09 May 2010

Some better than others, it seems

Rico says that, on the plausible assumption that watching any cowboy movie is a good thing, he's been watching one of those cheap DVD collections, Gunslingers, a two-disk set (each two-sided, thus saving the disk imprinting costs) of four less-than-famous Westerns:
God's Gun, with Lee Van Cleef
Beyond the Law, with Lee Van Cleef
Death Rides a Horse, with Lee Van Cleef and John Phillip Law
and Boot Hill, with Terrence Hill
Are we seeing a common theme here? Must've been Lee Van Cleef Day when they made the selections...

First up was, by chance (remember, the DVDs aren't marked), Death Rides a Horse. No, not Behold a Pale Horse, that's a classic, made in 1964 and starring Gregory Peck, Anthony Quinn, and Omar Sharif, about an incident following the Spanish Civil War. (And, if you haven't seen it, get it from Netflix or your local video store and see it. Do it today.)
Now, Rico says he likes Lee Van Cleef, and Westerns, but some spaghetti Westerns are almost too painful to watch, and this is one of them. He'll struggle through to the end, just because, but John Phillip Law is nearly unbearable in this; he's like watching a bad Terrence Hill, only on downers. He's got over eighty movies in his resume, and is still making them, but hopefully he's gotten better since 1967...

Remember, too, that these are all, technically, Spaghetti Westerns, having been made in Italy. Thus they're really (in the same order)
Diamante Lobo, or Diamond Wolf
Al di là della legge
Da uomo a uomo, which is really Man to Man
and La collina degli stivali

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