Can you have tearjerker emotional moments AND cannibalism and torture all in the same movie? Italian nutjob Lucio Fulci doesn’t see why not. With little grace, he crams it all into this offbeat spaghetti western. Fulci is a rough filmmaker. He leans here on the same sudden camera zooms and gory shocks that he’d later use and abuse in his infamous horror movies. He’s never subtle, yet somehow achieves real cinematic dreaminess in his savagery. A Fulci film does not take place in this world. All rules are off. A pregnant woman can collapse from labor pains in the middle of the sun-scorched desert and then have her baby delivered in the nearest town where it’s snowing! Makes sense to me.
The pace has its languid moments, but the story is simple stuff. Four jailbirds cut loose by a corrupt lawman (who brings order to his town via a gang of killers in potato sack masks) travel out into the untamed plains and run into a crazy-fuck scavenger sadist named Chaco (Tomas Milian), who specializes in complicated rope knots, skin-flaying, crotch-stomping, rape and slow deaths. He seems like the big villain here, at first… and then he disappears and the film puts its focus on a dramatic childbirth of all things.
When Chaco returns, he’s not as threatening as before because by then we realize that the real villain of this film is FATE. Everyone here is doomed. The devoutly religious, the reformed sinner and the evil son of a bitch all get cut down equally hard in God’s country. The newborn baby boy provides a slight hopeful glimmer, but you also feel a little bad for him, for there is no future in Lucio Fulci’s Old West.