Vengeance

Another matzoh ball-topped spag western featuring Lee Van Cleef and a very young Leif Garrett (before he became a teenage heart throb), who also "teamed" up in God's Gun which I have given a low rating, but this one rates even lower for worse acting, action and production. Tom Thurston (Leif Garrett) witnesses the brutal murder of his parents and the abduction of his elder sister by a mostly Mexican band of outlaws led by white man McClain (Van Cleef) who is the most un-western looking villain in a Western movie; with his greasy long hair, ornate headband and single earring, he looks like he wandered out of Woodstock Festival into a movie set by mistake and decided to stay there. On the spur of the moment, Tom is hellbent on revenge, pursuing the gang surreptitiously and surprisingly manages to whittle down their numbers in various ways, without being caught. And that's just the beginning of a long list of errors I can spot, in continuity and logic and others. And that's not even mentioning the passel of no-account lowlifes that try to rob the gold prospector Isaac (Jim Brown) of his hard-gained treasure, who are in my opinion the most moronic and incompetent bad guys I've ever come across in film. The climax and ending are simply unbelievable they're almost surreal. Watch the film and you'll know what I'm talking about.

KID VENGEANCE (2 outta 5 stars) Cheaply-made and poorly-directed piece of western fluff starring Lee Van Cleef as one of the most vile villains he's ever played. This was during his later years when he was getting a bit long in the tooth to believably play those nasty, tough guy parts... but he is still the most interesting thing in this movie. He leads a bunch of bandits who rape and kill the mom and dad of young Leif Garrett and then kidnap his sister. Leif goes after them with "vengeance" on his mind. He begins to pick off the bandits one by one, using some pretty unconventional means (bow and arrow, rocks, scorpions, the old snake-in-the-saddlebag trick). He eventually teams up with a gold prospector (Jim Brown) whose life savings have been stolen by these men as well. The film starts off looking like a bad TV-movie... but once the raping and killing starts it becomes obvious that this was no "Movie Of The Week". You might be interested enough to sit through it once but this is no classic by any means.

Young Leif Garrett watches helplessly while his parents are murdered and his sister taken by a savage band of grimy cutthroats led by Van Cleef, who looks like a hippie with full facial growth, earring, long hair, and headband (probably holding the hair extensions in place), and Robert Morley. (best remembered for waking up next to a horse head in The Godfather)

Garrett tracks the bandits and begins to slay them one by one before teaming up with gold miner Jim Brown to finish them off.

Not a spaghetti western, this was an Isreali production made in Isreal by Golan-Globus, who did a better job (Van Cleef too) with God's Gun.

Most people agree that Lee Van Cleef's career in westerns ended with a whimper, but I thought it was okay. Too bad that in the following twelve years nobody got him back in the saddle with a six-shooter. It would have been great having seen Lee Van Cleef on a horse in the action packed eighties.

Leif Garrett did this film a year after God's Gun (aka Diamante Lobo). In the previous film, Garrett was quite good in a challenging (for several reasons) role, but his performance felt a bit tentative (also for several reasons). In this film, just one year later and for the same infamous producers, he was confident, sure-footed and turned in a very fine performance. The film was his to carry, and he did so quite well. Garrett was one of Hollywood's most promising young actors at the time, when too many child actors were, at best, barely adequate. True, it was a low budget, cranked out film, but Leif was a class act. Lee Van Cleef had played similar roles before - many times. He could have phoned this one in, and sometimes it looked as though he did. Jim Brown, following up a legendary professional football career with a number of turns as a film actor, handled his assignment competently. The only other actors with anything significant to do were Glynnis O'Connor, who sometimes overacted and wasn't as good as in some of her later roles; John Marley, good as always in the sort of role he has played many times; and David Menachem, an Israeli child actor who did several other American films but somehow didn't catch on. He should have; he was quite good. The production values were much better than God's Gun. The script was much more coherent, the dialogue more speakable, the direction more fluid. At least part of it was shot in New Mexico (the rest in Israel). Being in the US meant that the production was controlled by a SAG contract, always an advantage. Kid Vengeance (also available at one time or another under several other titles: Vengeance, Vendetta, Take Another Hard Ride) gave Garrett the chance to launch a serious career as an actor. He demonstrated that he was up to the challenge. But then the music producers came along. Too bad.

I know nothing of Lief Garrett's modern day goings on, but I'll tell you this: he can sure pick a grim film to star in! Not only was he great in Devil Times Five (aka Peopletoys), he's also good in this, as a kid out to get revenge on the low down scum who killed his parents! The leader of this gang? Lee Van Cleef, all bald and knife-brandishing.

Garrett fairly works his way through the evil gang, using snakes, scorpions, nooses, rocks and arrows in what amounts to almost a slasher-like Western. I didn't even think he needed the help of Jim Brown, but when Big Jim starts throwing dynamite at everyone, you're kind of signing up a winner right there! Big Jim also brings along his band of brothers he's been fighting with, just to complicate things up a bit.

This is your typical dark late-era Spaghetti Western, violent and pretty unrelenting, with a fairly high body count. Made in Isreal so I guess the term 'Spaghetti' might not be appropriate.