"Better luck next time except there won't be a next time for you." Those are the very last words of the lyrics of the song that close the movie. And it's very descriptive of the movie. It doesn't even care to be thoughtful enough for an individual SEQUENCE taken for itself to be coherent or make sense. It obviously just strings together cool elements that end up being less than the sum of their parts yet you still somehow get the idea and with the right attitude you should get quite a lot of enjoyment out of it. The film is mostly set-pieces without them ever really being set up. The situations are always about life or death and rules are being made up as they go along..
The movie starts with two men walking through the desert. One guy has two guns and no water. The guy in a safe distance behind him following him has water but no guns. Cool setup, huh? Yeah, except that it doesn't make an ounce of sense. Why would the guy with the guns run away deeper into the desert from the guy with the water? Wouldn't it make more sense the other way around? Through "Spaghetti Western Flashbacks" (courtesy of Quentin Tarantino) we learn that the guy with the guns, together with three other guys, killed the waterboy's brother and he wants revenge, which is what holds the movie together. Waterboy's revenge against four men who he is finishing off one by one in separate episodes is all there is to the plot. They are all killed in funny ways but let me just tell you about how this first "episode" ends.
At night the two men take a break and they make a nap in the cozy desert sand (the duo-gun man rests next to a cross that sticks out of the sand in the middle of the desert) while waterboy uses the time to build a fake well out of stones that lie around. You see, earlier that day waterboy yelled to duo-gun man: "Hey, behind that dune over there is a well. Look, fresh water. Yum! (drinking the same old water he's been carrying around all along)" So the next morning (waterboy wasn't anywhere in sight) duo-gun man checks behind that dune and lo and behold, a well! He robs to it, looks into it and...all he sees is more sand. That's waterboy's cue to show up and shoot him dead. Waterboy pushes the body into the stone circle. His final resting place.
It says a lot if I have to say that out of all the Spaghetti Westerns I've seen this is the most incoherent one. I can't even say that it is full of plot holes because it is LIKE a surreal piece, which per definition can't have plot holes. Yet it never really emits a surreal vibe. The film is well-shot with a lot of nice touches from start to finish in the shape of camera movement and composition, it looks more professionally made than most SWs, the visuals alone make it worth seeing for genre fans. The music is a lot of cool fun, it isn't very melodic and most of the time it's rather minimal, for example single pluckings of guitar strings which is pretty much my type of SW score.
