DAY 8:
Professionisti per un massacro (1967) - Director: Nando Cicero - 6/10
One of the very few spags in which slapstick seems to work for me just fine. I must say I enjoyed the whacky combination of violent action and comedy; albeit far from being original, the script furnishes enough items of interest and applies enough detail to keep your interest throughout. Other than the part played by Byrnes, I found the characters sufficiently memorable to root for them in the context of the tale, which is not all too frequent in as action-driven genre as this, with Hilton getting here one of his most extravagant roles and turning in a great performance.
There is no denying that the film loses its focus in the second half and is not nearly as enjoyable and as direct as its first 45 minutes; the plotline with the Mexican bandit feels somewhat out of place and is not that gripping to follow in the first place. While it is hardly a classic and is definitely burdened with a baggage of faults, the motion picture exhibits enough buoyancy as well as energy to surmount its shortcomings. A solid mid-tier entry with just enough assets to justify its existence.
Un dólar de recompensa (1972) - Director: Rafael Romero Marchent - 4/10
While it may seem a little fastidious to fuss about a gritty revenge yarn made as late as 1972, the fact of the matter is that its paper-thin storyline, odd contrapuntal score and hit-and-miss rendition mark this one as more of an amusing curiosity rather than a notable work capable of standing on its own. Few of the genre examples were able to conjure up a genuine atmosphere of suspense and mystery, but here genre’s one-dimensionality reaches its absolute nadir in the way the laughably perfunctory tale plays out.
Most of the more accomplished revenge stories diversify their otherwise shallow screenwriting mechanics with such motifs as the master-pupil theme or something to that effect, yet creative measures of this sort are hardly to be found here and most of it comes down to an otiose rehash of the same tropes you have seen dozens of times before in much better ventures, except that they are presented here in a merely okay fashion. The whodunit mystery, which has a depth of a toilet bowl, appears to be solely a pretext to encase a number of shootouts and other standard action filler. I guess it is preferable to some slapstick abomination, but do not expect an iota of nuance here, as this is strictly mediocre stuff.