that is pretty equal to my opinion of that flick. It makes me laugh about the lack of story-telling.
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it’s not a bad Fidani but in the end it’s a bad SW.
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@blosserfred has done it again. Check out his new in depth review:
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In the scene when Sartana rides into a town soon after he has freed the kidnap victim there is a banner in the town which reads ‘Vote for J Corbett’ which I though was a nice reference to The Big Gundown.
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Am a big fan of Miles Deem movies, I love the bargain basement feel of them… loads of horse riding and shoot-outs… Jeff Cameron is pretty solid in this one… had to watch it, several times, on YouTube as I haven’t been to get hold of a physical copy yet
Too many words (and work) for a film that doesn’t deserve so much.
Here’s my opinion:
Demofilo Fidani has the strange ability to make time stretch, turning these 87 minutes into 120, 130, 150… Eighty-seven minutes that feel like eighty-seven hours under a merciless sun in the Almería desert—which, of course, is nowhere to be found in this “cento per cento” Italian low-grade production.
A group of men who are having a really, really, really bad time (so they say) because of a criminal gang roaming their lands decide to hire the famous outlaw SARTANA (Fidani shamelessly ripping off someone else’s intellectual property) to help them solve this little problem in exchange for the usual reward and the promise of clearing his name.
This “plot” serves as nothing more than an excuse for our protagonist to wander from place to place in a series of endless shootouts. Standard fare for this kind of spaghetti western, but worse: here, our “Sartana” just happens to run into the bad guys (coincidentally the very ones he’s chasing) almost by chance and takes them out one by one—sometimes in a contrived, overly staged duel, other times in the obligatory SHOOTOUT. In between, our hero finds time to save random people (just to remind us he’s actually THE GOOD GUY) and to play not one but two rounds of open poker with the gang leader he’s pursuing (abandoning the second game halfway through without any explanation). An hour and fifteen minutes later, and without it being entirely clear how he got there (who cares?), he ends up facing the “final boss” in a bare-knuckle brawl in a muddy pit. This is probably the best sequence in the film (if only because it means our suffering is almost over).
I’m Spaniard, and I don’t want to sound chauvinistic, but lately I’ve been thinking that almost all the cheap spaghetti westerns that don’t feature Spanish landscapes—and usually aren’t co-produced with Spain—are by far the shabbiest, both in terms of setting and filmmaking. Fidani’s film only reinforces that idea.
Clumsily directed, edited, and “acted,” riddled with continuity errors and a nonexistent script full of inexplicable sequences, it somehow manages—despite having far more action scenes than your average spaghetti western—to suffer from an astonishing lack of pacing that makes you wonder if anyone was actually in charge.
Do not recommend.
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Difficult to add to what has already been noted about this one, I agree with the majority of what has been said, but I will do my best to give my own thoughts.
Third Fidani flick that I’ve seen and I think this is the best of the bunch so far. Not been exposed much to Jeff Cameron either (doesn’t help that I get him mixed up with Jack Betts all the time) but from the very few films I’ve seen him in, I wish he’d been given more than these lower-budget ones.
4/10. Tempted to give it a 4.5 but 4 will have to do.
Overloaded with action, which in my opinion, was done well, so I can’t say this was “boring”, but the little to no plot, coupled with lack of character depth weighed heavy. It’s also rare that I pick up on poor sets but I wasn’t a fan of any used here, they all came across as cheap and shabby. The lack of people was strange too, all the towns were like ghost towns.
Watchable. And I wouldn’t get upset if I had to watch it again. It just wasn’t very good.