indeed, Conversi seems to have a bit of a competition going on with Marshall who can outcrazy the other), smiling coldly about his body count. That’s not exactly the kind of behaviour that’s going to sell a redemption arc, scenes of Shane bonding with sugary sweet Christian and falling for Georgiana notwithstanding. On the more positive side, all of this is certainly not what one expects from a Spaghetti Western, and I’m not one to complain too loudly about a film trying to do things differently, even if it doesn’t work out quite as well as one would wish for.

In general, Fizzarotti seems to have understood the Italian western wisdom that, if you can’t hire a great actor, then hire one with interesting eyes, so while Marshall’s certainly not a master thespian in anybody’s book, he – and quite a few other cast members – do that staring into the camera in close-up thing so important to Italian westerns very well.

Their director provides them with quite a few opportunities for this sort of thing, too, for while Fizzarotti certainly isn’t a great stylist, he has at least studied the Corbucci rule book of Italian western filmmaking, going for the tight close-ups, the occasional use of a handheld camera, and an aura of grime and mud you’d expect or hope for in a film like this.


Obviously, this is not a top tier Spaghetti Western, in part because it doesn’t really have much of a handle on how to integrate the hero’s nihilist vengeance and his redemptive arc on more than the most obvious level of plotting; in part because Fizzarotti is a decent imitator instead of someone bringing much of his own to the table. However, for a film from the lower rung of the Italian western ladder, it’s a perfectly fine time, at least ticking a lot of the boxes you want to have ticked by a film if you simply enjoy genre tropes for what they are, as I often do.

Past Misdeeds: Sartana the Gravedigger (1969)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The North Western Bank is supposed to be the most secure bank in the West. Guarded by ridiculously uniformed men, a gatling gun and some choice examples of the art of safe-building, nothing and no one should be able to get away with an assault. But a very tricky gang of robbers manage to get inside and make away with several hundred thousand dollars. One of the bad guys seems to be the famous bounty hunter Sartana (Gianni Garko), or at least a guy with Sartana's dress sense and gun. Turns out Possibly-Sartana is also the mandatory bandit who kills off his partners in crime to have all of their ill-gotten gains for himself.

Understandably, the authorities put a nice little price on Sartana's head.

Of course, everyone's favourite cloaked bounty hunter is innocence itself and feels the dire need to find out who framed him for the robbery. To make his job more difficult, quite a few of Sartana's colleagues (and supposed friends) in the bounty hunting biz decide that they'd very much like to have Sartana's bounty, the moral and practical problems (surely, there must be easier prey than Sartana) notwithstanding.

Sartana's search for his enemies leads him at first to his old acquaintance and friend, the hobo thief Buddy Ben (Frank Wolff). Buddy sends him to a guy named Dynamite Butch who probably helped outfit the bank robbers, but Butch is murdered before Sartana can talk to him. That will be a repeating problem in the bounty hunter's pursuit of his hidden enemies. Whoever knows something gets killed before Sartana can acquire the information he wants.

And then there are Sartana's colleagues to cope with, guys with names like Shadow (Jose Torres), Deguejo (Gordon Mitchell), or the delightful Hot Dead (Klaus Kinski), who is only in the bounty hunting business to pay off the debts his incredibly bad luck at gambling brings him.

Somehow, the man in black still manages to follow a trail I didn't manage to actually comprehend and arrives in the perfect little town of Poker Falls where he will spend the last thirty minutes of the movie, killing people and having fun.

The ground rules I have set when writing about some of director Giuliano Carnimeo's other Spaghetti Westerns also apply to Sartana the Gravedigger. That is to say, the film is lacking in the depth the films of directors like the Sergios brought to the genre. Neither politics, nor social commentary, nor even slightly complex (and complicating) character work seem to interest Carnimeo. Words like "light" and "fluffy" come to mind, and if I were a less happy-go-lucky kind of guy, I'd probably spend most of this review complaining about the film's utter lack of subtext.

That would of course be quite unfair to Carnimeo's achievements in this particular movie. I believe the director must have put quite a bit of energy into excising every Spaghetti Western cliché and archetype that could even vaguely be connected to a reality outside the film; the only element that could be read as even vaguely meaningful for the world at large is the inevitable evilness of rich men, but even this aspect is treated with so little interest by the director that the greatest effort couldn't convince me to interpret this point as even slightly politically motivated, be it consciously or subconsciously.

Instead of using his imaginary West as a place to apply his theories about the nature of man, the corruptive influence of capitalism, or to break the American concept of Manifest Destiny into little pieces, Carnimeo treats his West as a giant playground. Seldom is the Spaghetti Western as close to the spirit of kids playing Cowboys and Bandits as it is here, but it's also seldom that a Spaghetti Western's utter lack of earnestness works as well as it does here.

Sartana the Gravedigger is dominated by a sense of the absurd and the whimsical that at times makes it feel as if it had been scripted by a very clever child, following every idea that comes to its mind whenever it does come to its mind. If you expect a strong, clear narrative, you'll probably run away in terror. This is the sort of movie that doesn't have any problem with just leaving its hero and the main narrative behind for ten or fifteen minutes just to check in and see what a minor character with little actual importance to the main plot like Kinski's Hot Dead is doing on his search for Sartana. Not much of import, as it turns out, but who cares about that as long as what Kinski is doing is fun to watch?

Looking for fun instead of meaning or narrative structure is very much what Carnimeo makes his business here. The film merrily flutters from one scene to the next, not very concerned with how everything hangs together, but very concerned with making every single scene fun to watch for its audience.

Carnimeo shows itself to be a very creative director when he needs to be. The director goes from (actually funny, for once) comedic bits to exciting and inventive action scenes, to the sort of iconic looking shots that give the Spaghetti Western genre some of its power as if it was the easiest thing in the world. While the film's script is as loose and episodic as they come, Carnimeo's direction feels tight and assured - a far cry from the Wtf-style other light Spaghettis like Ferdinando Baldi's The Stranger Gets Mean utilize.

The director is assisted by a bunch of character actors - basically everyone you see in every second Spaghetti Western - visibly having a blast with their weird and exalted roles. Even often wooden Gianni Garko shows a bit of charm, even enthusiasm, and Kinski is as funny and relaxed as I've ever seen him.

With so much sparkle coming from the screen, one would be quite a curmudgeon to not like Sartana the Gravedigger. I, for one, won't be one this time.

Past Misdeeds: And God Said To Cain (1970)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

After ten years of forced labour, Gary Hamilton (Klaus Kinski) is pardoned by the state governor. As it goes with protagonists of movies, Gary has been framed for the crime he has supposedly committed, and has not exactly mellowed towards the people responsible for his plight.

So Gary gets into the next stagecoach to return to the little Western town where his troubles began. With him in the coach is Dick Acombar (Antonio Cantafori), a soldier who is just returning home after two years of absence. As destiny (and it is destiny responsible in this particular film, and not luck) will have it, Dick is the son of the main target of Gary's vengeance. Gary gets out of the coach a bit before town, because he still needs to buy a weapon and a horse from the mandatory old blabbermouth, but he asks Dick to tell Acombar that he'll be around for a visit in the evening.

