Cover Art

Credits

Director: Guilo Questi Starring: Thomas Milan, Marilou Tolo, Roberto Carmardiel, Raymond Lovelock Screenplay: Franco Arcalli, Benedetto Benedetti, Maria del Carmen Martínez Román and Guilo Questi Country: Italy AKA: Se sei vivo spara

The hallucinatory imagery Questi uses to tell his story of revenge is completely out there, unlike anything ever seen in a Western with the possible exception of Alejandro Jodorowsky's Mexican western El Topo. His combination of new wave editing techniques, horror movie clichés and over the top violence leaves the viewer exhausted. The editing in some sequences is rapid fire to say the least, every 4 seconds the image changes often throwing in flash frames of seemingly inconsequential images recalling the editing style of the late great Russ Meyer. The violence is graphic and unpleasant; an Indian is gorily scalped and in one painful sequence an almost dead bandit body is ripped to pieces as the desperate doctor tries to remove every golden bullet from his body.

The film follows the tortured life of a stranger who is double crossed by his gang and left for dead in an early grave. Brought back from the brink of death by two Indians he heads to a small town called The Unhappy Place where the gang is holed up. By the time he arrives he discovers that the townsfolk are even more desperate and evil than his fellow gang members who have all been hanged. He is left to fend for himself in a town full of blood thirsty, gold crazed psychos. Thomas Milan is great as the stranger; the star of Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling and Four Gunmen of the Apocalypse, along with the western Companeros and the debatable Caligula 2, exudes that star quality that so few have.

The use of horror imagery is not always successful; the site of his sand covered hand rising from the dead looks fabulous but the scenes where a stripped stranger, crucified on a cross, is tortured red by vampire bats is just silly. The stock footage of Fruit bats and the odd vampire bat that never appear even close to our hero doesn't work at all.