The West and the Ruthless

200412: Well done, well done. For an obviously low budget western these creative folks did a pretty damn good job. Fun film with weak acting but one great story. Features unique transistions through time. Unexpectedly enjoyable.

Not good, but somehow riveting. Some cool camera angles, reasonably good period costumes, acting was either wooden or good but limited by the writing. The story line was interesting, but wrapped up too quickly with little finesse. I did, perversely, enjoy the odd insertion of twenty-first century phrases i.e. "gross" and "weird, right?". I had to rewind to verify that, during one scene, the gunshot injury was to the woman's right shoulder when it was consistently on her left shoulder before and after this scene. Weird, right? I think they should try again, but run the dialog past a writer first and take the time to have continuity checked.

A man and two women are on a carriage with a driver who appears to be taking them in circles. Eventually the man stops him, and whips him asking for the reasons behind his actions. Another man and woman watching from the distance shoot both men, despite recognizing the driver, tie up one woman leaving her for dead, and kidnap the other who is pregnant. The West and the Ruthless (who thought that was a good title??) takes all of these characters as well as two brothers who run a brothel and tells an interesting story surrounding this event shown out of order.

This film is pretty amateurish from top to bottom. There is some weak and wooden acting, muddy visuals on DVD, and a score that's not bad, but doesn't really fit with the film. Fortunately, the story is interesting enough to overcome some of these issues. A storyline involving a former black slave (Danny Brown, who is easily the best part of the film) and one of the brothers (Dan Fowlks) is the highlight of the story, while one involving the pregnant woman (Rebecca Gomberg) and a man trying to save her (Alexander Harris) is pretty painful with some really poor acting. The sequence also hits right when the story should be picking up steam, but instead stops it right in its tracks as the characters spend far too much time literally just standing there and talking.

Because of the design of the plot some scenes do repeat themselves as it tries to tie everything together. Everything does tie together in the end, but it happens so quickly it's almost laughable. The credits features some nice hand drawn style portraits of the actors and stay tuned for some silly outtakes post credits. The West and the Ruthless (arg!! Such a terrible title!!) is certainly far from perfect, but if you are a fan of westerns and have appreciation for something that at least tries to mix things up then this may be worth a quick look.

Low budget. poor direction. bad acting. other than that, not bad LOL. The only good thing I can come up with is the actress who played Scarlet did a good job. The rest was melodramatic and hard to watch. One other annoying thing was how they kept jumping back and forth with repeated long scenes. These were hard enough to watch the first time. It really felt like they had only a 45 minute movie, so they tried to stretch it into 84 minutes by chopping some scenes short so they could replay them in entirety later. I really hope I don't run across any more work by these clowns. Oh, and there was a VERY huge continuity mistake. So I don't have a spoiler, I won't say who. But someone with a very noticeable bullet wound on the left shoulder suddenly has the wound on the opposite shoulder.

Amazing movies, have watch this movies several time and it very interesting.. great story, highly recommended