E Dio disse a Caino... (1970)

... aka: And God Said to Cain...

... aka: Dödsjakten (The Death Hunt)

... aka: Et le vent apporta la violence (And the Wind Brought Violence)

... aka: Fury at Sundown

... aka: Hevneren (The Avenger)

... aka: Revenge at Sundown

... aka: Satan der Rache (Devil of Vengeance)

... aka: Un homme, un cheval, un fusil (A Man, a Horse, a Gun)

Directed by:

"Anthony Dawson" (Antonio Margheriti)

Former army lieutenant Gary Hamilton (Klaus Kinski) has been stuck in a prison labor camp for ten long years. After slaving away breaking rocks with a sledge hammer in a rock quarry for a decade, and trying to avoid the rattlesnakes in the process, Gary finds out he's finally be pardoned, and by the President of the United States, no less! Now it's time to settle back into normal life. Well, kind of. He's got some other stuff to take care of first. Gary stops by a saloon for a drink and refuses the bartender's offer to stick the prison with the tab. "A man must pay for everything," he solemnly states before heading out. 

Stopping by an old trader's place, Gary purchases a rifle, a horse and enough ammunition to gun down about 500 people for ten bucks, which is incidentally the same amount of money I spent on a cold, shitty hamburger earlier today. He then meets cadet Dick Acombar (Antonio Cantafora, a fine looking chap) on a stagecoach ride. Dick is about to enter his final year at West Point and has come home for a visit. He's still trying to decide what to do with his life: Enter into military service or settle down with a wife, start a family and work at his rich father's mining company. Mr. Acombar (Peter Carsten, also one of the producers) has higher aspirations for his boy and wants him to enter politics. I won't spoil anything, but I will say that Dick's woes about the future will be solved by the end of the film.

It turns out Gary was framed for stealing a fortune in gold and cash during a stagecoach robbery (and the killings associated with the theft), wrongly convicted, given a life sentence (overturned by the government, who gave him leniency and a surprise pardon for his prior military service) and now has vengeance on his mind. The evil schemer who ruined his life is none other than papa Acombar. When word gets back to him that Gary's out and planning on paying him a visit, he puts a bounty out on his head. His primary goons are the Santamaria brothers; Miguel ("Lee Burton" / Guido Lollobrigida), Francisco ("Alan Collins" / Luciano Pigozzi) and Jim (Lucio De Santis), though it seems like 99% of the whole town is willing to do his bidding.

While Gary was away, Mr. Acombar stole everything that was his, including his house, his personal belongings and his blonde, beautiful and backstabbing lover, Mary (Marcella Michelangeli), who helped frame Gary by casting doubt on his alibi. He's also essentially taken over the entire town. Anyone who opposed him fell victim to an "accident" and now most of those left are conspirators or too scared to go against him. There are a couple of exceptions, including saloon / brothel owner Rosy (María Luisa Sala), whose husband had been murdered, and Dr. Jonathan (Giuliano Raffaelli), who has known Gary since he was a child. Both are eventual allies.

The best thing going on here is the wonderfully gloomy atmosphere achieved by Margheriti and the production people, who have set the events on the evening a tornado is passing through town so we get lots of swaying, unreliable lighting and constant gusts of strong wind blowing around dust, smoke and pieces of hay. This is clearly where the director's experience with Gothic horror - he'd previously made HORROR CASTLE (1963), Castle of Blood (1964) and THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH (1964); all of those good efforts, too - is evident. So much of the movie takes place in the dark that our hero ends up riding off into the sunrise, not the sunset, at the end!

While this definitely has merit in the visuals and mood, the simplistic and predictable scripting knocks it down a notch. Almost the entire last hour is spent with Kinski lurking in the shadows, occasionally ducking into some catacombs that once served as a Native American burial ground, and shooting people, which grows repetitive and tiresome. There are no wrenches thrown into the works. No real curve balls. Just a straightforward revenge story with a little minor additional conflict thrown in to fill in the gaps. Most of the drama revolves around Acombar and his son, with the latter oblivious to his father's misdeeds but determined to find out what's going on. In this case, the apple fell very far from the tree as son Dick is kind and actually has some decency while the dad is such a bad dude he thinks nothing of gunning down a preacher in a church for refusing to help him.

