Le jour du jugement

According to this movie vigilantism should be preferred over real justice. This movie is an orgy of brutal shooting scenes without much story. It does therefore make no sense to watch it. Even if the longer Italian version should have more story included, the morals behind the movie remain questionable. Moreover, the director did a terrible job cutting the scenes. Everything seems to be cut together carelessly, so that at no point in the movie any suspension can develop. Also the characters remain flat and are not developed at all. The audience only learns a minimum about the main character. His life and motivations remain unclear. I therefore highly recommend to watch the classic Westerns before turning to this movie.

Unfortunately, the version of this movie that I have suffers from very poor editing. There are a couple of scenes that are so badly chopped that you just kind of have to figure out for yourself what just happened! Confirming my suspicion that this movie was grossly hacked up is the fact that, according to the IMDb, the Italian version of the film runs for 99 minutes. My English language DVD is only 73 minutes long!

What's left of the movie is actually very enjoyable. It's a decent B-grade revenge story with all the requisite cool action scenes and cheesy emotional flashbacks that make these movies so much fun to watch.

The music score is decent, but it borrows some parts from another, more well-known, spaghetti western called "The Hellbenders" (I Crudeli). I wouldn't be surprised if the borrowed parts of the music score are unique to the English language version. Perhaps the editing wreaked so much havoc with the original score that some moron in the chopping room said "let's just stick that Hellbenders song in there to fill in those parts." Who knows?

The version that I have probably really deserves a 5 out of ten rating at best, but I can tell that the movie would be considerably better in its complete, original form, so I am giving it an extra point. I hope a good print of the film in its entirety gets released some day, because I would love to see it and rewrite this review. I wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be a 7 or an 8. At any rate, I liked it anyway, so if you're a spaghetti western fanatic, you may find it to be worth watching, even in its current chopped up form.

A Yankee officer returns from war to find his wife and son murdered by a band of killers. A toy drummer is the only remaining memory for him, because they burnt down his house. The officer takes the toy drummer with him as a symbol of his vengeance. He lets him play every time he found one of the murderers, and kills one by one. This extremely simple story serves as a formula of ritual. 1971, there had been several years in which the Italian western had formed its typical clichés, and I believe writer/director/producer Mario Gariazzo is quite aware that he uses them all. Ty Hardin as the officer uses masks so nobody knows who he is. An excellent cast supports him. Rick Boyd, Lee Burton and Ken Wood are familiar faces from earlier westerns. Gordon Mitchell is the deputy sheriff, and Craig Hill gets the role of a circus director with a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache. Beautiful Edda Di Benedetto appears as an Indian girl who helps the avenger. Despite some confusion probably due to the cuts (copies in most countries are 20 minutes shorter than the Italian original) and lack of original music (soundtrack mostly borrowed from "I Crudeli"), this is a good revenge western movie for the fans of the genre.

A man returns home from the Civil War to find his wife and child have been murdered. He vows revenge and sets off to get it. Before he kills he sets in motion a small mechanical drummer that was one of his son's toys. As the body count increases the town where the killers reside gets nervous wondering who is next.

I saw the shorter 75 minute version of this film and can only wonder how this plays in the full 99 minute Italian version. Here the film is a series of brutal gun downs by our "hero" with very little in between them. To be honest the action is not bad, its just that with little more than the gunfights for the first half of the movie any interest is lost before the second half gets under way (I ended up picking up the paper and reading). There is no character development and little plot beyond the quest for revenge and the sheriff trying to stop him by standing around looking concerned. Making things worse is the dubbing which is so loopy as to be nonsensical.

This is not a movie I can not recommend, at least in the shorter version, unless you are need to be put to sleep or are trying to see every Spaghetti Western ever made.

4 out of 10

Californian star Ty Hardin stars as a Yankee soldier who seeks revenge on all those responsible for killing his Indian wife and his Son. Armed with his 6 shooter, Henry rifle and a toy robot of a little drummer boy.he moves among the townsfolk disguised as an 19th century hippie, (who digs graves and bleats out biblical passages, plotting his Doomsday on all those that wronged, and there's a lot of them. What could have been a Spagetti western classic turned out to be a bit of a disappointment mainly due to the poor direction, the action scenes are some of the worst I've seen, guns not in frame,shootings off screen , 9 shooters???, really horrible work. I saw the full 88min version and there a re 2 scenes that are in different places to the 74 min cut down version.the music cues are different too. The music is marvelous only it was not written for this film, it was written by Ennio Morricone for the film the Hellbenders (I Crudeli-1967) all that said Ty Hardin is cool as the Yankee with no name and even better as the Hippie preacher man, it was also nice to see Craig Hill in a non gun slinger roll as the carnival man "O Connoor". The Toy robot idea was a clever replacement for the old chiming pocket watch gag. Not the best in the west but a must see for die hard Spag fans.The dubbing was pretty good esp the Hippie voice