Payment in Blood

Ticks all the right boxes with some whacky characters and several exciting action sequences. The musical score is half decent to. The story concerns a Confederate Major, who is caring on his own private campaign and after the official surrender. Sort of plays like an inferior 'Hellbenders' by the great Sergio Corbucci. The lower score of six, is just a comparison to the many other, better examples of this particular genre but the fans will still enjoy.

Macarroni Western starred by two ordinary Spaghetti actors as Guy Madison and Edd Byrnes ; both of whom played several Italian oaters . Simple but effective Western that has all the classic ingredients of a good Spaghetti . It deals with a gunman named Stuart (Edd Byrnes) joins up with a gang of Confederate guerrillas commanded by Col. Thomas Blake (Guy Madison) to find a cache of missing Confederate gold . Set during post Civil War a misfit group carries out a risked travel beyond enemy lines , as Stuart teams up a motley bunch , including a veteran captain and other various colleagues (Ryk Boyd and Ennio Girolami , among others) to help them out by promising a massive reward if it succeeds . As the meanest rebel ever born lives only to make 'em die . They must pull off the dangerous objective , as Stuart and the ambitious drifters join forces to take a lot of money from confederacy that has been buried into an Indian cemetery similarly to ¨The good , the bad and the ugly¨ . The dangerous assignment is set against stark environment , Union soldiers attacks and hazardous trails . As the battle for victory has ended but the war for vengeance goes on.

This enjoyable Ravioli Western packs thrills, action , brawls , crossfire and drags at times , balancing in ups and downs . There is plenty of action in the movie , guaranteeing shootouts , fights or stunts every few minutes . This is an agreeable Western all'Italiana dealing with a continuous confrontation among protagonists and both of them against several opponents . The movie has the typical European Western characters , as the bloody facing off , greedy antiheroes, dusty and spectacular showdowns , extreme baddies ; and being rightly directed . This Italian Western was filmed in 1967 , a notorious year in the development of European western that almost doubled since former year with movies mostly filmed in Spain and Italy . Director Enzo G Castell makes a nice camera work with some zooms and clever choreography on the showdown , fighting , spectacular shootouts and entertaining scenes . The film blends violence , high body-count and it's fast moving and quite entertaining ; there is a very odd implementation of shots in the camera work during some particular scenes as the film approaches its climax , as in the ending gunfights and the customary showdown conclusion . Guy Madison's performance in the movie is a bit wooden for the role of such an interesting character, a rebel confederate Colonel similarly to Quantrill or Anderson , but the fantastic performance by Edd Byrnes as a likable gunslinger saves the show . Edd is very fine , he ravages the screen , he jumps , bounds and leaps , hit and run . Byrnes as a brave and two-fisted gunfighter is terrific , subsequently the would play similar roles in other Spaghettis as "Professionals for a Massacre" by Nando Cicero and ¨Any can gun play¨ by Enzo G Castell . Ennio Girolami , Marino Girolami's son , plays as a cruelly baddie role ,he is pretty good , subsequently he would play similar characters in various oaters and Spaghettis , many of them directed by his brother Enzo G Castellari . The musician Francesco De Massi composes a nice soundtrack , well conducted , this turns out to be one of the most memorable parts of the movie , adding catching songs at the initiation and final .

The film was well produced/written by Marino Girolami who used pseudonyms as Fred Wilson or Dario Silvestri , he is father of Enzo G. Castellari and Ennio Girolami and brother of Romolo Guerrieri . Marino wrote and directed several Western such as "Badmen of the West" ,"Two Ringos from Texas", "God Was in the West, Too, at One Time" , "God Was in the West, Too, at One Time" . The motion picture was professionally directed by Enzo G Castell . Enzo usually makes experimental editing techniques such as unbroken transitions from one scene to another and a cameo appearance in his films . Castellari often works with Guido and Maurizio De Angelis and uses to do slow motion shootouts and choreographic death scenes . Enzo is a good a craftsman working in all kind of genres , as he made Western especially . His first one was ¨Some dollars for Django¨ co-directed by Leon Klimovsky , but actually, for the most part of its filming by the disagreements arising with Klimovsky was realized by Enzo G. Castellari, which this film was his directorial debut in a sub-genre that became one of its greatest representatives ; in fact if you compare the beginning of "7 Winchester for a massacre" which would direct the next year and the end this one seem to be similar direction . After that , he went on directing ¨ Johnny Hamlet¨ , ¨Kill them everybody and came back alone¨, ¨Tedeum¨ , ¨Cipolla colt¨ and the masterpiece : ¨Keoma¨ and finally its inferior sequel ¨Jonathan of the Bears¨ also with Franco Nero . Some of them are serious , others are goofy and plenty of slapstick and slapdash . This ¨Seven Winchester for a massacre¨ is a bewildering story , enjoyable in lots of parts and it will appeal to Spaghetti Western fans . It's a passable film , and better than a lot of the ulterior spaghetti western to come .

