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It had been a good, long time since me and my high school buddies sat down to a righteously awful straight-to-video flick. This confused mess fit the bill and then some.

Try to picture a sort of Pam Grier-type exploitation movie but with Cuban Americans and production values that make you wonder if they just strung three episodes of an ethnic soap opera together, and you have some idea what this is like.

With dozens of goofy montages and instances of recycled footage, it has to have more padding than any 80 minute movie I've ever seen. The action sequences are edited badly (tons of dissolves a la "John Carpenter's Vampires"), choreographed worse (looks like they got the guy that did "Mighty Morphin Power Rangers"), and performed horrendously. The ladies are gorgeous, the guys are cheesy and sleazy--pretty much all the prerequisites are met for a raucous evening in front of the tube with friends and beer. Lots of beer. Check it out!

I recently subjected "The Magnificent Seven" to just about the toughest test imaginable--I watched it just a few days after "Seven Samurai." And while I'm not going to pretend it's on par with Kurosawa's astounding masterpiece, I have to tip my hat to Hollywood on this one: it's good, DAMN good, among the best American Westerns.

The focus of the screenplay is more on post-Bogart-pre-Eastwood cool banter than the gradual, taciturn character development of "Seven Samurai," but that doesn't mean that the film doesn't have a heart. Considering it clocks in at barely over two hours (compared to the marathonic three and a half of "Samurai"), it actually does a fantastic and very economical job of fleshing out its memorable cast of characters.

One particularly wonderful scene that stuck in my memory from the first time I saw the film ten years ago is the one where Lee (Robert Vaughn), drunk in the middle of the night, confesses his frailties and fear to two of the farmers. The scene (along with the general story of these down-and-out heroes) was groundbreaking in that it began the deconstruction and deromanticization of the Western hero which would be brought to fruition in Sergio Leone's unparalleled spaghetti Westerns.

The star-studded cast wouldn't hold up doing Shakespeare, but they're ideal in this gunslinging, cool-talking tough-guy adventure. As if a lineup of heroes that included Yul Brynner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn wasn't enough, Eli Wallach steals the show as the Mexican bandit chief, a worthy precursor to his classic role "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly." If the screenplay has a major flaw, it's that his character isn't featured more.

The score is, of course, one of the all-time classics. And while not as alive visually as the Japanese film that inspired it or the Italian Westerns it influenced, it's still mighty fine to look at, and the gunfights don't disappoint.

The pieces add up to one of the great entertaining films of all time, which still manages to be moving and morally aware despite its Hollywoodization of Kurosawa's vision.

"Seven Samurai" is not properly an epic. It does not cover any great distances (perhaps a few dozen miles, at most), or stretches of time (maybe a month), and its climactic battle features perhaps sixty to eighty people--it's a positively modest production when compared with other three-hour affairs such as, say, "Gone with the Wind" or "Spartacus."

But there is one dimension, at least, in which Akira Kurosawa's opus approaches the epic scope: it leaves no corner of the human spirit or the human condition unexplored. The film is, simply, what it is to be human, in its entirety: courage, fear, love, hate, lust, cruelty, kindness, cameraderie, greed, selflessness, sorrow, laughter. This tale of farmers, bandits and warriors is really a story about all of us--the downtrodden, the wicked and the noble.

Very, very rarely, if ever, has a film had such a complete, unerring, and successful devotion to the reality of its characters. And what characters they are--particularly Toshiro Mifune's unforgettable noble savage, Kikuchiyo, and Takashi Shimura's wise and gentle leader, Kambei.

I almost feel as if there's nothing to say--deeply insightful, profoundly moving, beautifully made, unfailingly entertaining even with it's 200+ minute running time--a magnificent film, a PERFECT film, perhaps the greatest ever made.