Acquasanta Joe

I rated this one with solid 5/10 points. It's very limited in various ways. Let's face it, most Italian westerns weren't blessed with a high budget, this wasn't either and it shows. The action takes place mostly somewhere in a canyon or woods, you barely get to see. Still, it's entertaining. The characters are stereotypes, starting with the hero Holy Water Joe, the ruthless but cunning headhunter who brings down a pack of bandits that robbed the bank he put all his earnings in. The action is quite fast and though this kind of movie naturally isn't a grade A product it's fairly entertaining. The soundtrack is quite interesting, as it contains both the usual orchestration for spaghetti westerns as well as some 60/70s style music. A product of it's time I guess. However, I felt entertained by this one and for that it gets a bonus pushing it to 5 of 10 points, with the entertainment factor higher than that.

Released in 1971, "Holy Water Joe" (aka "Acquasanta Joe") is an Italio Western about a gang of outlaws who steal a Union cannon and use it to rob a bank that contains the savings of bounty hunter Holy Water Joe (Lincoln Tate). Of course, he aims to set things aright. Ty Hardin plays the leader of the outlaws while Silvia Monelli appears as the lone female member of the gang, a half-breed. Richard Harrison is also on hand.

This combines the tone of "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" (1966) with (sort of) the plot of Elvis' "Charro!" (1969). The cast is good and I like the score with its pieces of anachronistic early 70's rock, which goes to show that "Young Guns" (1988) wasn't the first Western to do this, not by a long shot. Unfortunately, the tone incongruently mixes gravity with goofiness and it prevents the viewer from taking the story serious. The comedy's simply not amusing. Worse, the story is dull, particularly the first half. Thankfully, I started to catch a grip by the second half and somewhat enjoyed the pic. But this is Exhibit A in why Spaghetti Westerns have a bad rep.

The film runs 88 minutes and was presumably shot in Spain. DIRECTORS: Mario Gariazzo & (uncredited) Richard Harrison. WRITERS: Gariazzo & Ferdinando Poggi.

GRADE: C-

Like SARTANA IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH (1970), I watched this via C'Est La Vie's R2 DVD and, in hindsight, both film and disc are of similar quality. The lead is Lincoln Tate in the title role of the bounty hunter pursuing Ty Hardin's band of Renegade Union soldiers; Richard Harrison appears as one of the latter's associates who later double-crosses him.

Having watched so many Spaghetti Westerns this past week, the films' plots get intertwined in my mind – and, frankly, I can't recall much of what this one was about!; I do know that Hardin's gang carries with it a cannon to aid in their bank robberies and that his leadership is challenged at one point by a bald-headed associate whom Tate eventually dispatches with a horde of arrows in the style of Akira Kurosawa's THRONE OF BLOOD (1957). Hardin eventually joins forces with Tate to retrieve a stash of money hidden in a cave, and also involved is Hardin's half-breed (and gun-toting) woman – who has her eyes on Tate as well.

The director biography, included among the extras, makes some claim for him being a versatile film-maker but, personally, it's the first I've ever heard of him: his career spanned all sorts of genres from Spaghetti Westerns to crime thrillers, horror, sci-fi and even erotica (as it turns out, he also made the sentimental drama THE BALLOON VENDOR aka THE LAST CIRCUS SHOW [1974] – starring James Whitmore and Lee J. Cobb – which, when released in Malta back in the day, proved a huge box-office success)!

A bounty hunter who goes by the name of "Holy Water Joe" or "Acquasanta Joe" decides to put all of his savings into a bank. However, when gangster Donovan and his gang rob the bank, he sets out to get his money back. But, rivalry in the gang makes things complicated, as the union army also is interested in finally putting the gang to rest. "Holy Water Joe" gets four stars. Two for the performance from Ty Hardin of "Bronco" fame who absolutely steals the show with his nutty performance, and two more stars for the grand gun-cannon-bow and arrow battle at the end, other then that its a strange mixture of spaghetti western violence and zany comedy, with a rather bland forgetful lead in Lincoln Tate.

It was around this time during the spaghetti western craze that many spaghetti westerns started to add some comic elements, some being outright comedies. "Holy Water Joe" (a.k.a. "Acquasanta Joe") plays it straight for the most part, but there are several scenes that are clearly there to generate laughs. When this comic side of the movie is placed against the serious side, it is sometimes jarring, because the movie has several sequences where people are viciously gunned down or threatened with hanging or being blasted by a cannon. Apart from that flaw, I didn't find the movie as terrible as some of the other IMDb users did. I'm not saying it's a great or even good western, but I found it lively enough to pass the time (though not much more.) If you are a fan of the spaghetti western genre, it's probably safe enough to give it a try.