Le rescapé de la vallée de la mort

Al Adamson is a notorious name in cult film circles as a man who made the movies of Ed Wood look good. His films are known for being amateurish, slapdash, and hard to enjoy, and having sat through some of his horror outings it's hard to disagree. However, FIVE BLOODY GRAVES, a rare entry in the western genre for the director, is a surprisingly entertaining little film.

Of course, it's still amateurish in nature, with 'anything goes' style performances and a general hurried feel to the production. On the other hand, it's absolutely packed with action and violence; the storyline is pure Cowboys and Indians, with never any more depth to it than that. Rest assured that the expected shoot-outs, knife fights and horse riding scenes come thick and fast in this film.

Adamson has amassed a wealth of has-been actors for his film, headlined by western star Robert Dix. Watch out for future cult director John 'Bud' Cardos as an Indian and John Carradine as a preacher. Unfortunately the version I watched was heavily cut for violence, but even so I found it better than many modern day attempts at the genre. Certainly no classic but it might just be the director's best film.

Five Bloody Graves is one of the few real drive-in westerns. It's directed by the much maligned Al Adamson, who made many colorful schlockers in his day. With it's nonstop violence and gory excess, this is no exception.

In this the west is depicted as a vast wasteland of hate and savagery, populated by half mad characters including death himself. There isn't much plot except for numerous people wandering around the rugged Utah landscape trying to massacre one another. Being that this is narrated by the grim reaper, there's not much mystery as to where most of the characters wind up.

Incidentally, John Carradine, Scott Brady, and Robert Dix were back together a year later in a better drive-in western, Cain's Cuttroats.

As far as the detractors go, many of them were tricked by the deceiving advertising on the video box into thinking that this is a horror picture. Fans of B-westerns will most likely be more forgiving than the average viewer.

Five Bloody Graves (1970)

* 1/2 (out of 4)

Drive-in flick about lone gunman Ben Thompson (Robert Dix) who loses his wife and sets out on his own. He ends up battling evil Apaches and eventually comes across a wide range of characters and tries to protect them from the Indians who are looking for scalps. If you want a quality Western then it would be best to skip this thing and check out some John Ford films. This movie here is pretty bad on one hand but when you compare it to other films by director Adamson then you might realize that the man certainly did much worse. I think this film here is a tad bit better than some of the director's other work simply because he pretty much throws everything into this movie. We got the crazy gunfighter, countless crazed Indians, traveling prostitutes, a preacher (played by John Carradine) and countless other characters. None of the actors give what you would call a good performance but at the same time they all fit their roles nicely and are at least entertaining to watch. I thought Dix was mildly interesting in the role of the gunfighter and Scott Brady adds some fun as a rival. John "Bud" Carlos plays the main Indian and while he doesn't look the part he at least makes the role fun. Carradine was obviously picking up a paycheck but he's always fun to watch and especially if you're a fan of his work. No matter what trash a filmmaker would give him to read he'd at least give it his all and that's certainly true here. Adamson really doesn't know how to say no as we get just about everything you'd expect to see in a film like this. We get several knife fights that end in deaths. We get countless gunfights that end in deaths. We have a couple horse chases, a few naughty women, a voice-over from Death himself and of course we got the before mentioned Carradine so what else would you want? As with most Adamson films the major downfall is the horrid pacing, which grows old very quickly and at 90-minutes the thing is simply too long to really be enjoyed.

There's one saving grace in this movie: the scenery. It was shot in some rugged and truly beautiful country in Utah, but Al Adamson is such an incompetent hack of a director that he doesn't really do anything with it--it's just kind of "there" in the background, and the few times where you get a glimpse of some of the spectacular views that SHOULD have been seen a lot more often, it looks like Al just happened to be pointing the camera at that particular spot rather than actually having planned the shot (although "Al Adamson" and "planned the shot" are two phrases that don't usually belong in the same sentence). Few things in this film make sense, starting with the title--even if anyone could figure out exactly what a "bloody grave" actually is, there are a lot more than five people killed, the only graves shown are at the end of the picture, and there are only four of them. Having a title that is not only senseless but untrue should give you an idea of what's to come, and since this is an Al Adamson movie, it doesn't fail to live up--or down--to that expectation.

The "action" is laughably inept, as it invariably is with any Adamson film. Scenes seem to be inserted out of nowhere. At one point there's a shot of the survivors of an Indian attack holed up among some big rocks in a dry, desert area awaiting another attack. The next shot shows a half-dozen Indians charging through a lush, green valley, yelling and whooping. The next shot is of the same people in the same group of rocks, but you can't see or hear the Indians. The next shot is the yelling and whooping Indians charging through the valley again. Then back to the shot of the people in the rocks. And that's it. There's no Indian attack, the valley the Indians were charging through is never seen again and, come to think of it, neither are the Indians. As further proof of Adamson's razor-sharp film-making skills, during an attack on a ranch house the number of Indians keeps changing--six attack the house, two of them are killed and one rides away. So where are the other three? Then one Indian fires a burning arrow at a ranch house from a distance of about five feet, and the house proceeds to burn to the ground in about ten seconds. Throughout the movie there's a hilariously pretentious voice-over from "Death" that makes no more sense than anything else. Adamson did manage to get a few professional actors for the picture--John Carradine, Scott Brady, Jim Davis, Paula Raymond--but he also populated it with several of his usual gang of inept "discoveries": Kent Osborne, John Cardos, Vicki Volante. Cardos isn't all that bad, actually, but Osborne and especially Volante are awful. Darlene Lucht (here billed as Tara Ashton) plays one of the prostitutes on a wagon attacked by the Indians, and she's actually not bad at all (and a real beauty, to boot). But the idiotic script (an example: Ben, who's supposed to be the Indian "expert", says that Yaqui Indians are actually Apaches but that the Mexicans call them Yaquis. That is flat-out untrue; Yaquis and Apaches are two entirely different tribes), the badly done "action" scenes, the confused editing, the wildly inappropriate music score (while Joe Lightfoot is chasing the man who raped and murdered his wife, the music that's playing is a pseudo-jazz/rock tune you'd hear in a '60s teen musical with go-go dancers in a cage doing the frug in a "hip" nightclub) all combine to make this even more of an atrocity than the usual Adamson epic. I realize this is an Al Adamson picture, but this one is a stinker by even his almost non-existent standards. Don't waste your time.

Compared to other Al Adamson films this is pretty good, hence the 3 stars. Only two things worth noting, it starred John Carradine, who as well as classics was known for making turkeys and if you're English it suddenly plays the theme music to the News at Ten, which caught me completely off guard.