The first time I watched this spirited spaghetti western, I was somewhat disappointed after a promising opening thirty minutes of a certain eerie quality. Watching it again the story soaked in a bit more, but I didn't find it all that captivating even with its oddly sprawling and grim nature that ends with poetic justice. It's rather an unconventional effort into Gothic territory, but I found it to go on for too long and completely drag and flounder about after the half-way mark. I was really into it until Tomas Milan's character 'the stranger' made himself at home with the town's occupants. There it seemed to stall, not knowing which way to go and being disorienting. Nothing against Milan's turn, as he was astounding (even if most of the time he feels like nothing more than a passenger), but I guess I expected way too much from this highly regarded genre film. It's weird and unbalanced, as the atmosphere is quite tripped out (wait for the hallucinatory torture scene involving bats) and the maniac violence is sadistically graphic (the restored scalping scene comes to mind) and underneath the surface is a homoerotic edge. It's a boundless and at times wicked mixture. The structure of the psychedelic story is solid (a melodrama leaning on greed, corruption, religion and retribution) and the script squeezes out a morbid sense of humour, while director Guilio Questi infuses some striking images (hanging corpses) and modestly staged shoot-outs. What it seemed to lack though, was a real kinetic edge to its violence. Ivan Vandor's saucy score and Franco Delli Colli's elastic photography shape up well.
