Past Misdeeds: A Coffin For The Sheriff (1965)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts without any re-writes or improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

A scruffy and unwashed man called not Ringo, not Django, not Sartana, but Shenandoah (Anthony Steffen) rides into a small frontier town. The place has some troubles since the gang of bandit Lupe Rojo (Armando Calvo) has put their base of operations into the area around town.

Shenandoah seems to have something in mind with the gang, though. At first, he does the usual "let's compare our penis sizes" bit by playing the always lovely "poker leading to fisticuffs" game with some of the gang members.

A little later, he subtly interferes with a bank robbery in town, carefully constructing an opportunity to grab a wounded gang member and rescue him from the law. It seems like he wants to join up with the gang.

Unfortunately, Rojo isn't just letting anyone join his merry band of slobbering psychopaths. There is a rather ill-advised membership test in form of a deadly game of hide and seek with guns against one of the original gang members for the potential newbie to survive.

Shenandoah is rather good at the game, though, and uses the possibility of a slowly dying bandit right at his feet to ask some questions about a stagecoach robbery and a murdered woman in Omaha two years ago. Alas, he doesn't get the answers he seeks.

At least, his life's dream of being one of a group of psychopathic bandits who are bound to die rather sooner than later is fulfilled. Nevertheless, he continues to ask pointed questions about the Omaha business. One could get the idea that it is somehow a lot more important to him than raping and pillaging. It might just be possible that our unshaved hero is out for revenge for a certain murder in Omaha.

All goes swimmingly, until Rojo decides to plunder the ranch of a local rancher named Wilson (George Rigaud). Wilson is an old friend of Shenandoah, and the gunman can't help himself but warn him and his pretty daughter (Luciana Gilli) of the ensuing attack.

The following debacle for the gang and Shenandoah's not exactly inconspicuous behaviour weakens his position as a big bad bandit decisively, though, starting off his obligatory torture and the typical finale of bloody vengeance.

If the plot synopsis of A Coffin For The Sheriff (and no, I have no idea what the title has to do with the film) makes it sound as if the typical fan of Spaghetti Western had seen this all before, that impression is perfectly true. There truly is no original bone in Mario Caiano's film's body, but while watching it, I didn't find myself holding that against it.

It is a very thin line which divides the realms of the clichéd and of the iconic. Caiano's film mostly dances directly on the line, doing too much of the expected in the expected manner to come down on the iconic side, yet doing it with too much panache to result in the let-down of the too clichéd.

A Coffin For The Sheriff succeeds as a very pleasant example of its genre (and this isn't exactly typical of the usually rather scattershot Spaghetti Western) mostly through the tightness of its script and Caiano's drive in executing it. While the usual assortment of side characters (with three women fawning over our hero) with their little side plots is there, the film integrates them into the main plot in a sensible way instead of going for a smoke and letting the side plots take over from time to time. This gives the film a sense of wholeness one seldom finds in the genre outside of the work of the Sergios.

But it would be unfair not to give Caiano his fair share of props. Having gone through a very typical career for an Italian director of the time by working in every genre that was popular at the moment, Caiano obviously picked up quite a bit about keeping his plots moving and cutting down on filler while letting his film look much more costly than it probably was through judicious use of rather impressive outside locations. As an old pro (his first writing and assistant directing credits come from the 50s), Caiano doesn't miss out on adding stylistic elements typical of the Spaghetti Western, elements which might still have looked vaguely original to an audience just one year after A Fistful Of Dollars. It is an excellent example of how fast some of the things Leone and Corbucci did visually became part of the visual language of Italian filmmakers trying to make a quick buck off of their successes.

So, friends of frightening close-ups of ugly, sweaty, unshaved men won't miss out here.
Also not atypical for an early Spaghetti are the acting performances. Steffen is (as was often the case with him) a little bland, yet as solid as someone with seemingly total facial paralysis can be, while the bunch of half-remembered character actors playing the bad guys are chewing the scenery nicely.

