Gone with the West

Ex-convict James Caan is released from prison and sets out to exact some long overdue vengeance on Aldo Ray, the man who murdered his family years before and apparently the rest of the town as well.

There's some trashy fun at first but things run out of steam pretty quick and never recover.

A paper thin story, the obnoxious free-wheeling 1970's style direction, and the bad funk score are all pretty off-putting, as is the terrible performance by Stephanie Powers, who looks like Johnny Depp in Benny & Joon and is so verbally challenged she makes Tonto look like a radio talk show host!

The great Sammy Davis Jr. is sadly wasted in this. His leather-clad gunfighter character was the most entertaining thing in the movie and really deserved a better script!

I agree that this move must have originally been unfinished, or else something bad happened during the production - mainly because of the wrap-around present-day footage and narration that is completely redundant. What I can't figure out is how a cheapo movie like this got stars that were (of the time) pretty prominent, especially Caan. Well, Davis can probably be explained, because he appears in only a few scenes that were probably filmed in a day. I got a laugh out of his shiny black leather pants, and Powers was so mind-bogglingly awful (hardly speaking a word of English, by the way) that there was some extra amusement from that. Other than that, this is an incredibly painful western to sit through, with some of the most ludicrous plot turns even to hit the prairie.

there are really no words to describe how bad this movie is. thank god we bought it at the dollar store! the only way my sister and i watched it was in fast forward! we couldn't stop laughing, we only watched when we guessed the man was singing, we knew someone was dead! Stephanie powers had the best role, she really did not have much to say or do. i hope they all got paid a lot of money for this mess of a movie.you can tell this movie was made in the late seventies. the music and the way the camera angles were so bad, i thought i was watching a music video. the only way to watch this movie is with a lot of popcorn and a big drink.

Newspaper folk from the city, doing a piece on ghost towns, get an earful from a batty old crone near San Juan Batista who tells them a tall tale of the Old West. Excruciating western, apparently played for laughs, pits lonesome cowpoke James Caan against small town strong-arm Aldo Ray, with Stefanie Powers as an Indian love-interest who apparently doesn't speak English. Showing definite, crippling signs of post-production interference, this threadbare film is so ineptly edited, one feels as though he's watching a proposed pilot for a TV series which never sold. It isn't fair to call the end results a 'film' or a 'movie'...it's simply an excuse for the actors (good ones, mind you) to make a little extra money. Hopefully, the cast and their managers were well-paid. NO STARS from ****

This has to be one of the worst movies ever! How did it take three people to write a story with nearly no dialog and very little plot? How did anyone get talked into financing this bomb? How did they manage to get James Caan and SAMMY DAVIS JR.! to appear in this thing? I think this movie gave Sammy Davis Jr. cancer. He probably never let Sinatra or Dean Martin know he was in this thing. It is that utterly bad. It is more confusing than some bizarre Fellini flick. I watched the whole thing and I have NO idea what it is about, just a collection of scenes that don't add up to a story. I don't know what any of it means - the cockfighting, the woman and little kid getting shot, the two hookers (?) getting into a fight, the wrestling match in the bar (which is perpetually in a fight scene), the cowboy singing 'Abide With Me' every so often. Weird, weird, weird. Maybe it would make sense if you watched it on LSD, since it was apparently written under that influence. I can't recall another movie which has left me feeling so stunned, like 'What the HECK was that?' No wonder it's in the public domain; nobody would have spent the few dollars to keep the copyrights going. Wow. This whole movie makes no sense whatever.