A Card shark, a mad slave, the town drunk & a pregnant prostitute escape a town massacre only to find themselves at the mercy of sadistic bandit Chaco.
Directed by Lucio Fulci a familiar name to fans of Italian horror movies this is a Spaghetti Western made at the tail end of the genres lifespan & it shows. The premise is intriguing & on paper the characters are interesting, particularly the transformation of the central protagonist gambler Stubby Preston, but in execution it is not so good.
Most of the acting is as flat as the direction which slows the pace right down as do the bizarre kitsch musical interludes. There is nothing wrong with a slow pace but this film almost comes to a stop. The highlights are few & far between with the excellent Tomas Milian woefully underused as is the great American character actor Michael J Pollard & the remaining cast are left with little to work with. Of the highlights are the notorious torture scenes which have a strong sadistic streak much like the excellent Django & the results of where the protagonists food came from in a rainsoaked ghost town.
Unfortunately this film appears to have been made by a director who is not familiar with Westerns. Sometimes this can be good breathing fresh live into a stale genre but here it just emphasizes the inadequacies of the film. As mentioned the Spaghetti Western was on its way out in the seventies, its short but excellent international heyday being the mid to late sixties. Four Of The Apocalypse highlights the way in which a lack of imagination was compensated for by just making the films more violent. This is a shame, the film could have been great if more attention was placed upon the script & acting.
In closing Four Of The Apocalypse has an interesting movie hidden somewhere in the script if only one of the masters of the genre such as Leone or Corbucci had been given the material to work their magic on.
Directed by Lucio Fulci a familiar name to fans of Italian horror movies this is a Spaghetti Western made at the tail end of the genres lifespan & it shows. The premise is intriguing & on paper the characters are interesting, particularly the transformation of the central protagonist gambler Stubby Preston, but in execution it is not so good.
Most of the acting is as flat as the direction which slows the pace right down as do the bizarre kitsch musical interludes. There is nothing wrong with a slow pace but this film almost comes to a stop. The highlights are few & far between with the excellent Tomas Milian woefully underused as is the great American character actor Michael J Pollard & the remaining cast are left with little to work with. Of the highlights are the notorious torture scenes which have a strong sadistic streak much like the excellent Django & the results of where the protagonists food came from in a rainsoaked ghost town.
Unfortunately this film appears to have been made by a director who is not familiar with Westerns. Sometimes this can be good breathing fresh live into a stale genre but here it just emphasizes the inadequacies of the film. As mentioned the Spaghetti Western was on its way out in the seventies, its short but excellent international heyday being the mid to late sixties. Four Of The Apocalypse highlights the way in which a lack of imagination was compensated for by just making the films more violent. This is a shame, the film could have been great if more attention was placed upon the script & acting.
In closing Four Of The Apocalypse has an interesting movie hidden somewhere in the script if only one of the masters of the genre such as Leone or Corbucci had been given the material to work their magic on.