A Coffin For The Sheriff is probably not the sort of film I'd recommend to a Spaghetti Western beginner. There are just too many excellent films to see first before starting to waste time on one which is "just" very good, but when one has reached the point where one has worked through the classics and semi-classics of the genre, films like this are the little gold nuggets hidden in the dust and mud of the genre.

Killer Fish (1979)

If you’re gonna steal a bunch of diamonds from your former employers, go big, thinks Paul Diller (James Franciscus), so while he’s having a nice game of backgammon as an alibi, a power plant and other stuff explodes as a distraction while his nurse-turned-lover Kate (Karen Black putting way more effort in than anyone else on screen) and a group of professional criminals lead by professional criminal and semi-professional ladies man Lasky (Lee Majors playing that character he’s always playing lest horrible things will happen on screen, one supposes) do the actual stealing.

Things go well enough, and the successful criminals sink their loot in a lake to let it wait there for sixty days until the heat dies down. Alas, not everyone – namely some of Lasky’s buddies - is too happy with the idea of waiting two whole months in a tourist town in Brazil (there’s obviously no accounting for taste). They learn all too soon that Diller has taken some precautions for this case, for he has infested the nicely dammed off lake with piranhas who proceed to eat the untrustworthy criminals. Despite this not hanging well with Lasky, he still finds time and space to romance visiting model Gabrielle (Margaux Hemingway, not able to act as usual) and say stuff like: “Historically, bisexuality is a lot older than any of my blocks” (seriously). Obviously, everyone involved is still trying to pull one over (though it’s clear Lasky and Kate would both have preferred to play fair) on each other, an activity that gets decidedly more dangerous once a storm destroys the dam and the surviving cast find themselves on a sinking boat on a piranha-infested lake.

As long-time readers among my imaginary audience might remember, I’m predisposed to like any old crap Italian director in every genre known to Man and some known only to Italian cinema Antonio Margheriti did, so it’ll come as little surprise to these chosen few that I did indeed like, as well as deeply enjoy, this somewhat misbegotten mixture of heist film, post-Jaws something-in-the-water horror, men’s adventure, and disaster movie that mixes so many genres it’s no wonder it can’t do any single one of them terribly well. Instead, the movie is a series of barely connected events, cool ideas, horrible ideas and the mandatory in about half of its sub-genres boring modelling scenes. Somehow, this film-like entity still manages to have something like a discernible plot – mostly because it is entirely made out of clichés, one might suspect.

On the other hand, the film’s cool ideas lead to some fine library footage explosions, later on some of that patented Margheriti model work for the dam destruction sequences, and many a scene of actors getting eaten by fish. That’s rather enough to keep me entertained at least, and while I’d never pretend Killer Fish is anything like a brilliant movie (or even among the best third of Margheriti’s films), its mix of absolutely archetypal genre clichés, but from a bunch of different genres just thrown together, is rather irresistible to someone like me fascinated by the way the content of 70s men’s adventure books made it into the movies (without said movies ever actually adapting them). There’s a somewhat grimy charm to the resulting film that’s certainly enhanced – the charm part, this is - by it being actually shot in Brazil, the generally lovely cast, and the curiously likeable quality most of Margheriti’s movies (even those in the sleazier genres) have for me.

Three Films Make A Post: His acting will kill you.

Taken 3 (2014): You gotta hand it to Luc Besson and director Olivier Megaton, they really went out of their way to make Liam Neeson’s third adventure as uninvolving as possible, with a plot as predictable as the sunrise, but much less interesting. On the positive side, this time around, Liam’s female movie relatives aren’t kidnapped. Too bad the film’s alternative is to kill off Famke Janssen and have someone attempt to frame Neeson for it. The expected series of mild action scenes, a bit of waterboarding, and random melodrama ensues with little that’s thrilling or interesting to watch. The formula has grown stale, and neither Besson nor Megaton seem to have any interest in finding something interesting to replace it with.

But hey, at least the words “IT ENDS HERE” are on the film’s poster.

