Trinita va tout casser: La colline des bottes

I approached this film with little to no expectations, after reading a few fairly negative reviews here on IMDb. I was pleasantly surprised.

The film opens up with Stephens (Terence Hill) trying to evade a posse of killers chasing him through a small town, where a circus is performing. After taking a bullet, Stephens eludes his would-be killers and stows away in a circus cart. We soon learn that one of Stephens fellow gunslingers is working as a trapeze artist with the circus. Ultimately it is revealed that a local exploitative mine owner is in control of the posse and one of his henchmen eventually crosses the circus performers. So the gunslinger, trapeze artists and a local itinerant official join forces to fight against the corrupt mob lead by Honey Fisher (Victor Buono).

The film is well-paced, though not as hurried as many spaghetti westerns sometimes are. The camera work is just a touch above the standard spaghetti western, and a little different from the standard approach. There are a lot of close-ups and the camera is used effectively to create an unsettling and downright weird atmosphere throughout a good portion of the film - this puts an unexpectedly sinister spin on the seeming novelty gimmick of circus performers in battle.

Director Collizzi did a masterful job with a script and story which were - by genre standards - merely OK. Some of the characters remain somewhat weakly developed, but this doesn't really detract from the film's entertainment value. The actors perform generally well (though the charismatic Lionel Stander gets just a little irritating at times).

Recommended for fans of the western genre.

Terence Hill & Bud Spencer early pairing. Low budget western with a lot of stars in it. Not the usual by any means.. western-wise or hill/spencer-wise.. 3 years before Trinity, Hill portrays a character named Cat Stevens ( A name that was also his characters in both Dio perdona... Io no! & I Quattro dell'Ave Maria). It can be dull at times but it's a good movie given the chance. I originally wrote a more negative review of this film and after watching it a few more times since I have edited it to lean on the more positive side. Worth checking out & it is made on DVD now. Although the transfer is cassette quality. It does give the film that nostalgic quality & makes the dirt floors & dirty faces look even more filthy.

Boot Hill, the English title for this spaghetti western finds Terrence Hill confronting a the hired thugs of town boss Victor Buono and getting shot up for his efforts. A traveling circus takes him in and gives him shelter over the objections of owner Lionel Stander who reluctantly gives in. After that Hill teams up with Bud Spencer, a fellow gunfighter whom he brings out of retirement and Woody Strode who is with the circus, but has his own agenda with that town and its boss.

The film sadly enough tries to be a comedy, but the laughs don't quite come in the right places. For the life of me I could not understand the dubbing of Victor Buono who is playing a variation on the part he had in Four For Texas. Buono had one of the most cultured voices in the English language during his lifetime so that just seemed incredibly stupid to me.

Boot Hill marks the farewell performance of Eduardo Ciannelli who was all of 80 years old and looked it. He was dubbed, but his Italian accent would have been really out of place in this western. My guess is that Ciannelli was not in the best of health making this film. Not one I'd want to go out on.

For those who like the pasta westerns from Europe you might enjoy Boot Hill. But it just isn't my taste.

The U.S. TV print of this film is awful. There is no pan and scan so there are long sequences where nothing is in the center of the screen! I found myself almost hallucinatory after an hour of this film. None of the American actors dubbed their own voices with the possible exception of Lionel Stander. Terrence Hill plays it straight here.

I would be very interested to see this film in Italian, subtitled and letterboxed. If you get the Trinity box set here in the U.S., I recommend you throw Boot Hill out immediately, unwatched.

Misleadingly promoted as a "Trinity" film, "Boot Hill" can barely even be classified as a "Bud Spencer-Terence Hill" film, since it gives the two stars very few chances to exercise their teamwork (Spencer appears after the first half-hour). The story is confusing, and the direction is annoying: for one thing, many action scenes take place in the dark, and for another, the camera focuses a little too closely on the actors; too often half the action appears to have been chopped off the sides of the screen, even though the version I watched was letterboxed. Not recommended. (*1/2)