cinema history class: death rides a horse

Session: Bring Your Own Spaghetti Western, Week 3
Movie: Death Rides a Horse (1967)
Directed by Giulio Petroni

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

Plot:
As a young boy, Bill saw his family murdered. Now an adult, he seeks revenge. Hilarity ensues.

Administrative Notes:
It has become a class tradition to do a month of Spaghetti Westerns (or Spaghetti Western-related films) every January. It's a change of pace -- a palate-cleanser, as Keith puts it. This year, because several of us have suggested specific SpagWests, Keith decided to let us each pick one for this month's session. This week was Dave's pick.

Reaction:

Having scene DRaH a few times before, I went in having decided what I thought about the film, and planning to give it an 8. My thoughts at that point were that it's a very good SpagWest, but not one of the absolute top tier. The top tier consists of maybe The Good, The Bad and the Ugly (1966), Django (1966), The Mercenary (1968) and Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).

But watching it again, I realize that it's a better film than I remembered. There were a lot of plot elements that I had forgotten about, including the all-important twist ending. WHat also helped is that all the times I'd seen it in the past, the print was flawed, so the colors were muddy and the sound a bit muffled. This time we were watching on the new DVD release that's all cleaned up. I can't overstate how much of a difference that made in terms of enjoyment and appreciation of the film. I hadn't remembered how great the soundtrack is, or how well the movies was made.

Joe (who hadn't seen this film before) gave an uncharacteristically succint review: He said (and, though I am using quotation marks, it's possible that I am not getting the words 100% correct), "This is the movie that last week's movie [Hate is My God, which I wrote about here] was supposed to be. 10."

I see where he's coming from -- there were definite plot similarities, which I noted in my writeup of Hate. But Hate was much more ambitious and darker in its approach. I'd still love to see that the way it was intended. How would I rate it? I can only wonder. At any rate, DRaH definitely went up a notch in my estimation. Is it in the top tier? Not quite. But it's close.

Ratings:

Me: 9
Dave: 10
Joe: 10
Keith: 9
Sean: 3 out of 4