DAY 6:
El hombre de Rio Malo (1971) - Director: Eugenio Martin - 2/10
Like the title says, it is bad. It is such a shame that such a good cast goes to waste, James Mason is severely underused in particular; the film stresses its tongue-in-cheek nature insofar as it becomes distracting, which vitiates the whole effort in the process. The aforementioned drawback is not exactly remedied by the fact that the characters stay largely vague and the movie fails to establish any of them to a satisfactory degree, forcing a precipitate pace and a fleeting narrative focus with more and more turnabouts as well as set pieces being pelted at the audience.
It lacks the solid, well-rounded structure of such capers as Five Man Army and exhibits some serious issues with pacing; with its prevalent superficiality, it is reminiscent more of a pilot for a TV series than a feature-length film of a cinematic scope. Regrettably, the said faults are additionally compounded by film’s steadily accruing ineptitude and utterly horrendous soundtrack. While you can discern the higher budget in the way some shootouts are staged and whatnot, the directing and the editing are rather lame for something with such a hefty roster filled with such heavyweights. Everything appears misaligned and the overall structure feels disjointed, badly pieced together and messed up. Out of the big-budgeted spaghetti productions, it’s one of the worst works in my book.
Lola Colt (1967) - Director: Siro Marcellini - 3/10
In the end, I got pretty much the kind of farrago I had anticipated: the gallimaufry features a musical part sporting the black heroine, Lola’s character arc adumbrating some vestiges of a revenge motif, a bit of a romance/drama plotline in which Peter Martell takes part as well as more of a regular western storyline about an imperious landlord terrorizing the local town, all of which is rolled into one big flapjack of a motion picture, the final result is as flat as a flapjack too. In addition to the aforesaid so-so mixture, the movie has some middling directing plus an unremarkable soundtrack both of which affirm work’s humdrum stature.
The style is reminiscent of the kind of stuff you would see in those Americanized, early period genre examples: not particularly bad, but nothing outstandingly original or memorable either. The latter factor accounts for why this outing is not especially absorbing to watch; simply put, this whole potpourri might have worked better on the purely poppy level if it had boasted a more flamboyant rendition and finish. At the end of the day, it just gets bogged down in its stillborn attempts at fusing all these divergent themes, eventually lacking both in terms of style and substance.