Dick's father (Peter Carsten) has become the head honcho of the town, ruling it with an iron fist and a veritable army of gunmen, yet has somehow been able to hide his rather dubious character from his son. Acombar and those of his henchmen in the know seem rather disturbed when they hear the news of Gary's impending arrival.

Because the patriarch still wants to hide the nature of his affairs from his son (for whom he has great plans including buying him the presidency), he sends his men out into town to kill Gary before Gary can learn the truth of the business between them. That's easier said than done, though. Gary arrives at nightfall, together with a tornado that might just have metaphorical dimensions, and he shows a nearly supernatural ability at hiding and striking at his enemies from the shadows, slowly working his way closer to Acombar throughout the night. Of course, all that racket in town can't help but send a clever young man like Dick searching for explanations.

After my last Spaghetti Western experience with Ferdinando Baldi's clichéd and unfocused Django, Prepare A Coffin!, it is especially nice to stumble onto a film as focused and tight (though not lacking in clichés) as Antonio Margheriti's And God Said To Cain, the product of a director not only in control of his visuals but also one having quite specific ideas about dramatic unity Aristotle-style. Tightness and focus aren't usually words I tend to connect with Margheriti's name, but And God Said To Cain makes it quite obvious that the director could do tight and focussed if he wanted to.

Now, Margheriti is of course one of my special favourites among Italian genre filmmakers, yet I usually tend to praise him for those of his films that live on sheer gleeful silliness and a sense of good fun like his post-Indiana Jones adventure movies or - strangely enough - his jungle action films. One tends to forget that Margheriti was also quite at home in the Gothic horror genre - a part of the cinematic landscape where one won't find much glee - and did in fact produce some very fine films there.

And God Said To Cain is Margheriti's successful attempt at stitching the stylish and elegant head of the Gothic onto the stinking, unwashed and possibly flea-bitten body of the Spaghetti Western, creating a monster made out of ringing church bells, howling wind, shoot-outs and vengeance taken right out of the Old Testament. In a sense, mixing the typically elegant Gothic horror with the typically rude Spaghetti Western shouldn't work, what with the Gothic being a film genre of night and fog and the Spaghetti being one of daylight and too stark sunshine.

Fortunately, Margheriti makes some deft directorial choices, taking the mood (and therefore the night) from the Gothic and the nature of his hero and the way violence works in provoking ever more violence from the Spaghetti. The director also emphasises the common ground of the two genres he is trying to fuse: both can be high on the melodrama (although the Spaghetti Western not always is) and both love to tell stories of vengeance and the way the sins of the father tend to fall back on the sons, as will inevitably happen to Dick Acombar in the end here.

It comes with the vengeance territory that both genres tend to believe in destiny (or the grim god of the Old Testament working through the gun of a film's protagonist) and so like to end on a scene of a cursed building burning down. And God Said To Cain is certainly no exception to this rule, ending a final confrontation in a room full of mirrors (of course also a visual tell of both the Gothic genre and the Spaghetti Western) with a burning villa.

I find it rather interesting how the film utilizes Kinski. Usually, directors employing the man had him do his - loveable and most excellent - Wild Man of Germany shtick, glowering, screaming and jumping up and down like the original, frightening Rumpelstilzchen, but Margheriti somehow convinces Kinski to restrain himself until he becomes a stone-faced, coolly-burning killer who shows his true emotions only through his eyes. Not surprisingly, Kinski is quite brilliant at this, too.

I was also impressed by Margheriti's restraint when it comes to showing the violence happening, often only letting us (and the increasingly panicked bad guys) see the aftermath of Kinski's killings instead of the the executions, letting the audience share something of his victims' fear of their enemy being more than just a normal human being who can be killed like anyone. Only the film's final third shows Kinski's work in more detail, and very consciously begins to show us the sheer physical strain this man must be under, making him possibly even more frightening than he was when he seemed to possess the dubious physical reality of the killer from a slasher movie. After Kinski has become something akin to a force of nature, he slowly becomes human again until he can throw away his gun in the end.

There's a mythical quality about much what happens in the film. It lies in the way in which what would be coincidences in a different world become destiny, in the dark rhythm of the film's editing, in the methodical way Kinski goes about the killing business, the silent fear he awakens in his victims and in the sparseness of information about what betrayal it is Kinski has come to take vengeance for.

This is not all the sort of Spaghetti Western one would expect Margheriti to make - and in fact, his other Spaghettis are much lighter in tone - but it should be an excellent surprise for everyone stumbling onto it.

In short: Durango Is Coming, Pay or Die (1971)

Original title: Arriva Durango… paga o muori

We’re back in the Italian West. Gunman Durango (Brad Harris, making for a fun western hero) – inevitably called Django in the dub of the version of the film I’ve seen – works as a roaming debt and money collector. Bandits have stolen your cows? Get them back for ten percent of their worth! A thug owes you money? Durango takes care of it for his ten percent! He’s rather popular too, for it is clear our hero prefers selling his services to the working poor and the down-trodden. In fact, when Durango wanders into a town dominated by evil banker, loan shark and all around crazy asshole Ferguson (Gino Lavagetto) he somewhat disgustedly declines to work for him.

Ironically, stumbling upon the aftermath of a coach robbery, making short process of the Mexican bandits responsible and arresting their eccentric leader El Tuerto (José Torres), Durango sort of does work for Ferguson. At least, he’s getting him a whole lot of money back. Ferguson isn’t happy with Durango insisting on his usual ten percent instead of the pennies he wants to give him, and only pays our protagonist under Duress. Later, some of his thugs ambush Durango on and take the money back.

Of course, Durango ambushes right back a night or so later but instead of just letting the gunman ride away with his now hard-earned bit of money, Ferguson decides to double down, frames Durango for a murder and starts making a list with the jury members he prefers to find Durango guilty. Obviously, Durango will escape and take vengeance on the banker.

Roberto Bianchi Montero’s Durango Is Coming turned out to be a pleasant surprise for this long-time spaghetti western fan, seeing as I’m pretty sure I’ve reached the bottom of the barrel of the genre by now when it comes to films in it I haven’t seen. And sure, Durango isn’t a particularly deep or complex example of the genre, but it is a sprightly and entertaining film that uses clichés and well-worn plot elements with excitement and charm. And who can resist a film whose main villain is as realistic as they come – a crazy, greedy banker? Lavagetto gets a handful of good scenes too, with his insane bout of laughter about the usefulness of dead men for financial transactions certainly the high point there.

Montero’s direction isn’t particularly stylish but it’s generally visually interesting enough to keep one interested, while the action is staged with competence. This is one of the friendlier films of the sub-genre, and while it has quite the body count, it does lack the nasty streak of a lot of its genre companions, clearly on purpose, for where many a film of the genre shoots for angry political subtexts of varying kind or a generally bitter or cynical view of the world, this one’s really escapist entertainment at its heart. Which isn’t a bad thing at all, obviously, at least as long as a film is good escapist entertainment. Durango Is Coming surely is that.