Chastity Bites (2013): John V. Knowles’s “Liz Bathory visits an American small town campus while working in the pre-marital virginity business” horror comedy, might not have Liam Neeson, or all that much of a budget, but it’s lively and the fun and funny moments highly outnumber its annoying ones. Plus, while it’s not completely original, it’s a film clearly trying to look at the classic elements it uses from its own place in time and space, subverting what seems fitting while keeping others in place. Plus, leads Allison Scagliotti, Francia Raisa and Louise Griffiths are, quite unlike Neeson, clearly putting energy and enthusiasm into their performances. I’m not too fond of the film’s more satirical parts because they tend to be built on the thing I like least in comedy – turning the kinds and classes of people the comedy writer doesn’t like into stereotypes so as to have an easier time making fun of them without hitting that pesky empathy in an audience – but for more than its running time than not, this is a fine little horror comedy.

Some Dollars for Django aka Drango: A Bullet for You (1966): I would not have pegged Paul Naschy’s frequent partner León Klimovsky as a very good Paella Western director, but the film at hand, while certainly not in the top of the Euro Western genre class, is a perfectly entertaining little thing, well-paced and energetic - which might be explained by Enzo Castellari supposedly having had a hand in the direction, but I tend to be very careful when it comes to this sort of thing. The film belongs to that part of the European Westerns that skews more to the classic US model of how such a film has to play out – just with added dubious dubbing, a bit more violence and torture and a much better musical score, of course – and even concerns itself with two very clear redemption arcs for its main characters. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t reach the heights of the best US Westerns there but it’s still pretty entertaining as well as showing Anthony Steffen and Frank Wolff in a particularly good week, the former expressing more emotion than usual, the latter making the most of the opportunity to for once be a bit more of good guy.

Technorati-Markierungen: french movies,american movies,spanish movies,action,horror,comedy,spaghetti western,in short,olivier megaton,liam neeson,famke janssen,john v. knowles,allison scagliotti,francia raisa,louise griffiths,leon klimovsky,anthony steffen,frank wolff

Three Films Make A Post: Horror so incredible it stretches the mind of man beyond the breaking point!

Armored Car Robbery (1950): Working for RKO's b-unit, Richard Fleischer learned early on some of the virtues that would make him one of the better work-for-hire directors in years to come: an ability to tell a story in the most economical manner while still giving it room to breathe. Case in point is this hard-boiled movie about the hunt for a quartet of armoured car robbers, a film that uses its 67 minutes of runtime to the fullest, trusting in the abilities of a fine cast (particularly Charles McGraw, Adele Jergens and William Talman), and its audience's knowledge of the basics of the genre its working in. I'm tempted to say there's not quite enough depth to Armored Car Robbery but then, like its title, this is a movie that is all about a slick, polished surface that already says all there is to say.

The Crimes Of The Black Cat aka Sette Scialli Di Seta Gialla (1972): For most of its running time, Sergio Pastore's giallo comes down on the side of the giallo as a murder mystery, using a lot of favourite giallo bits and bobs (the amateur detective, fashion models as the main victim group, the black-gloved killer) in an entertaining, yet also somewhat conservative and certainly not lurid manner. Which is a curious thing to say about a movie about a blind composer (played by old wooden face Anthony Steffen with a quiet intensity of obsession I'm not surprised anymore now that I've seen him in enough movies where he actually acts) hunting a killer who uses a black cat as his murder weapon, but there you have it.

The film only becomes truly lurid and crazy with its last murder and final plot twist; fortunately, as the very solid and stylish suspense scene surrounding that final twist and luridness demonstrate, Pastore is well equipped to make a perfectly fun film even without the lurid and the crazy whose absence so often breaks a giallo.

Eyeball (1975): This one is generally treated as one of Umberto Lenzi's best giallos but I can't say I see it. Sure, there's a killer in a stylish red raincoat haunting Barcelona stealing eyeballs, but the red raincoat is as stylish as anything here gets, and the eyeball-stealing less lurid than is sounds. Meanwhile the plot slowly plods along, the mystery bores a bit, and the murders just aren't all that interesting. It's an okay film to watch if you don't have anything exciting at hand, but that's as far as it goes for me.

