Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The Living Coffin

I very much wanted to like this film, but except for very few atmospheric shots near the beginning, there's not much to like here.
It's a cross between the kind of western in which the hero's horse is billed just slightly below the hero himself and Mexican gothic horror, made hardly watchable by an extremely unmysterious mystery plot and the never helpful tendency to explain everything supernatural away with stupid "natural explanations". Things like that drain the fun out of everything.
And as if this wasn't bad enough, the movie we have to endure a hero so clean-cut that a typical Gene Autry character would be a decadent monstrosity next to him and the kind of OCR (Odious Comic Relief, for the uninitiated) that just isn't excusable. Further features are sloooooow paaaaaaciiiiing and some sub-standard action scenes (even for 1958). So it isn't much as a serious movie and most of the time just not trashy enough to be funny.
Big exception and personal favorite is when our hero waddles into a swamp and is rescued by a well thrown rope. Thrown by his horse, that is.
Fortunately there are better movies about the Weeping/Crying Woman to see. 

Darling of the Day (so early in the film that you are still looking forward to nice gothic horror):
"The unburied wander through the dark forests and the only way to get them away from the house where they died is piercing a clock with a knife on the hour of their dead."

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