Past Misdeeds: California (1977)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

The US Civil War is over. The former Confederate Army is being dissolved, which leads to an army of men without money or food trying to get home passing through areas where they aren't exactly welcome anymore.

A man (Giuliano Gemma) who has given himself the pseudonym of Michael Random - after a brand of tobacco, the film informs us, not the plotting proclivities of Italian scriptwriters - is one of those men. While he is not a bad guy at heart (as proven by his heroic efforts in protecting a helpless kitten from being eaten), Michael is rather cynical about the war and his shadowy past in which (as we will learn much later) he was a gunman known as "California", so he would really rather keep to himself and cultivate his aloof pose. That's easier said than done when a very young, very much not cynical former soldier named Willy Preston (Miguel Bose) starts to follow Michael around like a loveable little puppy.

At first, the older man is annoyed by his new companion, but Willy's excessively kind nature and the vagaries of travelling together let the men grow close.

At the same time, a group of fur-coated bounty hunters lead by a certain Whittaker (Raimund Harmstorf) is prowling the ex-Confederate refugees as the easiest prey imaginable. Whittaker is in league with some Union generals who are just too eager to produce new victims for him.

Somehow Michael and Willy are always able to just barely avoid direct run-ins with Whittaker's group, but those guys are not the only danger awaiting them.

After some strokes of bad luck, Willy ends up dead with a bullet in his back for a horse he had to steal to keep alive. Michael decides to do the decent thing for once, and travels to the Preston farm, telling Willy's family that their son died as a hero in the war.

Willy's parents (William Berger and Dana Ghia) are just too willing to take Michael in as a kind of adoptive son, while Willy's cute sister Helen (Paola Bose) takes quite a shine to the man. It seems as if Michael could make a peaceful life for himself on the farm, but one day, when visiting the nearby town, more bad luck leads to Helen's abduction by Whittaker and his gang, who have just fallen out with their former friends in the military.
Michael swears to bring Helen back, whatever the cost might be.

Before director Michele Lupo ended his career with a string of shitty Bud Spencer vehicles, he made this excellent late-period Spaghetti Western.

It's a slow film mostly built on two of the most important fundaments of Spaghetti Western filmmaking - mood and mud. A large part of the film trades in a silent mood of melancholia. To produce that effect, Lupo drenches his film in muted autumn colours, fog and the aforementioned mud. It is quite a beautiful film to look at if you are a friend of the colder seasons, and definitely a visually well-composed one.

The film keeps the Spaghetti-typical nasty violence a bit more low-key than usual. This doesn't mean that there is no violence on display, rather Lupo uses violence and the undercurrents of violence as silently waiting below much of human interaction instead of throwing it into our faces all the time. Unlike many American western directors, he doesn't shy away from random death and the suffering of innocents, he just doesn't wallow in it more than is strictly necessary to get his points across.

The film's subtext isn't much friendlier than those of other Spaghetti Westerns, though. Lupo's film isn't as hopeless as some other films of the sub genre, but calling California's ending a happy one would be quite a stretch, unless every ending that leaves people still standing is to be called a happy one.

I was pleasantly surprised by the acting here. Gemma has never been one of my genre favourites (which mostly says that he isn't a Franco Nero or Lee Van Cleef) does an excellent job of keeping his character sympathetic despite his flaws and past and still makes you believe in both, while Harmstorf actually manages something you don't get to see too often, namely making it plausible why people would want to follow the main bad guy. He's quite a charismatic man in his own, selling-women-into-prostitution way.

You could now add the usual paragraph criticizing the treatment of Bose's female main character as an object used to keep the plot running, but I'm afraid this just comes with the Spaghetti Western territory. At least, Lupo is showing restraint when it comes to showing the indignities heaped upon her on screen. Although I am not sure that this really is the better way to go about it. Not showing the worst often just seems a bit cowardly to me, as if a film wouldn't trust its audience enough not to enjoy a rape sequence.

The film's screenplay isn't without its flaws anyway. While I approve of its preference for randomness in place of classic plot logic when building the film (and here it really feels like a writerly decision to keep closer to reality than the orderliness of tight plotting and not like incompetence), there are moments when the film just drags its heels a little too much for my tastes.

Of course, nobody in her right mind watches Italian films for the quality of plotting. Thankfully, the rest of the script isn't half bad.

California is one of the better late period Spaghettis I have seen, well worth watching for anyone interested in seeing a film of the genre that shows restraint without being defanged.

Past Misdeeds: A Coffin For The Sheriff (1965)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A scruffy and unwashed man called not Ringo, not Django, not Sartana, but Shenandoah (Anthony Steffen) rides into a small frontier town. The place has some troubles since the gang of bandit Lupe Rojo (Armando Calvo) has put their base of operations into the area around town.

Shenandoah seems to have something in mind with the gang, though. At first, he does the usual "let's compare our penis sizes" bit by playing the always lovely "poker leading to fisticuffs" game with some of the gang members.

A little later, he subtly interferes with a bank robbery in town, carefully constructing an opportunity to grab a wounded gang member and rescue him from the law. It seems like he wants to join up with the gang.

Unfortunately, Rojo isn't just letting anyone join his merry band of slobbering psychopaths. There is a rather ill-advised membership test in form of a deadly game of hide and seek with guns against one of the original gang members for the potential newbie to survive.

Shenandoah is rather good at the game, though, and uses the possibility of a slowly dying bandit right at his feet to ask some questions about a stagecoach robbery and a murdered woman in Omaha two years ago. Alas, he doesn't get the answers he seeks.

At least, his life's dream of being one of a group of psychopathic bandits who are bound to die rather sooner than later is fulfilled. Nevertheless, he continues to ask pointed questions about the Omaha business. One could get the idea that it is somehow a lot more important to him than raping and pillaging. It might just be possible that our unshaved hero is out for revenge for a certain murder in Omaha.

All goes swimmingly, until Rojo decides to plunder the ranch of a local rancher named Wilson (George Rigaud). Wilson is an old friend of Shenandoah, and the gunman can't help himself but warn him and his pretty daughter (Luciana Gilli) of the ensuing attack.

The following debacle for the gang and Shenandoah's not exactly inconspicuous behaviour weakens his position as a big bad bandit decisively, though, starting off his obligatory torture and the typical finale of bloody vengeance.

If the plot synopsis of A Coffin For The Sheriff (and no, I have no idea what the title has to do with the film) makes it sound as if the typical fan of Spaghetti Western had seen this all before, that impression is perfectly true. There truly is no original bone in Mario Caiano's film's body, but while watching it, I didn't find myself holding that against it.

It is a very thin line which divides the realms of the clichéd and of the iconic. Caiano's film mostly dances directly on the line, doing too much of the expected in the expected manner to come down on the iconic side, yet doing it with too much panache to result in the let-down of the too clichéd.

