The temptation to make weak and obvious jokes about this film is simply too strong for me to resist.... but the punchlines I'd come up with couldn't be as much of a joke as this movie itself. A sad Spanish production that somehow managed to wrangle movie icon Joseph Cotten and rising camp icon William Shatner into a hackneyed film about a death feud between twin "Commanche" brothers. Yes, we are supposed to believe that William Shatner of all people is half white man and half native American, and nothing in Shatner's bag of overstated expressions and mannerisms is going to help much in the matter. One of the brothers wants to live in peace as a white man, but he's continually being mistaken for his brother who still lives to rob and kill on the edges of civilization (while continually popping peyote buttons, which might explain the acting). Hilariously, the film is so naive that it expects us to respect the white-bread Shatner's wishes that his brother and the other Commanches would go back to the reservation where they will have some kind of idyllic life according to him.
The physical aspects of this production are embarrassing. There's actually some attempt by the director to bring visual nuance to the film, such as an interesting shot of a man disappearing from the frame which is revealed to be a mirror. But even the unfortunate director, Jose Briz Mendez, is undone in his ambition by the rock-bottom nature of everything associated with the film. The actors in the film are generally terrible, and all of the dialog is of course dubbed. There's a lack of scope to everything, as if the director was constantly aware that moving the camera in one direction or another would reveal unfinished parts of the set. In the end of the movie the good Shatner is supposed to be settling down with his generic showgirl girlfriend in this town, but we really can't imagine anyone wanting to live in such an ugly place for more than 5 minutes.
The production is so incompetent and lazy that when we start to see the clichéd "vultures overhead" towards the end of the movie, they sound exactly like crows. You see this vulture in the sky and then there's a voice going "Ca Ca Ca!". What's worse is that they didn't even bother to use an actual crow -- it's just some guy making animal noises dubbed onto the soundtrack. These people went to the Bert I. Gordon school of post-dubbing apparently.
It's just a horrible, rotten movie.... oh shoot I didn't mention that Joseph Cotten is in it. How Cotten ended up in so many bad movies around this time in his career is really difficult to understand. It actually fills me with sadness to see this great actor, who had been a leading man for Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, reduced to being the nominal "star presence" in a pathetic and pointless film like this one, which doesn't even have the class that Mario Bava could bring to some of his other European films. There's no excuse for this movie -- if it had been a TV pilot, the show would never have been picked up. To expect people to actually pay money for a ticket to this mess is almost criminal. I was able to survive and even enjoy the experience thanks to 4 pints of Stone IPA.
The physical aspects of this production are embarrassing. There's actually some attempt by the director to bring visual nuance to the film, such as an interesting shot of a man disappearing from the frame which is revealed to be a mirror. But even the unfortunate director, Jose Briz Mendez, is undone in his ambition by the rock-bottom nature of everything associated with the film. The actors in the film are generally terrible, and all of the dialog is of course dubbed. There's a lack of scope to everything, as if the director was constantly aware that moving the camera in one direction or another would reveal unfinished parts of the set. In the end of the movie the good Shatner is supposed to be settling down with his generic showgirl girlfriend in this town, but we really can't imagine anyone wanting to live in such an ugly place for more than 5 minutes.
The production is so incompetent and lazy that when we start to see the clichéd "vultures overhead" towards the end of the movie, they sound exactly like crows. You see this vulture in the sky and then there's a voice going "Ca Ca Ca!". What's worse is that they didn't even bother to use an actual crow -- it's just some guy making animal noises dubbed onto the soundtrack. These people went to the Bert I. Gordon school of post-dubbing apparently.
It's just a horrible, rotten movie.... oh shoot I didn't mention that Joseph Cotten is in it. How Cotten ended up in so many bad movies around this time in his career is really difficult to understand. It actually fills me with sadness to see this great actor, who had been a leading man for Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock, reduced to being the nominal "star presence" in a pathetic and pointless film like this one, which doesn't even have the class that Mario Bava could bring to some of his other European films. There's no excuse for this movie -- if it had been a TV pilot, the show would never have been picked up. To expect people to actually pay money for a ticket to this mess is almost criminal. I was able to survive and even enjoy the experience thanks to 4 pints of Stone IPA.