Technorati-Markierungen: american movies,italian movies,in short,crime,giallo,richard fleischer,charles mcgraw,adele jergens,william talman,sergio pastore,anthony steffen,umberto lenzi

Malocchio (1975)

aka Eroticofollia

aka Evil Eye

Playboy Peter Crane (Jorge Rivero) goes through some heavy times. Dreams where a bunch of butt-naked evil hippies (is that a penis dangling in semi-slow motion?) make googly eyes at him and make funny noises. The dreams disturb Peter's wild(ish) lifestyle, but things become really disturbing when he meets up with a woman named Yvonne (Lone Fleming) who tells him she had a dream in which her dead husband warned her that a man named Peter Crane was going to kill her. Which would be reason enough to either seek psychiatric help or avoid people called Peter Crane in the future, but obviously not for her. Yvonne is quite different - the next night, she meets Peter again, and even follows him to his villa.

But the making out session first turns into a manifestation of poltergeist phenomena, and then sees slick Peter suddenly turn into a glowering strangler. The next morning, Peter remembers nothing of what he's (probably) done. Somebody seems to have taken care of the dead body too. This is the first in a series of murders Peter may or may not commit under some sort of occult influence. There will be more poltergeisting, an old family friend who may have an agenda of his own (Richard Conte), a frightfully attractive female psychiatrist with dubious ethics (Pilar Velázquez), a blackmailing factotum (Eduardo Fajardo), and a lot of oddness (and I don't just mean a couple brushing each other's teeth in the shower though that scene would be odd enough for most). From time to time, the film pops in to the investigation of the murders as made by Inspector Ranieri (Old Wooden-Face Anthony Steffen) whose attempts to make sense of anything that happens in the movie are bound to fail.

Despite beginning like a giallo with slight supernatural elements, Mario Siciliano's Malocchio soon enough turns out to be one of these really weird pieces of continental European horror movies from the 70s that pride themselves in making as little sense as possible. Sure, one could, if one wanted, read a lot of what's going on as metaphor, squint at some of the film's backstory, add up what one imagines (audience hallucinations are always a possible effect in these movies), and arrive at some sort of explanation of everything that's going on here that may even be the explanation the screenwriters thought of (if indeed they were in the thinking business). However, I don't think that effort would be as worthwhile as just taking the film's oddness at face value.

The narrative is as jumpy and illogical as you'd expect in a case like this, with nobody's actions making much sense, motivations that seem made up on the spot, and only the loosest idea of dramatic tension. The film's climax does indeed seem wilfully un-climactic, and the filmmakers decision to do the ouroboros thing in the end gives the impression they just ran out of napkins to write on rather than leaving the audience with the shock of finding the main character trapped in a never-ending nightmare.

Of course, as you'd also expect in a film like this, that insistence on only making the vaguest sense, on leaving every scene dipped in a haze of the unreal is also Malocchio's greatest strength. This is, after all, a movie whose protagonist can't tell dreams from reality and truth from lies - why should it be any different for the audience?

If there's one problem I had with the film, it's that Siciliano's direction is not quite strange enough for the strangeness of the material. His direction is not bad - especially in the evil hippie demon dreams and assorted scenes - but he's often coasting a bit on the wonderful mugging and eye-rolling of his actors and the oddness of the script without adding quite enough oddness all his own.

But in the end Malocchio is confusing and dream-like enough to satisfy me, even if I've experienced films that were even more confusing and dream-like than it is.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spanish movies,mexican movies,horror,wtf,mario siciliano,jorge rivero,richard conte,eduardo fajardo,anthony steffen,pilar velázquez

In short: Django the Bastard (1969)

Original title: Django Il Bastardo

aka Django the Avenger

aka The Stranger's Gundown

A rather creepy gunman with very limited facial expressions - for the movie's first hour, I count one and a half - named, like these gunmen usual are, Django (Anthony Steffen), rides through the West delivering crosses containing the given day as their date of death to various men before he shoots them. Of course, Django is out for vengeance for something that will be explained in a (slightly comical) flashback later on.