A Coffin For The Sheriff succeeds as a very pleasant example of its genre (and this isn't exactly typical of the usually rather scattershot Spaghetti Western) mostly through the tightness of its script and Caiano's drive in executing it. While the usual assortment of side characters (with three women fawning over our hero) with their little side plots is there, the film integrates them into the main plot in a sensible way instead of going for a smoke and letting the side plots take over from time to time. This gives the film a sense of wholeness one seldom finds in the genre outside of the work of the Sergios.

But it would be unfair not to give Caiano his fair share of props. Having gone through a very typical career for an Italian director of the time by working in every genre that was popular at the moment, Caiano obviously picked up quite a bit about keeping his plots moving and cutting down on filler while letting his film look much more costly than it probably was through judicious use of rather impressive outside locations. As an old pro (his first writing and assistant directing credits come from the 50s), Caiano doesn't miss out on adding stylistic elements typical of the Spaghetti Western, elements which might still have looked vaguely original to an audience just one year after A Fistful Of Dollars. It is an excellent example of how fast some of the things Leone and Corbucci did visually became part of the visual language of Italian filmmakers trying to make a quick buck off of their successes.

So, friends of frightening close-ups of ugly, sweaty, unshaved men won't miss out here.
Also not atypical for an early Spaghetti are the acting performances. Steffen is (as was often the case with him) a little bland, yet as solid as someone with seemingly total facial paralysis can be, while the bunch of half-remembered character actors playing the bad guys are chewing the scenery nicely.

A Coffin For The Sheriff is probably not the sort of film I'd recommend to a Spaghetti Western beginner. There are just too many excellent films to see first before starting to waste time on one which is "just" very good, but when one has reached the point where one has worked through the classics and semi-classics of the genre, films like this are the little gold nuggets hidden in the dust and mud of the genre.

Three Films Make A Post: The One...The Only KING OF MONSTERS as the new demon of the atomic age!

Tunnel 3D aka 터널 3D (2014): The only genuinely positive thing I can say about this South Korean mess is that it is one of the still too few horror films directed by a woman, one Park Gyoo-taek in this case. It also goes to show that women are just as good at making generic crap as men are. This is pretty much “I Know What You Did Last Bloody Valentine”, with a perfectly useless twist surrounding the identity of its killer, and way too little of interest going on to get away with keeping as low on blood and sleaze as it does. One and a half hours of boring characters doing boring things do not a slasher nor a thriller make.

Any Gun Can Play (1967): This Spaghetti Western by Enzo G. Castellari on the other hand is never boring. It concerns a gun-fighting banker (Edd Byrnes), a bounty hunter some versions call Django but the one I saw dubs the Stranger (George Hilton), and a Mexican bandit (Gilbert Roland) chasing after a bunch of gold the bandit stole and then let steal from him, with various other groups also showing – generally violent – interest.

It’s neither a particularly original nor a very deep entry in the genre. Castellari plays the usual series of betrayals and alliance shifts, the shoot-outs and punch-ups with a friendly grin. The film is, consequently, rather good fun that – for better or worse – lacks the mean-spiritedness as well as the political background of many other films of the genre.

Contraband (1940): This is the second movie in the fruitful partnership between Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger. At this point in time, they were making pleasant, clever genre fare with a mild propagandistic bend. Consequently, this is a romantic spy movie about a Danish freighter captain played by Conrad Veidt who insinuates himself into the spy plots surrounding one of his passengers (Valerie Hobson). A smart and loveable, mildly exciting romp through black out London ensues, with some very fine moments of suspense, a fun central couple, and an air of off-handed sophistication that makes the whole affair pretty delightful.

Night of the Serpent (1969)

Original title: La notte dei serpenti

aka Nest of Vipers

Alcoholic gringo Luke (Luke Askew) has been taken in by one of the archetypal gangs of bandits/revolutionaries that dominate Italian Mexico and the border regions of the US to Mexico. The charming people use Luke as their mascot and punching bag. The band’s leader is not completely without morals – even if it’s the sort that’ll not hinder him from killing quite ruthlessly – yet he’s not above lending Luke out as the perfect scapegoat and one-time killer for the plans of the police chief (which means he is his own kind of little violent potentate) of a neighbouring village. That man (Luigi Pistilli) has gotten in on reaping the fruits of a semi-accidental killing, and he and his not quite so willing co-conspirators just need somebody like Luke to either kill a child, or at least take the fall for the deed.

Turns out they couldn’t have chosen a worse alcoholic, for Luke’s mandatory trauma is just the right one to get him to leave off the tequila, take up his gun, and do some very practical things to assuage his guilt.

Just when I thought I finally truly had seen all the good films the Spaghetti Western had to offer and was basically down to Demofilo Fidano films (a fate as worse as death, and probably more painful than most deaths), along comes Giulio Petroni’s Night of the Serpent. I shouldn’t be too surprised, really, because Petroni’s handful of westerns is always at least interesting.

As a director Petroni here fluctuates between competently regurgitating stylistic elements of the genre he’s working in (his fast eye zooms are particularly dangerous there) and breaking them up or in with moments reminding me of completely different things. There are, for example, a handful of scenes staged as if they belonged into an old west gothic, or perhaps an atypical giallo. Particularly the initial murder-by-accident comes to mind here, but there are bits and pieces of this sort sprinkled throughout the film, turning it at times into something stranger or perhaps more personal than your typical Spaghetti Western.

Petroni also adds quite a few other strange moments to the film – there’s for example the mildly perverse subplot about two of the conspirators – the local priest and the local prostitute – and the rather unhealthy thing that’s going on between them. These moments give the film a peculiar mood and demonstrate a good degree of disgust towards your typical bourgeois, towards minor authority figures (and the film is good at emphasising how tiny these people’s authority is in the large run of things) who only ever misuse their little power and then whine about the consequences.

Consequently, the film’s positive figures are a self-destructive loser with something to feel as guilty about as his enemies, the local female shaman peyote popper, and a kid who explains he likes a certain of his relations best because that one doesn’t hit him as hard when he beats him up. Oh, it really is 1969, isn’t it?

Night isn’t quite as cynical (I’m tempted to say noirish, given the philosophical outlook) as some other Spaghetti Westerns, so it finds a kind of happy ending that might actually see the surviving characters grown through the violent proceedings. In another fine twist, it does so not in the traditional manner but by breaking up the climactic show-down through some surprising business I’m unwilling to spoil. Petroni is again playing with the expected formula here and at the very least deserves a smile and a bit of praise for that, as well as for turning what could have been a bog standard example of its genre into something a little different, without ever leaving the formula too far behind.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,spaghetti western,giulio petroni,luke askew,luigi pistilli

Blood River (1967)

aka God Forgives…I Don’t!

Original title: Dio perdona…Io no!

