This is a very watchable Western that exhibits a high level of grotesque violence. I attribute the violence to the fact that this movie follows on the heels of “The Wild Bunch” which was a Western and which saw director Sam Peckinpah push the boundaries of on-screen gun play and graphically portrayed violence. “The Hunting Party” follows in the mold and shows a lot of bullet holes being made in some of the characters and there is generally sadistic bent to the character portrayed by Gene Hackman. Hackman is a cattle baron who treats his young wife like so much [More]
I started watching this western and began thinking that it was playing out as another dated take on The Old West that we have seen in countless TV shows and repetitive movies. There was a soundtrack featuring a harmonica, a jailbreak out of a Federal prison, gunplay galore and even some Gatling Gun action. It struck me as being old fashioned in an age where the Western had been electrified and shaken up by a work like Peckinpah’s “The Wild Bunch”. How could filmmakers fall back on all the old, reliable cliches of The Western genre and expect the audience [More]
“Chato’s Land” was a late entry in the Western film genre that had proliferated at the movie theaters for 50 years but started to fall out of favor by the 1970’s. To draw in viewers who might be lured away by other fare, some of these latter day “oaters” resorted to adding more violence and depravity. That sensibility shows up in this film, a blood soaked tale of a hastily drawn together posse of cruds who go off in pursuit of a wrongly accused Indian who kills a lawman in their town. As the misbegotten mob gets drawn deeper into his “Land”, a [More]
Certainly an interesting pairing of acting talent in this oater. Jack Nicholson plays a horse thief, who, along with his fellow gang, are systematically picked off by an eccentric, manic bounty hunter, Marlon Brando, hired by a cattle rancher whose stock has been stolen by the thieving bunch. This film is kind of a combination of genres: western and slasher. This was slasher before it existed! Halloween was still a couple years out. Members of Jack’s gang, including the great talents Harry Dean Stanton, John Ryan, Frederic Forrest, and Randy Quaid, are killed one after the other in some new graphic fashion. Yes. [More]
This movie has been playing a lot on cable TV. It is, in fact, a very fine film. Paul Newman is a man who was brought up among Native Americans in the Old West. His attempt to enter into “civilized society” meets with many harrowing encounters with man’s inhumanity to man. There are quite a few characters appearing in this film for whom enough just isn’t good enough. They want more than the what they’ve already got, no matter how sizable, and do not care who or what is forced out of the way on their quest to get the [More]
Legendary, ultra violent western from director Sam Peckinpah. A group of aging outlaws plan just one more big heist before “peacefully” riding off into the sunset. OK. That was really lame! But it’s a familiar tale of thieves taking down one more score before disappearing with the loot and presumably staying out of any more trouble. The really electrifying action takes place at the end of the film when the four man bunch takes on a Mexican stronghold of soldiers numbering in the hundreds. You will witness tons of graphic blood splattering, grenade tossing, and Peckinpah’s patented usage of slow [More]