cinema history class: scalps

Session: Spaghetti Nightmares, Week 4
Movie: Scalps (1987)
Directed by Claudio Fragasso

As always, there may be spoilers here. And the trailer may be NSFW and/or NSFL

Plot:
A group of renegade Confederate soldiers wants to capture a Native American woman for their colonel One particular Native American woman. Suffice to say she doesn't want to be captured. . Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
Scalps struck me as very American as far as Spaghetti Westerns go. As with The Four of the Apocalypse (which we saw a week ago), there were actual good guys. I also noticed that there was very little emphasis on gunplay. Most of the Spghetti Westerns I've seen seem to emphasize guns. For example, To cite one example, In The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, the three main protagonists are all expert gunslingers and the story comes down to a final three-way shootout (which, I suppose, is of interest to game theorists). Here, there are guns, but it's not the same. On another note, this movie involved Native Americans. Of course, it's not the only one to do so (Navajo Joe comes to mind), but that's a topic that the Italian directors seemed not to have explored much. Now, having said that, I should acknowledge that 1987 was pretty late in the Spaghetti Western timeline. Also, as Keith pointed out, it was written by an American. So that may have something to do with it. At any rate, it seemed to play like a Louis L'amour novel.

Keith (and I think the others) kept making the obvious comparisons to the second Rambo movie, though to me it seemed more like 1984's Red Dawn. Either way, it was exciting. And the use of bows and arrows (combined with dynamite) was terrific.

So we were watching this movie, and there was good energy in the room. We were really getting into this. But it really upped the ante in the last fifteen minutes, and you could tell from how we were reacting. But the denouement was killer.

I think the quote of the night was Keith's: "It's relentlessly bloody and ugly and bloody and relentless."

Ratings:

Me: 10

Dave: 9.8

Ethan: 8

Joe: 10
Sean: 2 out of 4

Joe suggested that we start a new class ritual. At the conclusion of each session, we each indicate which was our favorite move of the session. So here are our picks for the best movies from the "Spaghetti Nightmares" session:
Me: Scalps
Dave: Scalps
Ethan: Three way tie between Cut-Throats Nine, Four of the Apocalypse and Scalps
Joe: Scalps
Sean: Four of the Apocalypse