When a train full of gold is robbed by a gang of bandits that don’t leave any survivors behind as witnesses, adventurer Hutch Bessy (Bud Spencer), working for the insurance company responsible for making up for the losses, starts investigating the case. Hutch is convinced the way the heist was planned and executed can only point to one man as the responsible brains of the operation - his old acquaintance, the highly intelligent but psychopathic Bill St. Antonio (Frank Wolff). Problem is, Bill has been killed by Hutch’s and his old friend/enemy Pretty Face (Terence Hill) – or Cat Stevens, if you’re a script writer who has probably taken the name right out of the new album releases column of a newspaper – if under rather questionable circumstances.

When Hutch seeks out Cat to have a little chat about his theory and about what truly happened on the day of Bill’s death, the two of course do not decide to team up and find out what’s up, but do the old Spaghetti Western dance where they express their mutual sympathy by trying to put one over on each other at every possible juncture. To no one’s surprise, Bill will turn out to be quite alive and even crazier than ever, and Hutch and Cat just might have to work together one way or the other if they want to find the gold and survive against Bill and his gang.

Giuseppe Colizzi’s Spaghetti Western was made a couple of years before the dynamic duo of Terence Hill and Bud Spencer turned into the dubious but childhood-approved pair of punching comedians we hate and/or love or hate/love to love/hate, and really is your typical earnest and violent Italian western. In its structure God Forgives is clearly indebted to Leone’s second Dollar movie, though it is – like most of the films coming in the wake of Leone and Corbucci – somewhat simpler and certainly less loaded with philosophical and political undercurrents.

Visually, most Spaghetti Westerns tend to orient themselves more on Corbucci inventive yet rougher style than on Leone, most probably because Leone’s approach would take quite a bit more effort, time, and perhaps even money to copy, all things in short supply when you made an Italian genre film meant to cash in on the latest fad. Colizzi, though, actually does use quite a few of Leone’s techniques – most obvious the long shots, yet the film’s pacing tends to the stately too, and the framing of some scenes looks damn familiar, too. To my surprise, the resulting film actually works as more than an attempt to blankly imitate Leone’s style, its surface indeed carrying meaning. At least, the film gives the struggle of its to varying degrees unpleasant protagonists (all of them men, as usual in the genre) the proper atmosphere, and while the political and psychological subtext is pretty much Spaghetti Western by numbers, the film never feels so derivative it becomes annoying.

Rather, it’s another entertaining Spaghetti Western that looks better than some of its brethren, recommends itself by many a shot of men squinting at each other as well as by one of Wolff’s more exalted performances, and presents its typical tale of violence, betrayal, sweat, and more violence with enough style to keep it interesting even if you’re like me and have seen what I suspect is nearly every film in the genre ever made.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,in short,spaghetti western,giuseppe colizzi,terence hill,bud spencer,frank wolff

Three Films Make A Post: His acting will kill you.

Taken 3 (2014): You gotta hand it to Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton, they really went out of their way to make Liam Neeson’s third adventure as uninvolving as possible, with a plot as predictable as the sunrise, but much less interesting. On the positive side, this time around, Liam’s female movie relatives aren’t kidnapped. Too bad the film’s alternative is to kill off Famke Janssen and have someone attempt to frame Neeson for it. The expected series of mild action scenes, a bit of waterboarding, and random melodrama ensues with little that’s thrilling or interesting to watch. The formula has grown stale, and neither Besson nor Megaton seem to have any interest in finding something interesting to replace it with.

But hey, at least the words “IT ENDS HERE” are on the film’s poster.

Chastity Bites (2013): John V. Knowles’s “Liz Bathory visits an American small town campus while working in the pre-marital virginity business” horror comedy, might not have Liam Neeson, or all that much of a budget, but it’s lively and the fun and funny moments highly outnumber its annoying ones. Plus, while it’s not completely original, it’s a film clearly trying to look at the classic elements it uses from its own place in time and space, subverting what seems fitting while keeping others in place. Plus, leads Allison Scagliotti, Francia Raisa and Louise Griffiths are, quite unlike Neeson, clearly putting energy and enthusiasm into their performances. I’m not too fond of the film’s more satirical parts because they tend to be built on the thing I like least in comedy – turning the kinds and classes of people the comedy writer doesn’t like into stereotypes so as to have an easier time making fun of them without hitting that pesky empathy in an audience – but for more than its running time than not, this is a fine little horror comedy.

Some Dollars for Django aka Drango: A Bullet for You (1966): I would not have pegged Paul Naschy’s frequent partner León Klimovsky as a very good Paella Western director, but the film at hand, while certainly not in the top of the Euro Western genre class, is a perfectly entertaining little thing, well-paced and energetic - which might be explained by Enzo Castellari supposedly having had a hand in the direction, but I tend to be very careful when it comes to this sort of thing. The film belongs to that part of the European Westerns that skews more to the classic US model of how such a film has to play out – just with added dubious dubbing, a bit more violence and torture and a much better musical score, of course – and even concerns itself with two very clear redemption arcs for its main characters. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t reach the heights of the best US Westerns there but it’s still pretty entertaining as well as showing Anthony Steffen and Frank Wolff in a particularly good week, the former expressing more emotion than usual, the latter making the most of the opportunity to for once be a bit more of good guy.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,spanish movies,action,horror,comedy,spaghetti western,in short,olivier megaton,liam neeson,famke janssen,john v. knowles,allison scagliotti,francia raisa,louise griffiths,leon klimovsky,anthony steffen,frank wolff

Three Films Make A Post: ONLY THE COBRA COULD SATISFY HER UNEARTHLY DESIRES.

Perfect Friday (1970): On paper, Peter Hall’s caper film is a fun proposition, with three leads in David Warner, Ursula Andress and Stanley Baker who have actual chemistry going on between them, and a friendly caper plot where no outside body gets hurt. The thing is, it’s all just a bit too fluffy, with too many moments of the film basically going “look delightfully clever I am, dear audience” yet not really delivering on the promised cleverness.

There’s also the glaring suspicion that there’s not actually much going on in the film, Hall distracting from the rather too simple heist at the film’s centre by filming around it stylishly and complicatedly, yet never really interested in revealing much about the characters beyond the basics. It’s certainly a good enough time as long as the movie’s running, but afterwards, it’s hard to find anything about the film that warrants thought or memory beyond two or three funny lines and David Warner’s wardrobe.

Birdemic 2: The Resurrection (2013): I think I’ve heard this joke before, and that one, and that one, and that one too. They were funny the first time, but now, not so much anymore.

I Want Him Dead aka La voglio morto (1968): Paolo Bianchini’s Spaghetti Western about Craig Hill taking revenge for the death of his sister and incidentally thwarting a plan to prolong the US Civil War is a bit more run of the mill than the last half of this description suggest. That’s on account of Bianchini’s inability (or unwillingness) to make anything out of the opportunities that part of the plot could have afforded him. The film treats these things so generically, they might just as well have been replaced with “evil people are up to no good by doing evil” and kept the same flavour, or rather lack of flavour. Politically, we learn that capitalists are evil (breaking news!).

Having said that, the film’s still perfectly serviceable entertainment: people shoot at each other, innocents die, Craig Hill scrunches his face up, a generically cool Spaghetti Western score plays, and Bianchini does keep things moving along at a nice pace.