The avenger's job is nearly done, too. After getting rid of two of his victims in short order, there's just Rod Murdock (Paolo Gozlino) left, but Murdock is a more worthy opponent than the others. Once he realizes someone is after him (Django ain't one for subtlety), Murdock decides the protection of his mad brother (Luciano Rossi in a role that has a decided whiff of Kinski) and a few men isn't enough, hires a lot more thugs and holes up with them in a town he empties of other inhabitants.

Now having to use various techniques I usually connect with the goddamn Batman, Django goes to work on them.

I always seem to be of two minds about the Spaghetti Westerns of Sergio Garrone. On one hand, they are all highly derivative, with hardly any plot point that don't come up regularly in other Spaghetti Westerns, and with characters completely following the expected types, on the other hand, they are also usually highly entertaining and accomplished films.

Django the Bastard may even be Garrone's best Western - it is at least the best I've seen to date - mainly because this time around, there are actually a few elements to the film that aren't quite as often explored in other Spaghettis.

The main point of interest in this regard is the way the film treats its avenging anti-hero. That a Spaghetti Western's protagonist has near superhuman abilities with the gun and incredible tenacity isn't anything new, of course, but for about the first hour, Garrone's and Anthony Steffen's script builds him up as a nearly supernatural threat, putting a bit more of the creepy in their West than is the rule. In fact, the script uses this aspect so intensely that it came as a bit of a disappointment to me when Django turned out to be only a very messed-up and angry man who consciously tries to seem more than merely human, making the comparison to Batman more than just a throw-away joke of yours truly.

Another peculiar pop-cultural resonance of Garrone's film is Django's cruelty, and the strangely ritual elements of some of his killings, that - especially early in the movie - give the impression that he's not just traumatized and angry, but an actual serial killer preying on pretty atypical victims. If you squint, you could even argue that this makes Django the Bastard some sort of proto slasher movie, but then you can say that about nearly all movies with vengeance-driven plots if you broaden your definition of makes a movie a "proto-slasher" enough.

Apart from these aspects, Django the Bastard is very typical of this phase of the Spaghetti Western: a minimal (or minimalist, if you prefer) plot with archetypal characters is executed with true visual panache; actors with very limited range work excellently within their limits (in Steffen's case, this is clearly one of his best performances); rich people are bastards; fun is had by all.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,spaghetti western,in short,sergio garrone,anthony steffen,luciano rossi,rada rassimov

Un Angelo Per Satana (1966)

Warning: I'm going to spoil the film's rather annoying ending, for that's what you deserve when your movie uses that particular trope.

Some time during the 19th century. Sculptor Roberto Merigi (Anthony Steffen) has been invited by the Conte Montebruno (Claudio Gora) to a small village by the side of a lake to restore a statue that had lain on the lake's ground for a few hundred years before the Conte decided to bring it back on land again. The villagers are not impressed by the idea, fearing a curse laying upon the statue, but, being the modern men they are, neither the Conte nor Roberto are afraid of magic.

The start of Merigi's work on the statue marks the beginning of interesting times for the village. At the same time, the Conte's niece Harriet (Barbara Steele) is returning from her education in England to take possession of the estate that her uncle has been managing for her until now. To Roberto's fascination, Harriet looks quite a lot like the woman who must have modelled for the statue. Intrigued, the young artist asks Harriet to now model for him to make the restoration easier, a proposal to which the young woman agrees. Of course, the two fall in swooning, melodramatic love.

But all is not well: a woman's voice calls Roberto into the attic one night, and there exposits the nature of the curse the villagers fear to him. The voice claims to belong to a certain Belinda, who was the ugly rival of Harriet's facial ancestor, and caused various fatal occurrences in the village as well as the death of that ancestor. Now, Belinda has returned to begin her work of evil again.

