Outlaws and Angels

It's certainly not for everyone.

Low budget, bloody, dark, and disturbing. Although, the blood was exaggerated and cartoonish like a comic book movie.

The costumes were dirty and and lived in. The houses/sets looked like real shacks. Everybody and everything looked legitimately dusty, sweaty, and lived in. Living in the Southwest you get to realizing that nothing is ever clean.

The blood might put off some older folks, but I think that this is pretty normal for an independent film in our post Terintino, made-for-cable world.

The cinematography was surprisingly good. The editing was tight. Well directed, edited, and acted.

There were even a couple pretty songs. I kinda wish that they had leaned in to that a little more, but that might have made it too cheesy, so maybe not.

Sort of a modern Treasure of Sierra Modre. The literal bloody money bags were almost too heavy handed.

Also, that's Clint Eastwood's real life granddaughter as the main young woman. Her mother (his daughter) was even in it (but not as her mother).

"Where does it all begin. Violence, the gun, the knife, the axe. How's it born, how's it start?" Henry (Murray) and his gang of outlaws are on the run when the find a frontier house. They decide to hide out in there against the wishes of the family that lives in it. What starts off as a simple idea to hide soon expands into a dynamic that no one involved can explain or expect. There have been many many westerns that have come out in the last few years. Most of them awful, a few decent ones and then ones like this. One that isn't terrible and one that is worth seeing, but at the same time one that isn't all that memorable but it is watchable. The movie seemed to try way to hard to be like a toned down Hateful Eight but came off as more of a soap opera. There are some really good things in this and the twists are interesting and I do think it's worth seeing, but really only once. Overall, a movie that is entertaining as you watch it but a day or two after you won't remember half of it. I give this a C.

Criminales e Angelis! That might as well have been the name of this film that oddly pays homage to the classic Spaghetti Westerns. Unsavoury characters, ultra violence, twisty plot, offensive scenes it had it all. You couldn't like any of these people. Even the supposed lawmen were unsavoury. One almost expected everyone in the film to be dubbed except for a few main characters. Dubbing might have helped (or subtitles) as it seemed that almost everyone mumbled but you got the drift.

A band of outlaws (criminales) rob a bank in some dusty unnamed western town complete with hoods. Innocent people get killed (they are just bystanders after all). They escape but one of them is hit as they leave town. From there on its a rough ride as they wind up holing up with a christian family and everything becomes twisty, and ugly with gore and scenes enough to make you cringe. But the sets are great and the feel of being trapped in a place with a band of outlaws, a screaming christian mother and the very unsavoury minister of a father with their two daughters.

To give it even better feel of a being a spaghetti western there is the Clint Eastwood connection. Clint's former live-in Francis Fisher plays a somewhat hysteric christian woman while the daughter of Clint's and Francis's years together Francesca Eastwood is the the Angeli of the title. And what an Angeli she makes. Francis Fisher also played Ruth Dewitt Bukater, Rose's mother in Titanic and Strawberry Alice in Eastwood's Unforgiven.

As gore piles upon gore and cringing scenes pile on cringing scenes and the body count rises one is reminded that others can do what Tarantino and Peckinpah have done before. You can't like any these characters but you do admire the way the actors play them making it all seem too real. Just like the old spaghetti westerns.

The present movie is the final elaboration of a shorter piece called 'Henry John and the Little Bug', released about seven years ago by the same Author, JT Mollner, a peculiar kind of film maker.

The final full-length result is peculiar too, but very well acted and very well written. It deals with miserable beings living miserable lives and is a paradigmatic story of how misery, love and egoism can bring anyone to perdition, given the wrong circumstances.

There isn't much pity in Author's heart for his own characters and not many of them will make it through the end. But there is love, as in any great artist's eye, even though of a strange and desperate sort.

Besides writer/director JT Mollner deciding to create his own unique vision of a western where the three fugitive bank robbers hold a preacher named George Tildon (Ben Browder), his wife Ada (Teri Polo) and two daughters hostage the bank robbers have a continuing dwindling posse chasing them and the story just gets weirder and weirder.

The posse chasing the bank robbers is led by Josiah (Luke Wilson) who tries to lead his posse through intimidation and with idle threats but quite frankly he cannot even protect himself from of all people, the preachers half dead wife? Then there is the leader of the bank robbers named Henry (played by Chad Michael Murray) who takes a shining to the preacher's youngest daughter Florence Tildon (Francesca Eastwood) who has some secrets she wants to share with Henry.

In other real suspense films, the director/editor will purposely lower the actors voice so as to hold the audience's attention but this director, JT Mollner took this approach to extreme with his star Henry (Chad Michael Murray). Not only does Henry's voice come to almost a whisper, he mumbles most of his dialogue such that I thought the film would need to include sub titles because the quiet language Henry was whispering/mumbling was certainly not English no matter how many times I attempted to rewind what the heck he was mumbling.

If you enjoy seeing faces and heads being riddled with bullets and brain matter landing on the shooters own face then maybe you could be remotely satisfied. Or maybe incest, or male on male anal sex is your thing, then this film may appeal to you. I found it disgusting for a western and I do not object to violence just to sensationalism for garnering false attention. The dialogue was also very boring and extremely slow moving but I still hung in there which is why I did not rate the film any lower than a 4 out of 10. At least the ending was a bit of a surprise which I will not divulge so that you can also sit through the entire film and see if you agree or disagree with my review.