Technorati-Markierungen: british movies,american movies,italian movies,comedy,crime,horror,spaghetti western,peter hall,stanley baker,ursula andress,david warner,paolo bianchini,craig hill

They Call Me Trinity (1970)

aka My Name is Trinity

Original title: Lo chiamavano Trinità...

Hygienically challenged professional drifter (with a horse), and probably fastest gun alive, Trinity (Terence Hill), by chance comes upon the town where his half brother Bambino (Bud Spencer) is working as a sheriff. Or rather, where Bambino has gone under cover as sheriff, for in truth he’s only a mildly successful horse thief with a grumpy disposition, and has taken the place of the town’s actual new sheriff whom he - half accidentally - shot.

Mostly, Bambino is trying to lay low, and the town’s nice and quiet enough for that, or it was before a group of pacifist Mormons (yeah, I know) lead by Tobias (Dan Sturkie) arrived, settling as farmers in a place horse magnate and practical owner of the town, Major Harriman (Farley Granger), wants for his horses. Up until now, the Major’s men haven’t done much beyond punching out a Mormon now and then, but the situation won’t stay this way forever.

Particularly not once Trinity takes a look at two pretty Mormonesses and decides he really should be helping their people out against the Major and his men, dragging the unwilling Bambino in with him.

It’s always dangerous visiting childhood favourites, particularly when you’ve already made the experience that Terence Hill and Bud Spencer movies don’t hold up when you’re not a kid anymore, even when you’re as childish a grown-up as I am doing my best to be at all times, so realizing Enzo Barboni’s They Call Me Trinity was actually a rather nice Spaghetti Western comedy turned out to be a very pleasant surprise for me. Which might have a lot to do with the fact this was actually the first comedic outing by Hill and Spencer after the success of the comedy dub of a much more serious earlier film – Boot Hill - featuring the two in Germany and elsewhere in Europe proved surprisingly successful, and this was the film that set the basics of the formula of the pair’s films instead of just repeating it ad nauseam.

What makes the film work beyond the often quite funny interplay between Hill and Spencer, with Spencer as always giving the grumpy straight man to Hill’s trickster, is its clear-eyed view of the elements that make up the Spaghetti Western. Unlike Tonino Valerii would later do with Hill in My Name is Nobody, Trinity doesn’t use that knowledge so much for a deconstruction of the genre as for the kind of mild comedy that clearly loves its genre too much to become a true parody yet can’t help but use the more ridiculous elements of it as the base for jokes. Quite a few of these jokes are really just slight exaggerations of the generally exaggerated things happening in Spaghetti Westerns (particularly those having to survive on actors making snake eyes at each other and one or two gimmicks), often used surprisingly subtly and with only the very mildest wink in the direction of the audience.

Despite what one is used to from later Hill and Spencer movies, there really isn’t all that much slapstick going on here, with most of the physical humour working more as a sub-set of sight gags; just with more punching on heads and shot down trousers, as if the film’s high concepts was to take the Spaghetti Western and replace most shoot-outs with light and fun brawls. An approach that certainly, given the general wiliness of Italian genre producers, doesn’t just by chance open up the genre to family audiences.

Consequently, and despite some cynical jokes, the resulting film is a rather good-natured concoction where the big bad is sent off to Nebraska after a big climactic brawl, where shot sheriffs walk around on crutches quite sprightly, and where tricksters can happily escape the threat of grown-up responsibilities while still helping out those in need if they put their mind to it. If this is supposed to be a conscious argument against the Spaghetti Western’s generally more cynical and bitter bent I’m not at all sure, though it’s certainly not impossible.

In any case, They Call Me Trinity proves how a capable director can take some very pessimistic (sometimes even cruel) genre conventions, and give them a believable twist in the direction of the good-natured, the fun, and the (dare I say it?) life-affirming, without having to turn to sappiness – at least in the realm of comedy.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,spaghetti western,enzo barboni,terence hill,bud spencer,farley granger

In short: Raise Your Hands, Dead Man, You're Under Arrest! (1971)

Original title: Su le mani, cadavere! Sei in arresto

After the end of the US Civil War, former confederate nurse Sando Kid (Peter Lee Lawrence), learns the manly arts of violence and joins "the Rangers", a law enforcement organization that may or may not supposed to be the Texas Rangers. Be that as it may, Kid is rather good at his job and shoots down evildoers wherever he goes, ritually handcuffing the bodies of his victims, mumbling nonsense about the letter of the law. Is he a future serial killer? A closet necrophiliac? We don't know.

As an interesting holiday project, Kid travels to Springfield, his old hometown, where he pretends to be a dandyesque perfume salesman, and begins to put his nose and his gun into the business of local bad guy Lee Grayton (Aldo Sambrell), a man whom Kid once met when he was a Union officer with a love for killing wounded enemies. Grayton is trying to acquire a lot of land in the area to get control over a planned railroad line, and if the owners don't want to sell, his men have rather convincing arguments made of lead. Until Kid's arrival, Grayton's life of terrorizing the town, dominating the local sheriff and banker, and bedding saloon owner Maybelle (Helga Liné) has gone swimmingly.

Kid, however, is pretty good at making Grayton's life deservedly difficult, and Grayton's men rather dead, particularly when he partners up with crazy bounty hunter Dollar (Espartaco Santoni). In the end, it's really never in question who will win the final showdown.

And there lies the greatest weakness of León Klimovsky's Spaghetti (paella?) Western, a film the puts the "generic" in genre, with never a moment on screen one hasn't seen in tenser, more complex, or just more interesting form in a different movie, preferably with slightly more charismatic actors. This is the sort of film where the only surprise is how easy it will be for someone even only slightly knowledgeable about Spaghetti Westerns will be able to predict the how, why, and when of every single thing that's going to happen.

The only actual surprise in Raise Your Hands is how harmless many of the usually cynical and grim basic elements of the Spaghetti Western feel here. Somehow, Klimovsky manages to even stage a scene like Maybelle's death, that is, one where a woman is beaten to death, so that it feels harmless instead of bitter, or shocking, or just misogynistic. Not that I'd be really keen on this last mood, rather the opposite, but at least it would be a sign someone involved was trying to give the film a bit of personality, instead of the nothing that seems to be at its core.

Having said this, I also have to say that I found Klimovsky's movie not painful to watch at all. The frequent Paul Naschy partner is a perfectly competent Western director, keeping things empty but pacy. It's just too bad I'll remember nothing but a feeling of dissatisfaction about Raise Your Hands in a week or two.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spanish movies,in short,spaghetti western,leon klimovsky,peter lee lawrence,aldo sambrell,helga liné

Three Films Make A Post: In the wilderness you can't dial 911

Mask Maker aka Maskerade (2010): If you're in the mood for a pretty generic slasher, Griff Furst's Mask Maker should scratch that itch well enough. It's competently directed and acted, features the obligatory mini role for Michael Berryman, has a smidgen of gore, even a bit of atmosphere, an impressively crappy ending, steals/quotes from many a more original film, and even has one or two scenes that are actually suspenseful instead of reminding you of other movies' suspense. If this sounds a bit like damning with faint praise, that's a fair assessment of my tone. For what the film is, though, it's perfectly watchable.