And soon enough, Harriet begins to act strange, as if she were possessed by Belinda. She sado-masochistically messes with the minds of various male villagers, confuses the easily confused Roberto and seems to be set on a path of destruction of all love and happiness around her.

But not all is as it seems.

And it's exactly here that the film's problem lies. Up until the final thirty minutes, Un Angelo Per Satana is a minor, yet interesting Gothic horror film, directed by Camillo Mastrocinque - a veteran quite at the end of his career as a director - not with the mastery of mood or the stylistic flourishes of a Mario Bava, but a clear, professional assuredness that knows what's best about the film - Barbara Steele and the various heatedly sexual over- and undertones - and milks it for all that it's worth. Steele is - as always in roles like this - utterly convincing as the innocent Harriet as well as the ruthless and dominant Belinda. In the latter case, the actress projects an astonishing amount of negatively loaded sexual energy, making the grotesque and melodramatic emotional carnage she causes in men look nearly believable. Given how overwritten the script in this respect is, that's even more of an achievement.

What the film's script lacks is subtlety. As much as I enjoy thickly laid on sadism and masochism in my gothic horror movies, and as convincing as Steele is, it's still a little too much to ask from me to believable that five minutes with her will turn a loving family father into a raving family killer, or the local harmless loon into a budding serial killer; emotionally, the film is all turned up to eleven where a nine or ten from time to time would have been more convincing.

For a time, it's easy enough to explain the extremity of Steele's effect on men with the supernatural agency of Belinda, but once the film decides to have a "natural explanation" for everything that's happening, this excuse falls through and leaves a film full of people emotionally so strained that it's hard to believe they'd be able to cook a meal without having some sort of violent fit or trying to have sex with their soup bowls. Our romantic lead Anthony Steffen is the exception here, because he's in his fullest "piece of wood" mode and doesn't seem to know a single feeling well enough to show it.

I might have mentioned my hatred for the "natural explanation" ending in horror movies ten or twelve times in the past, but here's the problem in a nutshell: once you have built up the supernatural in a movie so that it becomes believable for your audience, it has become the baseline reality of your movie's world for a viewer, and changing that baseline back again to some stuff about hypnotism and legacy-hunting after an hour of running time is admitting you lied to your audience for the whole film without signalling the presence of an unreliable narrator; it's a betrayal of audience trust for a cheap gimmick, and so hardly ever worth it.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,reviews,gothic,horror,mystery,barbara steele,anthony steffen,camillo mastrocinque

Three Films Make A Post: In Illusion-O

Ringo, Face Of Revenge (1967): Four men of dubious morals (Anthony Steffen! Frank Wolff! Eduardo Fajardo! Armando Calvo!) form an alliance to acquire a hidden treasure. There are copious shoot-outs, a bar brawl and a number of double-crossings. The US (Andalucia) have seldom looked prettier.

Another Mario Caiano-directed Spaghetti Western that is sprightly and entertaining, but still leaves me wishing for a bit more substance (especially when it comes to the character work, which is just all over the place) and style, possibly even some surprises. Or some of that revenge promised by the title, now that I think about it.

 

Brain Twisters (1991): Neurological experiments of a near comatose college professor on some of his students cause a series of murders and suicides. It all turns out to part of a big mind control conspiracy. Only a cop-on-the-edge-of-falling-asleep-while-walking and a college-student-cop-love-interest can save the day. Nothing can save the beleaguered viewer from falling asleep. The acting is zombie-esque and the film is only 90 minutes long because everything in it happens very, very slowly. On the bright side, this could be the final cure for insomnia.

 

Paranormal Activity (2007): Given my love for POV horror, and my respect for anyone using a shoe-string budget to not make a backyard zombie massacre, Oren Peli's film should be right up my alley, but it never worked for me while watching it.