The Civil War is over. But not for Col. Thomas Blake (Guy Madison). He leads a gang of marauders who terrorize the area around the Mexican border, looting and pillaging, all in the name of the Confederacy. Blake dispatches Chamaco Gonzalez to the town of Manassas to learn the location of a lost Confederate payroll, presumably buried after the surrender at Appomattox by Gen. Beauregard's soldiers. But Camacho gets himself captured and has a date with a firing squad.

Enter a stranger named Stuart (Edd Byrnes) who rescues Chamaco and thereby earning a meeting with Blake.

He claims to know where the payroll is buried. He wants Blake's help in retrieving it, with the end goal of helping Southerners suffering because of the war.

Blake, of course, has other ideas for the buried fortune. With a handpicked group of men back across the Rio Grande to fetch the payroll, which Stuart says is buried in a sacred cave of the Apaches, near the town of Durango.

Along the way, a pretty lady named Manuela shows up, offering her assistance.

First up, Francesco De Masi's score is awesome, livening up the proceedings even more. Payment in Blood is the third Ed Brynes' spaghetti western and it's the serious one of the two. Not much humour, just a straightforward action tale that moves at a clip and provides a fair amount of uneasy alliances, double crosses and lead flying, body count piling up. It's quite fun with Guy Madison stealing the scene as Blake, an untrusting leader of a gang. Ed Brynes does well as the clean cut hero who has an agenda to fulfil. The finale set in an Indian burial ground is really exciting.

This was the fifth(!) Spaghetti Western I've watched from director Castellari (whom I met at the 2004 Venice Film Festival) – it's not too bad an effort actually, though still far away from the admirably elegiac quality he would eventually achieve in KEOMA (1976).

The plot is pretty typical of the genre: after the end of the Civil War, a Confederate Colonel (Guy Madison) wants to keep up the fight and recruits a band of outlaws to finance his campaign through random pillaging; given that the original Italian title makes an explicit reference to the fact that the gang totals seven men, I guess the film intended to be a roguish version of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)! Anyway, as expected, an outsider (Edd Byrnes) soon joins their ranks – after having rescued one of them (Enio Girolami, the director's brother and who, in the role of a peon, irritatingly speaks almost exclusively in Spanish throughout!). However, it transpires (equally unsurprisingly) that he's really a government agent out to ensnare Madison and his men by ostensibly leading them to a buried cache' of Confederate money! Along the way, a female character is also thrown into the fray – which, naturally, causes discord among the Colonel and his 'underlings' since, rather than share her with them as was their habit, he decides to keep her for himself; at the end, she too turns out to have been on the side of the law (and in cahoots with Byrnes all along)!

The film features plenty of action – set to a rousing score by Francesco De Masi – and climaxes agreeably with an atmospheric sequence set inside a cave (where the now worthless money is stashed) that served as burial ground for some Indian tribe or other.

Hmmm, now this sounds very familiar to me..... clean shaven poncho wearing bounty hunter goes undercover with a gang of "bad guys" in the pursuit of a cash box buried in a graveyard by soldiers during the Civil War.

And, yes, there are more than a few similarities between this film and Leone's "For a Few Dollars More" (in particular) and "Good, the Bad and the Ugly". And, yes, it has obviously a lower budget than both the aforementioned films. But when the "borrowed" stories are so good, there doesn't seem to be a problem in my eyes in recounting extended versions of such tales. So, I really enjoyed this film in its own right.

The leading role does owe more than a nod of the cowboy hat to Eastwood's Man with No Name, and in that respect Byrnes is not an ample substitute. To me, he is far too clean looking (although, like Eastwood's character, he will do whatever he needs to in order to get a job done). The show stealers are Blake (played by Guy Madison) and that rarest of things - a spaghetti western female role (Loiuse Barrett).

Whilst not as outstanding as some other Castellari films (say, Keoma and Jonathan and the Bears), it is still a highly enjoyable Spaghetti Western fare that I would recommend to fans of this genre.