In the
opening scene a cowboy named Selby is accused of cheating and challenged to a
duel by the four men he had beaten in a game of poker. It's a scene that
looks like dozens of other scenes from spaghetti westerns, until Selby pulls
out a four-barreled gun and shoots all four opponents with one single shot. We're not only supposed to believe
that this fantasy gun works, but also that it can shoot in four different
directions at the same time. This is western wonderland ...
The movie was a personal idea of producer Dino de
Laurentiis, who was fascinated by the success of Leone's A Fistful of Dollars and wanted to copy (or even double) it by producing a western that was
at least twice as extravagant. As far as I know it's the only spaghetti western
that was shot in Algeria and I guess it's also the only one to feature a
villain called Julius Cesar Fuller, a lunatic who lives in a imperial palace,
located on a hilltop and has surrounded himself by a harem of young girls from
all four corners of the world, and a praetorian guard of black-clad pistoleros
(played by Algerian extras). If that's not enough reason to watch the movie,
there are a few others, such as Femi Benussi performing an erotic dance and a
catfight with two girls ripping off each others' clothes ...
(text continues under the pic)
Selby, the guy with the four-barreled gun, is approached by
a solicitor who tells him that is father (whom he had never met) has left him a
goldmine, located in a place called Laredo. Selby receives an official document
plus a photo of a young girl. In Laredo he discovers that two other young men
had received the same message, document and photo: the two others are his
half-brothers, sons of the same father but a different mother. The first one,
Kato, is Japanese and a martial artist, the second, Devereaux, is French and a
hypnotist who beats his opponents by freezing their trigger finger or hammering
fist. The three team up and start looking for the goldmine and the girl on the
photo, but they're thwarted by this would-be Roman emperor and his private
militia of black-clad pistoleros ...
The
black-clad pistoleros reminded me a little of the black-clad muchachos of that
other ultra-weird spaghetti western extravaganza, Fabio Questi's Se sei vivo,spara (Django Kill), but I did not spot any homosexual overtones and this movie
is nowhere nearly as perverted or violent as the other one. The body-count is
pretty high but the tone is tongue-in-cheek, occasionally even cheerful. According
to Marco Giusti, the idea for the Roman palace was taken from Rio Conchos, a
popular movie in Italian cinemas at the time (*1). Salerno is
almost unrecognizable (actually I didn't recognize him) as the emperor, but
like the other actors he seems to enjoy himself. This is by no means a great
movie but it's quite lively and most certainly has some curiosity value.
⭐⭐½
Director: Enzo
Peri - Cast: Thomas Hunter, Enrico Maria Salerno, James Shigeta, Nadir Moretti, Delia
Boccardo, Gianna Serra, Femi Benussi, Umberto D'Orsi, Vittorio Bonos, Ferrucio
De Ceresa, Adriana Ambesi - Music: Marcello Giombini
Note:
* (1) Marco Giusti, Dizionario del western all'italiana
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