Margheriti directs with an extraordinary amount of low angle shots and there are also quite a few zooms right into bright blue eyes, which seem to jump off the screen since the entire cast look like they've been slathered with bronzer prior to filming. He also manages to come up with a visually striking climactic scene, set in a burning room filled with candelabras and mirrors, which seems to have been a big influence on the finale of Argento's INFERNO (1980).

Kinski's fine as the emotionless, quiet avenger, but he's been put to better use elsewhere and this isn't one of his more memorable roles. There's no graphic violence, just a tiny bit of blood, and the only non-shooting deaths are a hanging and someone getting crushed by a church bell, a fate fittingly reserved for Euro horror vet Pigozzi. There's also a cheesy theme song called "Rocks, Blood and Sand" sung by Don Powell.

Reportedly, this is an unsanctioned remake - uncredited rip-off if you prefer! - of a movie released just two years earlier called Uno straniero a Paso Bravo / "A Stranger in Paso Bravo" (1968). Directed by Salvatore Rosso and starring Anthony Steffen, that film has identical character names and much of the same plot, though its writers are not credited here; Giovanni Addessi, who also produced the film, and Margheriti are the only two listed as writers. (For the record, I have not seen that film myself and thus cannot verify any of the plagiarism claims.)

Though a box office success in both Germany and Italy, this was never theatrically released in America. It made its VHS debut here in 1986 on the Unicorn Video label. In the UK it was released on video under the title Fury at Sundown in 1984. There have been quite a few DVD releases since then, though these are all of varying quality. Since the film is so dark, you really do need a proper print of it. That occurred in 2021 when Arrow Video finally got it out on Blu-ray in their four film set "Vengeance Trails: 4 Classic Westerns." The other titles included there are Lucio Fulci's Massacre Time (1966), Maurizio Lucidi's My Name is Pecos (1966) and Massimo Dallamano's Bandidos (1967). This set was followed by a second called "Blood Money" from the same company.

★★1/2

Knife for the Ladies (1974)

... aka: Cuchillo para damas

... aka: Jack the Ripper Goes West

... aka: Knife in the Dark, A

... aka: Lovløs dom (Outlaw)

... aka: Silent Sentence

Directed by:

Larry G. Spangler

Fusion horror westerns go back to at least the 1930s, but this peculiar cross pollination has never really become a formidable subgenre. While horror movies have almost always maintained a certain level of popularity, there's historically been an ebb-and-flow nature to the western's popularity with moviegoers. Meaning, if westerns only come out in small numbers nowadays, then horror-westerns come out in much smaller numbers than even that. Still, there are quite a few interesting and sometimes excellent films to be found here and the occasional film that hits, such as 2015's Bone Tomahawk, which I wasn't overly enthused about but a lot of other people seem to like. Interestingly, in what is considered a genre that mostly appeals to men, two of the very best horror westerns; Kathryn Bigelow's vampire film Near Dark (1987) and Antonia Bird's cannibal-themed Ravenous (1999), were directed by women. Also interestingly, a number of classic westerns which were never considered anything other than westerns are finally being recognized by film historians for their horror content decades after the fact, like the Clint Eastwood films High Plains Drifter (1973) and Pale Rider (1985).

Nearly every horror western I'm aware of has some kind of supernatural or fantastical bent, whether that be ghosts, vampires or monsters, which makes A Knife for the Ladies an anomaly itself. Set in 1882, this one's an even rarer serial killer film / whodunit / proto-slasher. While that was a cool idea in theory for 1974, the execution here is unfortunately rather ho-hum.

Three mysterious murders have rocked the once-peaceful and now-dying small town of Mescal, Arizona, which was once home to a thriving copper mine that is no more. As a result, the town has drastically reduced in population, opportunity and financial stability. The murders themselves may or may not be tied into this, especially seeing how the first victim was Travis Mescal (former NFL cornerback Peter Athas), a descendant of the town's founders who was found viciously stabbed to death. Two saloon gals, employed by the aptly named "Hooker's Saloon", soon followed. Alarmed by the recent slayings, bank president Simeon Hollyfield (John Kellogg) takes a trip to the city to recruit Detective Edward R. Burns (Jeff Cooper) to help. Burns is offered a 500 dollar reward, a recommendation and paid accommodations while in town. Measly compensation, but as Burns notes, "It's poor pay... but a rich challenge." He accepts.