Cry of Death aka Carogne si nasce aka If One Is Born A Swine…Kill Him (1968): Talking of films that aren't exactly brimming with originality, house favourite Alfonso Brescia delivers a Spaghetti western with slight mystery elements. While the film's supposed twists and surprises are anything but surprising, Fausto Rossi's photography is pretty good, Glenn Saxson and Gordon Mitchell (as a gunman with a most disturbing smile and the most excellent name of - depending on the version you see - Donkey or Mule) seem to enjoy themselves quite a bit, and Brescia's direction keeps the film generally entertaining and somewhat stylish. As it goes with competent films, there are two or three stronger scenes that seem to belong to a more intense and complex movie.

Entity (2012): The final film in our Trilogy of Competence (the anthology movie Amicus never quite got around to make), Steve Stone's Entity is actually a wee bit too good for its companions, what with it ending on a pretty great fifteen minutes that give it something not exactly common in horror movies - a genuinely good and fitting ending that's not pissing away everything that's come before to set up a sequel. The only reason why Entity still belongs in this company (and doesn't warrant a full write-up) is that it still is another "film team stumbles through haunted industrial building" movie, containing exactly the kind of scares you'd expect from it, only really distinguishing itself by rather more than just decent acting (particularly Charlotte Riley and Dervla Kirwan are strong), and the decision to use some elements of the POV sub genre yet to still go for a more standard filming style. It would have been great if the visible talent of Stone and his cast had been used for horrors of a rather less trite sort, but one can always hope for the next movie. This one is at the very least worth watching once, which is more than a lot of industrial building strollers manage.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,british movies,in short,horror,spaghetti western,griff furst,michael berryman,alfonso brescia,glenn saxson,gordon mitchell,steve stone,dervla kirwan,charlotte riley

Three Films Make A Post: Born A Man...Turned Into A Living Laser Beam By Science's Most Gruesome Experiment!

The Last Killer (1967): Slow, ponderous, but not as weighty as it would like to be Spaghetti Western about George Eastman making a crash-course as a gunfighter and professional killer to be able to avenge his murdered father. Boredom ensues, though I can't say the film is actively bad.

Sector 7 (2011): Generally, contemporary South Korean filmmakers seem to be much better at making big budget genre movies that aren't dumb as rocks than their US counterparts, so I did go into this monster on an oil rig movie with certain expectations to be entertained. Alas, Sector 7 is a proper catastrophe of a movie. It's a plodding mess, dumber than you may think possible, full of clichéd non-characters who do things too idiotic to even accept in a monster movie (it really is that bad), hideous "comic" "relief", actors working on valium and a monster that looks a lot like that from The Host but (of course) worse.

The whole affair has a SyFy monster movie vibe, with all the crappiness that entails, just with a higher budget.

The Gibbering Horror of Howard Ghormley (2005): Fortunately, this brilliantly creepy piece of Weird filmmaking (shot on Super 8, no less) that is available to watch on YouTube in two parts here and here, gives me the opportunity to end this on a positive note. Director Steve Daniels uses the rawness of Super 8, editing and staging that at times remind me of Eraserhead and Weimar expressionist films, and a pretty fantastic soundtrack and sound design to create a nightmarish mindscape I found utterly irresistible and properly conducive to feelings of actual dread.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,south korean movies,american movies,spaghetti western,horror,in short,george eastman,steve daniels

In short: Django the Bastard (1969)

Original title: Django Il Bastardo

aka Django the Avenger

aka The Stranger's Gundown

A rather creepy gunman with very limited facial expressions - for the movie's first hour, I count one and a half - named, like these gunmen usual are, Django (Anthony Steffen), rides through the West delivering crosses containing the given day as their date of death to various men before he shoots them. Of course, Django is out for vengeance for something that will be explained in a (slightly comical) flashback later on.

The avenger's job is nearly done, too. After getting rid of two of his victims in short order, there's just Rod Murdock (Paolo Gozlino) left, but Murdock is a more worthy opponent than the others. Once he realizes someone is after him (Django ain't one for subtlety), Murdock decides the protection of his mad brother (Luciano Rossi in a role that has a decided whiff of Kinski) and a few men isn't enough, hires a lot more thugs and holes up with them in a town he empties of other inhabitants.

Now having to use various techniques I usually connect with the goddamn Batman, Django goes to work on them.

I always seem to be of two minds about the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Garrone. On one hand, they are all highly derivative, with hardly any plot point that don't come up regularly in other Spaghetti Westerns, and with characters completely following the expected types, on the other hand, they are also usually highly entertaining and accomplished films.

Django the Bastard may even be Garrone's best Western - it is at least the best I've seen to date - mainly because this time around, there are actually a few elements to the film that aren't quite as often explored in other Spaghettis.

The main point of interest in this regard is the way the film treats its avenging anti-hero. That a Spaghetti Western's protagonist has near superhuman abilities with the gun and incredible tenacity isn't anything new, of course, but for about the first hour, Garrone's and Anthony Steffen's script builds him up as a nearly supernatural threat, putting a bit more of the creepy in their West than is the rule. In fact, the script uses this aspect so intensely that it came as a bit of a disappointment to me when Django turned out to be only a very messed-up and angry man who consciously tries to seem more than merely human, making the comparison to Batman more than just a throw-away joke of yours truly.

Another peculiar pop-cultural resonance of Garrone's film is Django's cruelty, and the strangely ritual elements of some of his killings, that - especially early in the movie - give the impression that he's not just traumatized and angry, but an actual serial killer preying on pretty atypical victims. If you squint, you could even argue that this makes Django the Bastard some sort of proto slasher movie, but then you can say that about nearly all movies with vengeance-driven plots if you broaden your definition of makes a movie a "proto-slasher" enough.

Apart from these aspects, Django the Bastard is very typical of this phase of the Spaghetti Western: a minimal (or minimalist, if you prefer) plot with archetypal characters is executed with true visual panache; actors with very limited range work excellently within their limits (in Steffen's case, this is clearly one of his best performances); rich people are bastards; fun is had by all.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spaghetti western,in short,sergio garrone,anthony steffen,luciano rossi,rada rassimov

Three Films Make A Post: Enter a prime-evil world of future shock and alien terror.

The Unholy Four aka Ciakmull - L'uomo della vendetta (1970): Enzo Barboni's Spaghetti Western about four escaped mental patients (Leonard Mann, George Eastman, Woody Strode, Pietro Martellazana) finding out the truth about the amnesiac (Mann) among them, which obviously leads to some vengeance-ing in the end, starts out strong if loosely plotted, but peters out somewhat after half of the film is over and the actual main plot is truly starting. A film that up to that point was dominated by some beautifully photographed scenes taking place in autumnal Europe/America becomes predominantly bound to not very interesting looking sets and wants a type of highly melodramatic acting from the cast that only Evelyn Stewart actually knows how to provide.

