THE WICKED DIE SLOW - Awful 60s US western with lots of rape scenes, killings and torture, all very badly directed and acted. It features also one of the lamest Clint Eastwood impersonators I’ve ever seen. 3/10, tops.
Only tracked this one down as someone kept asking me for a copy, and yes this is a terrible film.
[quote=“last.caress, post:11788, topic:141”]Today: The Salvation (Levring, 2014), a largely Danish production shot in South Africa. Mads Mikkelsen stars as a Danish immigrant in Death Wish mode as he avenges the murder of his wife and child, and is then himself hunted by the lunatic brother of one of his family’s killers (played fantastically by Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who also has an iron grip on the local town as a protection racketeer systematically claiming the town’s land on behalf of a shady cabal eager to seize the oil believed to be underground. Also starring Eva Green as a mute and including a smaller role for former Manchester United idol and crazed French Seagull-trawling would-be philosopher Eric “Kung-Fu” Cantona, The Salvation is another beautiful-looking movie and there’s a fair bit of action, too. It’s a little overwrought and one or two plot strands which feel as though they are going to have significance come to nothing, frustratingly, but all in all it’s a decent enough watch, not least for Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance.
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I’d say it’s more than decent, a well-made, tough as nails western with excellent flow and a diabolically nasty villain. Nothing groundbreaking of course, an impressive effort nonetheless.
Looks like one I may enjoy.
Desperate Trail (1995) - Impressive violent tv western… has an authentic feel to it and looks great
Blu Ray of The Mercenary.
Yesterday: The Legend of God’s Gun (Bruce, 2007).
“I’d never lick a man in his butt! I never have an’ I never will!” - The Bounty Hunter
Well! Let’s run quickly through the good points:
- The score
- Some fantastic highly stylized exterior shots
- The slip cover over the DVD case is nice and substantial, not that wafty, thin cardboard you get sometimes
And the bad:
- The entire cast
- The entire crew
- The entire script
So: Three goods versus three bads. Nice and balanced!
As a movie, it really has little to commend it. I’m unsure what it was about; I think the villain of the piece - “El Sobero” - offed the wrong man’s woman, and the man - “The Preacher” - is headed to the badass town of Playa Diablo to find El Sobero and exact his rootin’ tootin’ revenge. But that lot’s established early on; how it all unfolds, I couldn’t tell you. Much of the exposition is told by voiceover and dialogue throughout the movie is minimal, but much of the audio sounds as though it was simply picked up on whatever camcorders/iPhones they were recording this film on, so it’s not always as front-and-center as it should be, a problem compounded by the score frequently drowning the dialogue out. The cast is made up largely of musicians - members of Spindrift, around whom this project is built, but also some of their friends in Low Flying Owls and the absolutely fantastic Gram Rabbit - and it shows. None can act, none save Spindrift’s lead singer Kirpatrick Thomas (El Sobero) even look remotely like anything more authentic than a bunch of stringy 21st-century musos in cowboy fancy dress, most look visibly embarrassed by their own inability to carry their part in any given scene and one of the guys - Spindrift guitarist Dave Koenig - elects to cover his shortfall by going down the comedy route, gurning as though he had a gun to his head (which, occasionally, he does I suppose). This jars against the grittier tone of the rest of the movie, although fortunately it doesn’t jar as badly as it would have if the rest of the movie was achieving its intentions with any real success. Interior shots are all very flat; it’s as though they got Kevin Smith in to shoot them. And the entire thing has been drenched in fake digital film scratches and artifacts, to give it a bit of Spag Western/Grindhouse feel. Fine, but so much? I mean, I’ll squint through that degree of damage on a VHS porno from the eighties, but I’m not prepared to cause permanent eye-strain damage if nobody on the screen has got their klopper out, and why should I? Why should anyone?
Still, despite everything, dismissing the movie on those grounds, considerable though they are - insurmountable even, it would seem - would be a trifle unfair. See, it doesn’t work as a movie, no. BUT. What The Legend of God’s Gun really is, is a big fat 70-minute long promotional music concept video for Spindrift’s psychedelic/Spag-western inspired album of the same name, an album which preceded the film by a couple of years and which here serves as the score. The plot makes little to no sense, and what pieces DO make sense simply aren’t very good. Fine. Who cares? Do we care about the acting in the bridging scenes in, say, Bad Plumber F*ckers 4 or Clit Bang Wallop What a Porno 6? Of course not, we just need the grot scenes to be up to par. And The Legend of God’s Gun just needs its scenes to serve as a backdrop for that score which, as mentioned above, drowns out most of the dialogue anyway. Because it’s supposed to! And thankfully, that score is fantastic, up and down. The interior scenes which are mostly full of dialogue/exposition feel flat and ignored but again, so what? They’re the least “music video”-like scenes. The exterior shots are all high-concept painterly one-shot tributes to numerous Spags and to violent US westerns of the seventies and beyond, given a thick pop video digital filyering sheen, and as such look great. And, hell, if it didn’t feel quite MTV enough for ya already, they’ve even thrown in an interval at around the thirty-minute mark, during which we’re treated to - a music video for Conversation With a Gun by Spindrift[/url], shot right there on set! Look at The Legend of God’s Gun like this, and suddenly it’s a hugely entertaining piece! Provided you like the music of Spindrift of course. Which you really should. And if the gift of Spindrift wasn’t enough, the closing credits play out to the magfuggingnificent [url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFDJfD9qKt8]Devil’s Playground[url]Spindrift - "Coversation with a Gun" Uncensored - YouTube by Gram Rabbit. Even Low Flying Owls, another band who make an appearance in the movie, are well worth looking up. So that’s three new favourite bands for you! All from one film! Why thank-you, The Legend of God’s Gun! You’re welcome, SWDB forummers!
