"Quinto: non ammazzare" is a low budget spaghetti western by experienced director Leon Klimovsky who is probably best known for horror flicks like "The Werewolf's Shadow". Surprisingly, "Quinto" does not follow the typical paths of the European western wave around 1969. It lacks both the sarcasm and the Eastwood type of antihero. Instead, this movie is almost entirely set in a lonely stagecoach station in a desert, thus this "indoors western" has much in common with a theatre play.
Several bandits arrive at the station. The old station-master, a young man who helps in the kitchen and a couple of women become their captives. The bunch of rogues hides at the station because they committed a bank robbery - but the money is gone. All of them had worn the same kind of mask and one of them must have taken the money, but who? The bandits begin to accuse each other of hiding the stolen money and soon the killing begins...
Good performances by German Cobos, Roberto Camardiel as the station-master and Sarah Ross as Kate, the female member of the gang. But a big problem of this movie is: a hero you can identify with is missing entirely. It's a shame, really: "Quinto" has a good concept. The story and the characters are unusual and interesting. But despite that premise, "Quinto" is not particularly exciting. The poor budget shows, the continuity is a bad joke, and the whole psychological thrill that you depend on if you have less action scenes and more dialogues is not built up well enough. In a nutshell, it's an off-beat western which doesn't work too well but has moments of interest.