I had major problems with the male half of the haunted couple's jerkiness. I never found Micah convincing as a character, his scruples against getting help are transparently there to keep the film's plot from going into a direction it isn't prepared to go in, and not based on anything in his character the viewer is made privy of. I also had my problems with Skippy the cowardly medium. I understand that he's in there to convince us of how serious Katie's and Micah's problems are, but his actions feel as contrived to me as do Micah's, giving the film a very artificial "my first script-writing project" sort of feel.

Despite those contrivances and some pacing problems in the rather draggy first half, I don't think Paranormal Activity is a bad movie. It is just one that doesn't work for me beyond two or three mildly creepy scenes.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,american movies,spaghetti western,horror,thriller,in short,anthony steffen,frank wolff,mario caiano,oren peli

No Room To Die (1969)

aka Hanging For Django (which is an interesting alternative title for a film without a Django or a hanging)

Some time after the US Civil War. A town near the Mexican border whose surrounding landscape looks a lot like autumnal Italy is the centre of a rather nasty affair. The local land owners, especially the evil Mr. Fargo (Riccardo Garrone, director Sergio Garrone's brother), have invented a fantastic method to replace the slaves who aren't working their farms anymore. Their henchmen smuggle in illegal Mexican immigrants to whom they have promised a better life and money to send back to their families. Obviously, the capitalist menace treats them even worse than they once treated their slaves. If it is convenient to kill the Mexicans to evade discovery by the cavalry trying to stop the human cattle trade, so be it. After all, there are a lot of desperate poor people left where the last batch came from.

It could all go well for our capitalist friends, if not for the fact that most of the people they employ to do their human cattle trading for them have prices on their heads. That sort of people tends to attract the attention of bounty hunters, and it doesn't take long until the first of those arrive. Johnny Brandon (ole wooden face Anthony Steffen) and the preacher Everett Murdock (William Berger) aren't working together, yet still manage to disrupt Fargo's business in their separate but equally bloody ways.

It is getting so bad that Fargo has to lead his next human buying spree in Mexico himself. As if the man didn't have problems enough already with his non-reciprocated love for Mexican landowner Maya (Nicoletta Machiavelli) and his tendency to have expressionist black and white flashbacks!

Brandon proposes to Murdock that they team up and make a little trip to Mexico themselves, so there's no rest for the wicked Mr. Fargo and his men there either.

More dead henchmen later, the capitalist tries to pay the bounty hunters off. Murdock - being a preacher and all - is quite susceptible to bribery, but Brandon isn't in the bounty hunting business for the money alone.

As far as I can remember No Room To Die is the first of the handful of Spaghetti Western directed by Italian Sergio (and isn't that a promising first name in this genre?) Garrone I have seen, and if the rest of them keeps what this one promises, there are quite a few films for me to look forward to.

As is usually the case with Spaghetti Westerns from the second row of the genre, Garrone's film is far from being flawless. It is a highly derivative film that grabs as many stylistic elements from the genre-defining works of those other Sergios, throws them in a hat and pulls them out in a rather random fashion. Fortunately, luck and Garrone's directorial talent (I wouldn't dare to decide which of those two has the greater share after having seen only one of Garrone's films) conspire to let these random elements add up to a surprisingly entertaining film. We might (I certainly have) have seen everything here before, from the Anthony Steffen's crotch to the incessant shots of people staring to the strange rifle (shotgun? mini gatling gun?) Berger uses, but we haven't seen these elements put together in exactly the same way. That doesn't sound like much, yet leads to a very entertaining little film.

When you decide to live with No Room to Die's derivativeness, you can start to admire the cheap but classical form all those stolen elements take here.

And yet, having said that, I also have to say that a feeling of nervousness seems to be lying below the usual emotionally calm but physically brutal surface of the film that isn't stolen or borrowed from anyone else's films, but belongs to Garrone alone. Even the physical and tactical superiority of the violent heroes feels somehow more brittle than usual, not only in the obligatory torture sequence, but even in the most banal of shoot-outs. One could nearly start to think these protagonists are only human.

