I wonder whether its blu-ray releases are any good. I would love get my hands on one.
I think so, yes.
I bought the German Blu and was dissapointed, it’s a good print but German subtitles are burned in on the English dub.
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Thanks for the response, I contemplated getting the German Bluray the other day. I hope it gets a proper release at some point.
That sucks.
Yeah it does a bit. It’s not the end of the world but I did find a bit annoying, especially given how I would have thought it’d be more effort for them to do that.
I’d rank his westerns like this
- FOTA
- Massacre Time
- Silver Saddle
I’m really fond of all three though and I think White Fang is significantley worse than all of them if that counts.
My 3rd viewing of this tonight, and it just gets better every time.
Gonna revisit Massacre Time soon, and probably never watch Silver Saddle again.
Was it really that bad?
Terrible. Even Fulci didn’t like it, but I know @UglyOne427 absolutely loves it and places it above GBU the last time I checked.
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What makes you say it was that bad? I know it’s flawed but I still think it’s a good western, and it’s certainly nowhere near Fulci’s worst (and that’s coming from somebody who’s never seen any of his supernatural horror films).
I don’t rate it that high, I’d have it somewhere in my top 65.
I remember the kid being annoying and the ending being corny. Maybe I’ll give it another go, but it’s no Shoot the Living and Pray for the Dead (By far the best SW ever made).
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I remember the first time I watched it I thought the kid was going to be a lot more annoying than he actually ended up being, and I agree the ending is a bit silly but I think it sort of worked on a family film level.
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It isn’t 1st April yet, Dean.
IMO Fulci had an excellent eye for a scene and he was one of those directors whose style is immediately recognizable. I’d say he developed his own style in early 70’s. Even his not so good 80s B movies still bear his signature and have some excellent scenes in them. He could not tell a coherent story (unless he had a good screenwriter) but he always left me speechless with how he worked with atmosphere. FOA is no different. It is another Fulci’s movie with hardly any story yet it manages to drag you inside his vision, to care about characters and thus it leaves lasting impression.
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I just saw this for the first time. Somewhere around the 30th SW I have seen in the last year or so as I have explored the genre.
I am afraid I cannot pull my punches on this one – I thought it was absolutely awful, easily the worst SW I have seen and perhaps one of the worst 10 films of any kind I have ever seen.
This film is what I would expect to be the result if a mediocre film school student at a mediocre college who was a SW fan took a freshman class in directing, and near the end of the year the professor announced each student’s final grade would be based on a film which must use as many of the directorial techniques discussed in class, with one month to write and produce the film using other students in class as actors.
Awful script, boring, rambling, unfocused and contrived story, mostly terrible acting, and even worse dubbing than most SWs (which is saying something). The directorial execution itself is sorta okay (as opposed to the part of directing that involves drawing good performances out of the actors), but there were a lot of directorial touches that looked fancy but simply did not actually contribute to the story-telling (to the extent there is a story being told), as if the director was experimenting and seeing if he could pull off that thing his professor talked about in class that time.
Overall, I just don’t really even see the point in making the movie. What did Fulci think he was adding to the pantheon of film-making that this needed to be made? Was it a comedy, drama, horror, romance, road movie, noir, Western, revenge tale, allegory, or something else? It was, in turns, all of those things, and consequently none of them. While it feels most like an allegory, an allegory … of what? I have no idea. It honestly just feels like a film where Fulci was experimenting with techniques in preparation for future films, and felt like he would just rely on SW fandom, Tomas Milian’s name, some gratuitous violence and shock, and Lynne Frederick’s bare chest to sell enough tickets not to irk the investors.
Good things? Let’s see. Milian as a bad guy was decent and Michael J. Pollard as the drunk was fine, though both in a kind of melodramatic allegorical way than actually doing any fine acting. Lynne Frederick is really nice to look at. The town getting so wrapped up in the baby being delivered was … well, I mean, it kind of went against classic SW tropes, and so was mildly interesting from that standpoint. And … yeah, that’s about all I’ve got.
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One of the things I enjoy most about this site is how so many people can see the same movie and have so many differing opinions about that movie.
Have you seen White Comanche yet? 
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Not yet. Is that a recommendation or a warning? 
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In my eyes it’s a warning. From someone else, it might be a recommendation - you never know.
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I rewatched it a few months ago, and I lower my rating from 6 to a 5/10.
Yes, FotA differs strongly from the usual Spag, but the mixture of typical Fulci gore and the sentimentality lifted directly of the Bret Harte short stories (on which parts of the film are based) does not work well. The directing is mostly mediocre, as is the photography, and the score, which drifts away form typical SW music to bad pop music, adds to the feeling to be in the wrong film. The characters are too uninteresting to make the intended drama work, and the mostly mediocre actors don’t help either, with only Milian standing out. But his bizarre role blasts the story apart.
As a result it is just an odd film, which is too often for me more boring than entertaining. Still the intended unusualness gives it some edge.
I disagree and think that it is one of the best late spaghettis. It has a sombre melancholy reminiscent of Peckinpah and a dark vision. Fulci presents the west as a desolate wasteland in which only the most savage will survive. The theme song is memorable, the photography excellent and Milian brilliant as the villain.
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Well, this was disappointing. With how crazy and bloody Massacre Time was, I was hoping this would be on the same level. Four people getting stalked across the desert by a psychopath played by none other than Tomas Milian? Sign me up! Turns out it’s more like Tomas Milan torments our 4 protagonists for about 15 minutes, shows up for about a minute later on, then isn’t seen until the final confrontation where he just gets shot in a barn.
I was really hoping for a cat and mouse type of story where Milan is chasing after the protagonists through the desert - tormenting with them psychologically and slowly picking them off one by one until one of them can outsmart him and take him out. Instead, we get Fabio Testi being romantic and looking after a baby.
It just feels like nothing really stood out to me. There was only a little bit of Fulci’s signature gore, the music was nothing notable and none of the performances felt that good.
Is there something I’m missing with this one?
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