The Magnificent West / Il magnifico West (Gianni Crea, 1972)

[Mickey13]

Copied from the Spagvemberfest 2024 thread:

@Mickey13

The story basically boils down to the gunfighter acted by Vassili Karis assisting the townsfolk in ridding their territory of the bandits headed by the baddie played by Gordon Mitchell. First, Karis’s character is incarcerated along with a handful of resistance fighters, then springs out of jail with them so as to prepare the local population for the final confrontation with Mitchell and his wrongdoers… or so it seems at first.

This is what would have happened had the project been penned and executed with minimal honesty and competence. In reality, the moment Karis breaks out of prison, the narration actually grinds down to a stop and fails to go anywhere, instead turning its attention to people pelting one another with pebbles, doing acrobatics, digging holes in the ground with pickaxes and shovels for no apparent reason, dancing, stuffing their faces with chicken, all in anticipation for the climax which comes down to a scuffle between the bandits and the good guys dressed in drag.

As if that were not enough, there is a comic relief character by the name of “Pistola” whose antics and general aptitude for comedy are as pitiable as they are annoying. On the whole, considering that almost one third of the movie shows people essentially whiling away their time doing absolutely nothing and that the rest of the flick includes the usual succession of Creastic shootouts in which everybody shoots and misses their target, one would be hard-pressed to find an actual reason to willingly subject themselves to a viewing experience as excruciating as this one. Then again, if you are a deviant film scrounger in need of a rotten fix, this might very well do the trick, though at that point, you should probably consult a trained specialist.