Slovenly Sheriff Jarrod Colcord (Jack Elam), a "two-fisted bear of a man", isn't too happy that Hollyfield is about to bring a "fancy" detective in from the big city to do his job, so he starts slamming back whiskey shots and then organizes a torch-carrying posse of locals to go after Ramon (Phillip Avenetti), who's wrongly blamed for death #4 after a child places him at the scene of the crime earlier in the day. Saloon owner Virgil Hooker (Gene Evans) and a pair of no-good gunslingers; Lute (former Boston Bruins center Derek Sanderson) and Horace (former Oakland Raiders wide receiver Fred Biletnikoff), track Ramon down and then lynch him.

Burns arrives to a hostile reception from both Jarrod and many of the locals. He assigns Jarrod the task of finding Ramon's killers while he starts interviewing locals and snooping around. He pays a visit to the menacing Orville Ainslie (Richard Schaal), who runs the barbershop / mortuary and says things like "Dead is dead, I reckon" and "I suppose anyone's death is bad for business... except for mine." And then there's the widowed Elizabeth Mescal (Ruth Roman), mother of the first victim and now sole heir of the Mescal family dynasty. She believes the townsfolk blame her for the failure of the local mine, which has caused many to relocate elsewhere, and refuses to acknowledge the fact that her murdered son was anything less than pristine, even though he was well known around town for drinking, gambling and paying for the company of prostitutes.

All of the usual trappings of the western are here, right down to the stagecoaches, dusty town, gunfights and a heavy-handed moral getting shoved down our throats in unsubtle fashion (how they soft pedal lecture the little boy after his lies lead to a vigilante killing is more than just a little nauseating!), as are all of the usual trappings of the whodunit, most especially in the way this attempts to establish most of the central cast as suspects.

The end result is watchable, though middling. The murder scenes lack punch (and suspenseful build-up), the mid-section is a slog to get through and the film is visually flat and unimaginatively directed, but the shock finale may be worth waiting for. It's downright jarring and surprisingly perverse considering how tame the film had been up until that point! The performances here are extremely uneven, ranging from pretty good to terrible. Schaal and Roman fare best here, though the relationship that develops between Cooper and Elam's characters has its minor charms, as well. The cast also includes Diana Ewing (known to Trekkies as the memorably-attired Droxine in the 1969 Star Trek episode "The Cloud Minders") in an underdeveloped role as Elam's niece and Henry Kendrick (who also appeared in the 1988 horror western Ghost Town) as a doctor.

Settings are convincing as this was filmed at the Old Tucson movie studio and theme park, which was built in 1939, slowly added to over the years and also served as the setting for a load of other western films and TV shows like Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Rio Bravo, Three Amigos, Tombstone and Little House on the Prairie. Knife was one of over 400 productions shot there over the years. Many of the buildings and much of the movie memorabilia housed at Old Tucson was lost in a 1995 fire, which was rumored to have been started by a disgruntled former employee out for revenge. Attempts to rebuild what was lost were unsuccessful and it finally closed down for good in 2020.

Director Spangler also made The Soul of Nigger Charlie, a blaxploitation western starring Fred Williamson that was also filmed at Old Tucson, The Last Rebel, yet another western and a vehicle for football star Joe Namath (Spangler must have had a thing for pro athletes or something) and, for a change of pace, the hardcore porn film The Life and Times of the Happy Hooker. Co-writer Seton I. Miller had won an Oscar for co-scripting Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941).

This received VHS releases in Australia (Video Classics), Spain (Continental Home Video), Sweden (Svenska Walthers Video) and the UK (Iver Film Services), though I'm not aware of any U.S. home video releases until a TV edit (reduced down to just 51 minutes and re-titled Jack the Ripper Goes West) popped up on some of those cheap budget DVD packs in the early 2000s. In 2018, this finally received an uncut (87 minute) Blu-ray release from Code Red.

★★