Gunman of 100 Crosses / Una pistola per 100 croci (Carlo Croccolo, 1971)

[Mickey13]

Copied from the Spagvemberfest 2023 thread:

@Mickey13

Though the movie is intended to be a lot more serious than its sibling, videlicet Black Killer from the same director, the end result is just as helpless, but regrettably nowhere as funny as that one; the primary issue evidently originates from the fact that even though it is meant to be less of a joke, the execution is just as incompetent, so the tout ensemble simply turns out more obnoxious than amusing. The first half an hour proves agonizingly tedious and constitutes a veritable test of patience. Though the shootouts are helmed in a more or less proficient fashion, the rest of the direction leaves much to be desired in that there are multiple longueurs during which characters simply rove around with no dialogues or soundtrack playing in the background, thus certain scenes look plain odd and discombobulating for no apparent reason.

Furthermore, some of the deliberately comedic exchanges are nowhere nearly as funny as the inadvertently funny bits in Black Killer; the stuttering comic relief character promptly palls on the viewer and eventually gets on one’s nerves. The two narrative strands depicting the two disparate vendettas are bootlessly interspersed and fail to rivet attention in virtue of how formulaic and stodgy they are; at no point does the development of both character arcs come as a surprise in that one may very easily predict whither it is all going to proceed. Apart from a handful of idiosyncratic shticks, this is one very dreary affair indeed, though some people might take delectation in some of the gunplay and in how cheap it looks.