How much of that feeling got into the film on purpose and how much just happened to manifest itself is for the people who made it to say (and they could very well be lying).

It is also possible I have just made all of this up based on the slightly shaking hands of William Berger and Anthony Steffen's atypically numerous facial expressions. The thought of the latter is a bit disconcerting any way you look at it. Either I have gotten so used to Steffen that I by now count every slight movement of his face as a change in expression, or he really shows at least three and a half different emotions here!

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,sergio garrone,anthony steffen,william berger,reviews

On WTF: A Coffin For The Sheriff (1965)

Sometimes, you just want a Spaghetti Western that's satisfied with just being a Spaghetti Western. At times like that, films like this one are indispensable. My review on WTF-Film will tell you why.

 

Technorati-Tags: italian movies,spaghetti western,anthony steffen,mario caiano,reviews,other places

Gentleman Killer (1967)

A small US town close to the border with Mexico is plagued by the activities of the Mexican border bandit "Colonel" Ferrerres (Eduardo Fajardo). The only thing that stands between the exceptionally unwashed and evil man and his gang and the riches the town and the federal bank with its federal gold could provide is a troop of cavalry soldiers under the command of Captain Reeves (Vidal Molina) - at least until the redrawing of the borders between Mexico and the US is finished, at which point the town will become Mexican territory and Ferrerres' playground by default anyway.

The bandit leader is not willing to wait this long, though, and sets in motion a plan to get at the gold a bit earlier. First part of this plan is to slaughter the cavalrymen who are supposed to relieve the current protectors of the town. The military in this part of the world functions in a rather strange way, and so the absence of their relief doesn't hinder the soldiers from leaving their posts. All of them but Captain Reeves, whose job it is to represent the US government and to keep order in town until the new blood arrives - whenever that may be.

Under these circumstances, it's not much of a surprise that Ferrerres' men are killing the good captain quite effortlessly and with a certain amount of sadistic glee.

Nobody could have expected that the newest arrival in town, the professional gambler and gunman Gentleman Jo (Anthony Steffen), is the good Captain's brother, nor could anyone have expected that Jo is as good at posing as his own brother, making friends with the whore with the heart of gold (Silvia Solar), laying ambushes, backstabbing, setting bandits against each other and other special talents useful for the hero of a Spaghetti Western, as he turns out to be when properly motivated by a wish for vengeance.

Giorgio Stegani's Gentleman Killer has a lot in common with the actor playing its hero. Anthony Steffen will hardly be anyone's favorite Spaghetti Western hero, but one wouldn't want to say he's doing a bad job at anything that is required of him. He has the swagger, he has the stare, he knows how to let the small muscles around his eyes do much of his acting and he is convincing in his action scenes. It's not his fault that there are people in the business who are even better at it all, yet still he'll never be remembered as fondly as Van Cleef, Eastwood or Nero.

It is really much the same with the whole film. Stegani's direction is certainly not flashy or very remarkable, but he keeps everything tight, grimy and tense. Not much of what is happening during the course of the movie will be a surprise to anyone, but Jaime Jesus Balcazar's script keeps the "when" and the "how" of the plot open enough to keep the film interesting. I was even surprised by the ending which manages to involve a deus ex machina that is for once neither annoying nor stupid and instead pushes the film in a direction that puts its own anti-Mexican ressentiment into question in an unsubtle yet effective way.

Friends of the gentlemen Nicolai and Morricone (this time around with Nicolai listed as composer and Morricone as conductor and musical director) will be glad to hear that the score is of their usual standard; surely not their best work, yet still sounding pretty damn great to my ears.

Gentleman Killer is definitely no Spaghetti Western masterpiece, not the sort of film I'd recommend to people who just want to get a little taste for the genre or who haven't already seen at least some of the films of the Sergios. It is rather the sort of movie that can keep someone like me in love with a genre even after I've experienced most of its high points and some of its hidden diamonds, a film that provides exactly what one would expect in a genre film and that won't be ashamed of it.

 

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