Life is tough and too short to cling on to crap… Keep what is essential .
Always, always, keep anything that makes you laugh (essential), and what personally ‘builds’ you up.
Forever cling on to what you love.
I have no complaints about the acting, but with a story that is not so interesting for me the acting becomes a secondary aspect. Though I must say that I liked the quite different type of Fabio Testi characters much better in Dead Men Ride and Blood River. I think those suited him better
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Tomas Milian was more acceptable here than the for me rather irritating Cuchillo character in the likewise mediocre Run Man Run. But HIS best performance and/or best character was in Django Kill IMO. In Four Of The Apocalypse his character was rather one dimensional but at least less annoying than in Run Man Run.
I started watching The Heightful Eight some years ago since but gave up within a rather short time because of the fucking dialogue, i.e. too much fucking there for my taste 
The director Lucio Fulci’s much earlier The Brute And The Beast/Massacre Time is more entertaining IMO and also a more normal type of SW, but not among the better on my SW Top list with its 6/10 rating good for rank 68.
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I watched it today. I had read about the film before, including here on the forum, so I knew what to expect. Still, it gave me a sense of unease and kept me on edge, except for the dragged-out ending. You can also feel the decline of the spaghetti western genre. A strange film, but when I later listened to the soundtrack on its own, I realized it was actually quite good. Although, to me, there wasn’t much of a western in it.
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Just watched this. Reminded me of Cut-Throats Nine. It was also similarly gory.
This film centers more on character interaction and character development (I thought Lynne Frederick’s performance was good) rather than being packed with action. So I can see why it would appeal to some and not to others.
All in all I liked it, just outside my top 30. Gave it 7/10 and preferred it to Fulci’s Massacre Time.
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I really liked this the second time around. First time I watched it I couldn’t stand it, but maybe I was just on the right wavelength this time. Really good performances all around. Outside of the rump roast part, the typical Fulci sadism and gore didn’t feel as out of place as it did the first time I watched it, and there’s some really moving scenes and striking imagery. I thought the part with the all male town was really dumb and pretentious on my first watch, but this time I was legitimately moved by it.
It’s kind of fascinating to me how good Milian is in this, without chewing the scenery like he’s apt to do. I’m a fan of his and I like him even when he goes over the top, but he almost underplays Chaco and the character is all the more menacing and sinister because of it. Really impressive performance.
If you didn’t care for this one the first time you saw it I highly recommend giving it another shot. Went from literally my least favorite spag to borderline top 20.
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But for me it was the other way round, it lost with repeated viewings.
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Ah well, each to their own, but I certainly respect your opinion. What caused it to drop for you on repeat viewings?
I qoute myself:
It was just less interesting to watch, less entertaining. Some films win with repeated viewings, some lose.
But 5/10 is not a bad rating for me, and of course everybody has his own taste.
And as FotA is in the forum’s top 50 I’m obviously in the minority here.
For me this one has slowly climbed with repeated viewings from maybe 6/10 to 10/10.
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All very fair criticisms, one thing I would absolutely agree on is the photography being poor. I like Fulci and think FOTA contains some of his better directing, but he had a problem with lighting or something because every movie of his that I’ve seen have this kind of sloppy, hazy look to them.
I mostly agree as well about the soundtrack as well. I like it more than the Keoma or Mannaja ones because it’s used a bit more sparsely and the singing isn’t so in your face (wanna dieeeee), but it’s still not very good.
I’m generally a Fulci fan, so I was surprised at how much I disliked it initially. It’s probably one you have to be in the right mood for but I’m glad I gave it another chance
I probably had a similar experience. It was one of the first SWs I saw so I was expecting a more conventional movie with a clear hero like Keoma or something. So, I didn’t warm to its more arty-style.
I now appreciate it as one of the best made and most interesting of the genre.
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The Wikipedia entry for this helpfully gives links to the two short stories which form the basis for the movie, The Outcasts of Poker Flat (1869) and The Luck of Roaring Camp (1868). The Outcasts of Poker Flat had been filmed twice before by Hollywood, in 1937 and 1952. The 1937 version also includes elements from The Luck of Roaring Camp as the gambler character has a daughter called Luck. Both versions, naturally, add embellishments to get the material up to feature length, as does The Four of the Apocalypse.
The beginning of The Four of the Apocalypse is from The Outcasts of Poker Flat although in the short story the vigilantes only hang two people rather than gun down about 20-30. I suspect the production team might have been influenced by the beginning of Tails You Lose (1969) in which vigilantes do something similar and even whip a topless Edwige Fenech. The short story is even more downbeat than the movie with even the Fabio Testi character (called John Oakhurst) dying. In the novel they all get stuck in a shack during a snow blizzard which they have substituted in the movie by a rainstorm. There is no Chaco figure in the short story although a villain character had been concocted for both previous Hollywood adaptations. In the 1952 version, Cameron Mitchell plays the bad guy.
The section in the snowy mining community is taken from The Luck of Roaring Camp - the pregnant woman who dies giving birth to ‘Lucky’ (‘Thomas Luck’ in the story) is called Cherokee Sal and the name of the boy’s father is not disclosed. The short story ends with the death of Luck in a flood (as the other short story ends on the death of Oakhurst).
The odd contemporary music score I assume was influenced by Bob Dylan’s score for Pat Garrett & Billy The Kid, released a year before this was made although Ben and Charlie also had a 1960s pop song as its main music.
Fulci was on a roll when he was hired to direct this, having just made his two White Fang movies, both very successful at the Italian box office. Testi and Lynn Frederick had just made a Canadian Mountie film (green-lighted because of the success of White Fang) together for the same production company so they probably came to this as a package. Fulci had used Tomas Milian in two of his giallos so probably knew him well. I guess having done Che Guevara, Charlie Chaplin and a Japanese samurai in his most recent westerns, Milian was up for doing Charlie Manson. Howard Hughes says that Milian was on-set for only a week and all of his scenes were filmed in Spain.
I quite like this although the scenes in the mining community slow the whole thing down and when I was watching it I thought this must have been from another short story to the other material. The epilogue looks like an afterthought as well.
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