Rated: M
Running Time: 115 Minutes
Year: 1967
Boobs: Zero
One Sentence: Kill Bill Vol. 0
In my attempt to expand my horizons with movies we are going to look at Death Rides A Horse. A 1967 Spaghetti Western that seems to be quite famous in film circles. We heard that it was the inspiration for many other Spaghetti Westerns that came out after this, however I am not sure if that is true. What is very apparent however, is that there are scenes from Kill Bill, that were taken directly from this movie, also dialog. It has a very Kill Bill feel to it, you just know this movie was where a lot of the ideas came from.
Death Rides A Horse is a revenge tale, that I thought worked despite it's many flaws. The movie was made in 1967, yet, struggled with extremely poor film quality, audio and music. There were movies being made at this time, that were far superior in quality. This movie really fails to deliver on all of these fundamental points. The music was at times so distracting that I wanted to mute the movie. It was poorly recorded, high pitched and mixed way to loud. Then they would lay horribly canned sound effects on top of the music for the horses, train, or bullets. The DVD I was watching had film grain on it. They never got a good print to convert to DVD. It made it feel a little bit more old school and real, but I do not think this is something that should be on a DVD.
Despite all these issues, I thought the movie, was a cool, manly revenge western. The 2 main characters, were tough, smart, and knew how to shoot their guns. They had very little dialog, but when they spoke, it had fire and flare, and not a single word was a waste. I had to get into a mind set of a movie from the past, but when I allowed that to happen. Death Rides A Horse became what I guess everyone that loves these types of movies was talking about. It gave me an appreciation of a genre of films I have never seen and I am excited for my next one. If you can handle the low quality of the DVD, but like westerns, then I suggest renting Death Rides A Horse.
