La morte non conta i dollari

An amusing and passable Spaghetti Western with action, shots , go riding, brawls , twists and turns . It deals with a gunfighter : Mark Damon who arrives in Owell Rock town by stagecoach along with the lawyer Harry : Stephen Forsyth and a beautiful girl : Pamela Tudor who is daughter of a Colonel , the latter being subsequently murdered . All of them seeking vengeance and eventually will have to take off nasty Ben : Spartaco Conversi and his sons . And at the end takes place the ordinary and violent shotdown among them .

This is a run-of-the-mill Spaghetti Western with plenty of brawling , mauling , thrills , high body-count , fights and spectacular showdown. The picture was well starred by the always sympathetic Mark Damon giving a likeable acting who after playing various Roger Corman films , he emigrated to Italy where performed a number of Westerns as Johnny Yuma , Johnny Gold , Requiescant , Posate Le Pistole Reverendo , Tutto Per Tutto, , The Great Chihuahua Treasure Hunt , A train for Durango, Dead Men don't count .Co-starred by the weak and little known Stephen Forsyth who also played some Spaghetti , Epics and a film for Mario Bava .Along with two Eurotrash beauties : Pamela Tudor and Lucina Gilli . Furthermore , apearing various familiar faces regular in Spaghetti sub-genre : Nello Pazzafini, Spartaco Conversi, Dino Strano, Luciano Pigozzi nicknamed the Italian Peter Lorre and Ignacio Spalla or Pedro Sanchez who usually acted in similar roles to Fernado Sancho as a Mexican bandit . Special mention for musical score by Nora Orlandi and Robby Poitevin , being full of enjoyable sounds and catching leitmotiv. As well as atmospheric and colorful cinematography by Gabor Pogani who photographed notorious films , being shot on El Lacio , Rome .

The picture was competently directed by Riccardo Freda , though it has several flaws , gaps and familiares. Freda usted a number of aliases during his long career, including Robert Hampton and George Lincoln . Rccardo was a classy Italian writer and director who made all kinds of genres .Freda along other directors of his age as Vittorio Cottafavi, Giorgio Ferroni carried out nunerous movies in historical spectacle style , in which he developed a considerable mastery and skill. From the Fifties he made musclemen and Peplum movies as Spartacus , Teodora , Giants of Thessaly , The Seven Sword , Samson of the Seven Miracles od the World , Sins of Rome , Maciste all Inferno and Maciste in the court of the Great Khan at his best . In the early Sixties , he was a pioneer in Italy of horror fantasy films frightening audiences all over the world especially with I Vampiri ,1 Caltiki and The Horrible Secret Doctor Hitchcock with the terror myth Barbara Steele . He also made adventures as Black Eagle , The Son of Black Eagle , White Devil, Son D'Artagnan, The Mongols and uncredited Daughter of D'Artagnan , his last film.

The spaghetti western is a curious subgenre of exploitation cinema. The best ones are brilliant, and in my humble opinion there aren't any truly bad ones out there. There are just a whole lot of them, maybe hundreds, that simply... exist. Like "Death at Orwell Rock", for instance. It's not a particularly bad western, it just isn't any special or memorable whatsoever. The film follows the typical structure of a stranger arriving in a corrupt town, and gradually it becomes clear that he's on a personal mission to settle an old vendetta. It's watchable enough, and the script does contain one of two ingenious moments (like an identity swap and a feisty finale), but it doesn't differ much from the previous 10 you have seen, or the next 15 spaghetti westerns you'll watch. There are a couple of familiar Italian cult-faces in the cast, like Luciano Pigozzi and Nello Pazzafini, and they deliver largely on autopilot, just like director Riccardo Fredo whom I prefer when he makes gothic horror movies or Gialli.

While it lacks the opera-like style and sweep of the best Italian westerns, this minor entry in the cycle has its compensations. By concentrating on a limited number of characters playing out most of their story in the confines of a small town in the Arizona Territory, "Owell Rock" achieves a bit more depth than is often found in movies of this sort. This, however, requires the viewer to pay a greater-than-average degree of attention since the plot has its convolutions and the choppy editing in the English-dubbed print appears to have left out some bits and pieces which might have made the narrative play more smoothly. In short, if you're simply in the market for a mindless shoot-'em-up which places no strain on the intellect, better look elsewhere.

Mark Damon, who graduated from sword-and-sandal movies, makes a passable hero, though his English-dubbed voice doesn't quite seem to fit him. Alas, he has no "beefcake" scenes, and though there's a whipping in the movie, he is not the victim. Luciana Gilli and Pamela Tudor provide a bit of feminine pulchritude but have little else to do.

For the record, the title in the English-dubbed tape has a comma in it: "Death, at Owell Rock." And "Owell" is pronounced "Owl."