Rent Acquasanta Joe (1971)

Stale Spaghetti - Acquasanta Joe review by Count Otto Black

As with so many post-sixties spaghetti westerns, tracking down the obscure ones turns out not to be worth the effort. And judging by the credits, this one seems to be more German than Italian, which automatically decreases the chances of it being any good. Absolutely nobody in this film can act at all, and dubbing even more horrendous than usual doesn't exactly help. The "hero" thinks he's a second-rate Clint Eastwood, but in truth he's a third-rate Chuck Norris, minus that distinguished thespian's fine acting skills.

Apart from the shortcomings in the acting department - not something I'd normally criticize a spaghetti western for, but you need at least one good actor in a central role to cover up the shortcomings of all those bit-players and extras, and this film has absolutely nobody who even halfway resembles a star - it's flatly directed, and painfully cheap. At no point are we shown any exterior shots of anything other than uninhabited wilderness, so I guess they couldn't even afford to hire one of the western frontier town sets that had already been built in Spain for other spaghetti westerns, let alone build one of their own.

Tonally it's all over the place, veering from cartoonish slapstick to unpleasant death more or less at random, accompanied by often painfully intrusive music ranging from the usual Ennio Morricone knockoffs to wildly inappropriate heavy rock to tell us what the mood of the scene is supposed to be, since the actors certainly aren't capable of conveying something that subtle.

And as an action movie, it's extremely short on action. There's a very brief and very one-sided gunfight near the beginning (the only time our gunslinging hero actually uses a gun), but apart from that, there's only a tedious and poorly-directed massacre, and a showdown which has to go of its way to have the main characters repeatedly run out of ammunition in order to last long enough to at least pretend to be The Big Action Setpiece that justifies the whole film. The weapon the bad guy ends up being forced to use is so ridiculous that you feel kinda sorry for him. As for the plot, there isn't one. People randomly scheme against each other for constantly-changing reasons, most of them relating to things that happened before the film started because they're too expensive to show us.

On the plus side, both characters who threaten to become the dreaded Odious Comic Relief are mercilessly killed before they've had a chance to become all that irritating. But that's nowhere near enough. Don't bother.