cinema history class: cut-throats nine

Session: Spaghetti Nightmares, Week 1
Movie: Cut-Throats Nine (1972)
Directed by Joaquin Romero Marchent

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

Plot:
Sgt. Brown is marching a gang of hardened criminals across snowy mountains, knowing that one of them (but he doesn't know which one) murdered his wife. Oh, and he has his beautiful young daughter with him Hilarity ensues.

Reaction:
For this (the third?) installment of Spaghetti Western Month, Keith decided to go with spaghetti westerns that play like horror movies. And, boy-o-boy, did he deliver. CT9 is tense and miserable, cold and clautrophobic. And great.

In some ways, the film isn't much of a western. A lot of the tropes of Spaghetti Westerns are absent. For example, I only counted two gunshots, and though it seems to be building toward some kind of climactic battle, that battle never comes. It does, however, have the obligatory torture scene. In place of the familiar Spaghetti Western cliches, there are all sorts of horror movie cliches -- bloody stabbings, and even (courtesy of a hallucination) a zombie.

CT9 is much slower and more deliberate than most other movies I've seen in the genre -- and certainly slower than the good ones. But it keeps the tension alive. Even to the point where the moments that seem to be -- relatively speaking -- elicit muted uncomfortable chuckles rather than real laughs.

One of the most interesting things about the movie is the way it feels claustrophobic despite being set mostly in the great outdoors. Marchent kept placing his characters in enclosed outdoor spaces -- the entrance to a railroad tunnel, narrow paths on cliffs, forest trails. That claustrophobi feel combined with the unrelenting cold -- it reninded a couple of us of The Great Silence, which we saw a  couple years ago -- to make for an unremittingly tense experience.

Without giving away the ending, I will say that the conclusion was very well done. It did catch most of us by surprise.

Ratings:
Me: 9.4
Dave: 9.5
Ethan: 10
Joe: 9.8
Sean: 3 out of 4