O Fugitivo

I wanted to like this one but it failed on two levels. In the initial scenes the character played by Ku Feng contrasts with Lo Lieh's. Ku Feng is a carousing, horn-dog, brothel rat who lives for the pleasure of the moment. Lo Lieh is serious, thinking about the future, and wants to settle down with one girl. Yet somehow Ku Feng turns into a responsible citizen in his next scene. Secondly, guns and kung fu don't mix. The police use their rifles as if they were carrying umbrellas. The only time anyone shoots is when they are far enough away to guarantee a miss. The guns have limitless bullets unless a gun is needed to be empty at just that moment. Finally, it took me a long time to find this one because of the title. An internet shopping search will yield thousands of results pertaining to an American TV series. I only managed to find an old VCD in a Chinatown movie store.

77 minutes of wildly outrageous spaghetti western excellence, The Fugitive mixes fantastic gun-fu style action with the standardised Shaw Brothers martial arts formula, all scored by some of Ennio Morricone's finest music, it's almost as if someone was peaking at my Christmas list. Featuring a plethora of badass moments, the majority coming from leading man Lo Lieh, amidst the flurry of wonderfully gratuitous blood sprays, there's no denying the unique approach to this hybridisation of crowd-pleasing genres, often so over-the-top that you could never take it seriously. But that's where its charm lies and I couldn't ask it to do more. The threadbare story is perhaps its weakest element, but anyone who loves a good revenge tale can easily overlook this, besides, who needs a great story when you score your revenge with Morricone?