It's thanks to Barboni's impressive tight editing rhythms and his always inventive direction that the film stays watchable and recommendable.

Island Claws (1980): This film about a giant crab and his little crab buddies fighting "eccentrics" in Florida is the only movie by director/producer/writer Hernan Cardenas, and watching it, I wasn't much surprised by that. It's not a catastrophically bad monster movie, but if the internet wouldn't tell me differently, I'd have taken it for a rather mediocre TV movie without anything in the writing or direction marking it as something other than just another movie made for no other reason than a pay check, and without much enthusiasm. The film does have one or two moments of pleasant silliness but the rest of it is just so dumb and inoffensive that I think I've already spent enough words on it.

Heavy Metal (1981): As a rule, I don't watch much Western animation, what with the form's peculiar fixation on kids and a family audience, and it's corresponding lack of exploitational values. The portmanteau film Heavy Metal (based on the US version of the French magazine) is an exception to this rule, seeing as it was made with the twelve year old boy in all of us in mind and therefore exists only to provide exploitational values. I find the quality of the animation rather rough when compared to Japanese films of the same era, but it is rough in a way that fits the film's fixation on breasts, blood and freaky humour.

Personally, I could have lived without the segment based on Richard Corben's Den, but then I do think that the Den stories are the absolute nadir of Corben's rather wonderful body of work. However, as we all know, every film like this is bound by law to contain at least one bad segment, and the rest of the segments is entertaining enough to make up for that beautifully.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,american movies,in short,spaghetti western,horror,sf,fantasy,animation,giant monsters,enzo barboni,leonard mann,woody strode,george eastman,evelyn stewart

Three Films Make A Post: Things happen that have never been seen by human beings. The blood flows like vintage wine.

And The Crows Will Dig Your Grave aka Los Buitres cavaran tu fosa (1972): Despite its being graced with an awesome title, routine Spanish Western director Juan Bosch's film is a wee bit too generic to warrant me writing anything long about it. It's the usual mess of people (Craig Hill, Angel Aranda and Fernando Sancho among them) of variable nastiness doing nasty things to each other for monetary reasons - not much vengeance going around here - with some light political allegory thrown in. While I've seen it all before, I can't really complain about Bosch's execution of the story: the cruelty is cruel, the action is tight, the dialogue scenes have a certain amount of bite. Add decent acting by people with excellent facial hair and a generic yet fine soundtrack by Bruno Nicolai, and you get a Spaghetti (Paella?) Western that might be totally forgettable, but is also pretty entertaining.

My Horse, My Gun, Your Widow (1972): Again directed by Bosch, again made in 1972 (and still not the last film the director shot in that year), again a Spaghetti Western, again featuring Craig Hill, a Bruno Nicolai soundtrack and an awesome title. Alas, I wasn't as happy with this one, for this is one of those dreaded "comedic" films that suffer from not being funny at all. There are of course some good Spaghetti Western comedies, but those films usually know if there in it for the jokes, want to be parodies of the genre their working in, or hide more complex things behind their humour. My Horse etc doesn't seem to have much of a plan at all, and ends up being one of those films that are just kind of there without ever amounting to much.

Captain America: The First Avenger (2011): After the rather disappointing Thor, Joe Johnston (the guy responsible for the horrible Wolfman remake) of all people pulls the Marvel superhero films out of the druthers again with what is as fine a piece of blockbuster cinema as you're likely to encounter. The film not only gets the core of the character it is about right, but also realizes which elements of the original's serial/pulp origins will work under these particular circumstances and which won't, and then proceeds to dial up the useful elements to awesome. Add that the film has an actual heart, and find me a very happy man.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: spanish movies,italian movies,american movies,juan bosch,craig hill,joe johnston,chris evans,hayley atwell,stanley tucci,tommy lee jones,hugo weaving,spaghetti western,comedy,superheroes,in short

In short: The Five Man Army (1969)

Somewhere in revolutionary Mexico. Certified criminal genius The Dutchman (Peter Graves) summons a group of old acquaintances and friends for a heist. Knife-throwing swordsman Samurai (Tetsuro Tanba, trying to go broaden his reign of being in every Japanese film to Italian cinema too), food-fixated strongman Mesito (Bud Spencer), explosives expert and cardsharp Captain Augustus (James Daly) and unsuccessful bank robber and former trapeze artist Luis Dominguez (Nino Castelnuovo) are perfectly willing to take part in one of the Dutchman's plans, seeing they all have hit rock bottom in one way or the other.

The Dutchman has been hired by Mexican revolutionaries to steal half a million dollar of foreign bribes in gold that are bound to be delivered to the military dictator of the day, and instead give them to the revolution. Officially, every member of the Dutchman's team is promised a thousand dollars, but he heavily hints at further plans to steal the gold from the revolutionaries too.

However, before anyone can think about any kind of double-cross, there are a few problems to solve. Chief among these problems is that the gold is being transported in a heavily armed and guarded train only a fool or an army would take on in a frontal assault. Fortunately, the Dutchman is quite the planner when it comes to impossible missions.

From time to time, Italian producers didn't just import a handful of foreign stars to improve their films' chances at success in international markets, but also made attempts to give the director's chair to an American. Usually, these films didn't amount to much, for the US directors were generally of the dependable workhorse type of filmmaker badly equipped to work through the peculiarities of Italian scripting practices, as well as just not the sort of visual stylists many of even the lesser Italian directors were.

The Five Man Army's director Don Taylor is quite a good example of the type of American willing to do this type of work for hire. As a very experienced director mostly working on TV, Taylor is enamoured of a straightforward point and shoot style that makes the film look visually impoverished when compared to other Spaghetti Western. Ironically, how much of the film was actually directed by Taylor is not clear at all. Depending on the source, Taylor either directed most everything or was replaced by the film's producer Italo Zingarelli after a day or so. Since not even the actors playing in the damn thing are telling the same story about its production history, we will probably never know for sure.

Personally, I'd go with Taylor as the film's main director, though, because Five Man Army looks like the product of exactly the kind of director Taylor was, someone who doesn't have much of an eye for beauty or for mood, but who knows how to keep a film moving. The script (curiously co-written by US animation writer Marc Richards and Dario Argento) plays more to Taylor's strengths as a director than is normal in this sort of project, replacing much of the moral ambiguity and cynicism typical of the Spaghetti Western with more easily digestible boy's adventure tropes, and featuring a narrative that is as straightforward as the director's style.

Consequently, Five Man Army isn't much to talk about as a Spaghetti Western, but works perfectly fine as a straightforward Western with (also straightforward) heist movie elements. Plus, it has a pretty great scene where Tetsuro Tanba hacks an office full of soldiers to pieces while Nino Castelnuovo looks on with a shocked expression, which is something that can't be said about many Westerns, Spaghetti or not.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spaghetti western,in short,don taylor,peter graves,james daly,bud spencer,tetsuro tanba,nino castelnuovo