User Reviews

This film is very hard to get hold of, and the DVD version I saw was clearly taken from a poor quality VHS tape, and was only 83 minutes long, as against the 95 minutes advertised on IMDb and 100 minutes according to TCM. I'd like to see the missing 12/17 minutes on a decent quality print some day, as although this isn't exactly a classic of the genre it actually has a bit more going for it than just the bloody mayhem that the title promises -and largely delivers at the end, when Mario (Padilla) and his pals try to storm the villain's stronghold aided by plenty of dynamite and a Gatling gun. Mario tries to give up the outlaw life but is rejected by his wife after his 5 year absence, and even wounded by his own young son who's protecting his mother from this 'stranger'. As if that isn't bad enough, the bad guy sends out a group of henchmen to recover the money Mario has with him from a train raid, and they inflict carnage on Mario's home town, killing most of his family. So it's a dark tale, and the scenes when he's trying and failing to build another life with his family are well done, with some moody guitar music to back up the theme. There are definitely some Peckinpah influences here, especially with echoes of The Wild Bunch and Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia, though needless to say it's nowhere near that good. And both the director and Padilla are involved in an earlier, equally bleak and violent Western, called Machismo (1970). Hilariousy, Herb Fagen in The Encyclopedia of Westerns claims that The Great Gundown is a reissue of Machismo, which demonstrates that he hasn't watched one (or both) of these films. I've seen both, and they're definitely not the same!