7 Winchester pour un massacre

Hmmm, now this sounds very familiar to me..... clean shaven poncho wearing bounty hunter goes undercover with a gang of "bad guys" in the pursuit of a cash box buried in a graveyard by soldiers during the Civil War.

And, yes, there are more than a few similarities between this film and Leone's "For a Few Dollars More" (in particular) and "Good, the Bad and the Ugly". And, yes, it has obviously a lower budget than both the aforementioned films. But when the "borrowed" stories are so good, there doesn't seem to be a problem in my eyes in recounting extended versions of such tales. So, I really enjoyed this film in its own right.

The leading role does owe more than a nod of the cowboy hat to Eastwood's Man with No Name, and in that respect Byrnes is not an ample substitute. To me, he is far too clean looking (although, like Eastwood's character, he will do whatever he needs to in order to get a job done). The show stealers are Blake (played by Guy Madison) and that rarest of things - a spaghetti western female role (Loiuse Barrett).

Whilst not as outstanding as some other Castellari films (say, Keoma and Jonathan and the Bears), it is still a highly enjoyable Spaghetti Western fare that I would recommend to fans of this genre.

This was the fifth(!) Spaghetti Western I've watched from director Castellari (whom I met at the 2004 Venice Film Festival) – it's not too bad an effort actually, though still far away from the admirably elegiac quality he would eventually achieve in KEOMA (1976).

The plot is pretty typical of the genre: after the end of the Civil War, a Confederate Colonel (Guy Madison) wants to keep up the fight and recruits a band of outlaws to finance his campaign through random pillaging; given that the original Italian title makes an explicit reference to the fact that the gang totals seven men, I guess the film intended to be a roguish version of THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960)! Anyway, as expected, an outsider (Edd Byrnes) soon joins their ranks – after having rescued one of them (Enio Girolami, the director's brother and who, in the role of a peon, irritatingly speaks almost exclusively in Spanish throughout!). However, it transpires (equally unsurprisingly) that he's really a government agent out to ensnare Madison and his men by ostensibly leading them to a buried cache' of Confederate money! Along the way, a female character is also thrown into the fray – which, naturally, causes discord among the Colonel and his 'underlings' since, rather than share her with them as was their habit, he decides to keep her for himself; at the end, she too turns out to have been on the side of the law (and in cahoots with Byrnes all along)!

The film features plenty of action – set to a rousing score by Francesco De Masi – and climaxes agreeably with an atmospheric sequence set inside a cave (where the now worthless money is stashed) that served as burial ground for some Indian tribe or other.

Crazed Confederate raider Guy Madison can't stop raiding, even after the Civil War is over and done with. Ex-Confederate Edd "Kookie" Byrnes knows where a fortune in confederate treasure is buried and needs the bloodthirsty Madison and his band of cutthroats to get there, leading to an uneasy alliance and a harrowing trip across the frontier.

Another of director Enzo G. Castellari's patented brand of light-hearted adventure films, Payment In Blood is a decent enough, if not very original movie. It does have it's share of good action scenes, locations, and performances by it's lead actors, benefiting greatly from Byrnes charisma and Madison's machismo. The climax at the Indian burial ground is pretty neat too.

Castellari is actually pretty good at setting up and directing action sequences. He made his fair share of good movies, but I feel he really could have knocked it out of the park (and still can) if given the right script.

This is the second film of Enzo G. Castellari I have seen, after KEOMA. It's not as original as the latter but provides good entertainment. The opening starts with a pseudo-documentary narrative which introduces the characters. While in THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN the introduced characters are the heroes here they are the baddies. Later the characters aren't much further developed, though. The strong aspect of the film is the uncertainty about the intentions of the Stuart character, well played by Edd Byrnes. He doesn't seem to be a good guy but maybe there is a reason why he kills so many innocent people. Guy Madison plays equally convincing his counterpart Blake.

Overall an OK violent western with a good Francesco De Masi score which supports the pace of the story.

5 / 10.

Enzo G. Castellari was a director who seemed to contribute films in a variety of genres, from sci-fi to giallo. I get the feeling that his best ones are his spaghetti westerns though. In Payment in Blood he delivers a pretty solid entry. Its story features a renegade Confederate colonel who refuses to accept the South's defeat in the American Civil War and so continues the fight with a band of outlaws. A stranger saves one of his gang from execution and is taken into their fold when he reveals that he knows the whereabouts of a casket of buried money.

It would only be fair to say that the plot-line has quite a few similarities with Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy. Its hero, however, looks a little different from the shady leads from other spaghettis. He looks more like a character from an American traditional western, although he still has the same amorality and essentially acts in a similar way. The villains are decent enough and there is a fair amount of violent action to keep us entertained. Things are wrapped up with an interesting enough climax in an Indian burial ground, located in a cave. Overall, this is an entertaining, if unremarkable, western and should definitely find approval with fans of the Italian strand.