So, bottom line: Recommended? As a western… no. But as a musical concept from a terrific band (plus terrific guest bands too)? Hells, yeah!
With love and thanks to Reverend Danite. You are the gun.
Great review - (and only one *) :o
I appreciate the way there are links from the review to the bands mentioned (via youtube) and I’ve spent a while of this insomniac period this morning checking these bands out thanks to this, and have particularly enjoyed some of the Gram Rabbit stuff. But, for some reason I can’t seem to get the links to Bad Plumber F*ckers 4 or Clit Bang Wallop What a Porno 6" to work though ??? 
As to TLoGG - I’ve nothing much to add that hasn’t already been said so eloquently in the comprehensive review above. I sorta enjoyed the experience over a two night sitting, but it was more for individual vignettes backed with the rather good music.
I’ll cut it short and quote directly from the last sentence of the notes I made…
"…it was probably never intended to be a fully appreciated as a film divorced from the music - at its best it’s a psychedelic music video, at its worst it’s a poor and incoherent western."
Oh yeah - that yellow sky got tiresome as well. 
Hawken’s Breed - I had watched director’s Grayeagle earlier this year and it was quite ok, showing actually some potential, so I thought this couldn’t be too bad having also Peter Fonda and Jack Elam in the main roles. I was wrong. This is below average stuff. The score had a carefree feel and I hated it. The narration was an atrocity, devastating completely an already weak film. Acting ranged from average to bad, even from Fonda. A couple of killings made some impact and that’s about it. Totally disappointing.
Must have seen it over thirty years ago. I only remember a rather bizarre scene with a wolf trap (or something). And if I’m not mistaken, Jack Elam has an arm shot off.
I rewatched Grayeagle a while back and thought it was a bit dissapointing. Not bad, not great, only so so.
This and a head blown off in a graphic way. Quite possibly the only good moments of the whole movie.
I forgot about the head, still don’t remember it. Odd.
Charro! (1969) - Elvis was so good in this type of role, his voice is perfect to deliver the tough guy dialogue. I didn’t think he’d make a better film than Flaming Star, but this is pretty close… alot of it clearly Spaghetti Western inspired, especially with that amazing score
The Salvation.
Revenge western with a nice sense of style. In fact a very nice sense of style. The film does what it wants to do and gets on with it, which is what I enjoy. The violence level does not flinch. The best new western I have viewed in ages and comes to no surprise to me its not directed by an American director.
From last 2 weeks or so:
Pray to God and Dig Your Grave
Silver Saddle
Pistoleros
Requiescant
Adios Companeros
Life’s Tough, eh Providence?
Navajo Joe
Vengeance
O’Cangaceiro
The Specialists
Night of the Serpent
Duel in the Eclipse
Here We Go Again, Eh Providence
20.000$ For Every Corpse
Law and Order (1953)-Nathan Juran, with Ronald Reagan, Dorothy Malone.
I thought this was a decent little western with a good Ronald Reagan who quits his job as a marshall in Tombstone and now just wants to move on to another town and be a rancher. But, before he can settle down in the new town, he and his two brothers quickly get caught up in a fight between an old nemesis and his gang and the townsfolk. Good cast and the good action scenes made this an enjoyable watch for me at least. 6.5/10
Grimaldi: Franco & Ciccio sul sentiero di guerra/Paths of War[url]http://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/Franco_e_Ciccio_sul_sentiero_di_guerra[/url]
-Franco and Ciccio are Sicilian soldiers who travel to America and end up in the fights with indians and soldiers. Stupid comedy western, I wonder why I keep watching these.
[quote=“Bill san Antonio, post:11820, topic:141”]Grimaldi: Franco & Ciccio sul sentiero di guerra/Paths of War[url]http://www.spaghetti-western.net/index.php/Franco_e_Ciccio_sul_sentiero_di_guerra[/url]
-Franco and Ciccio are Sicilian soldiers who travel to America and end up in the fights with indians and soldiers. Stupid comedy western, I wonder why I keep watching these.[/quote]
I started watching one of their movies on You Tube recently (don’t remember which one exactly), but didn’t make it until the end. Terribly unfunny.
The Road to Fort Alamo.