Guns & Guts (english)

Original Spanish title: Las Viboras cambian de piel

A Mexican western by one of the most prolific film makers of the country, Rene Cardona Jr.  son of director Rene Cardona Sr., father of actor/director Rene Cardona III. The family was pretty consistent as far as name giving and choice of profession are concerned. It’s quite a bizarre movie, mixing  spaghetti western elements with a large scale bloodbath à la Peckinpah, spicing things up with a considerable dose of (oh dear) nudity.

Two men, an escaped convict and a cuckold husband, are on the trail of the man who has ruined their lives. Once a bandit, the nasty piece of work has become the sheriff of Santa Fé and is now living in a fortified monastery, surrounded by an army of gunmen. Funny thing is that both hunters are sturdily built, heavily bearded men who are each others spitting image (luckily, one of the two wears a Clint Eastwood poncho-like garment). They hire a third person, a good-looking, well-dressed pistolero, who lives among prostitutes. Once he nearly fell in love with a ‘normal’ woman, a situation that made him feel so miserable that he decided to stick to prostitutes for the rest of his life. In a funny voice over he describes his visions of spending the rest of his days on a remote ranch with his large collection of girls.

Being European, I’m not very familiar with Mexi-westerns. If they were released at all on the old continent, they got lost in the flood of spaghetti westerns and probably weren’t even identified as Mexican westerns. I’d say this is an enjoyable example of the subgenre. There’s a lot of talk and until the grand finale, there’s a certain lack of excitement, but the film is often (unintentionally?) funny and the scarce moments of gunplay are well-executed, in a style that owns quite a lot to (who else?) Leone. One of the highlights is a well-conceived variation on a Leonesque duel – a slow build-up resulting in a sudden eruption of violence, the pistolero drawing the attention to his right hand, eventually drawing his gun with his left. What follows, offers a foretaste of the kind of bloodletting you might expect during the grand finale. The victim is shot in the throat and slowly, very slowly falls to the ground, blood gushing from the wound.

The finale, the attack on the stronghold, is a large-scale blood ballet, aping the final shootout of Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch, featuring machine guns and men falling – aaaargggh – from great heights in super slow motion, blood gushing in geysers from their multiple bullet wounds. The film’s eroticism is of a particularly naughty kind. The highlight is a game of strip poker involving our pistolero and three saloon girls, resulting in an draw: the women topless, the man with his trousers on his ankles. (Scherpschutter)

Congrats Furious Cinema and Chris Casey (I know he likes Mexican westerns)

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Aanraders in overeenkomstige genres, volgens Boobytrap:
- The man who shot Liberty Valence (western / drama : 8)
- Colorado Territory (western : 8)
- True Grit (2010) (western / drama : 8)
- Stagecoach (western / drama : 8)
- A Time for Killing (western : 7)

Hoe beoordeelt Boobytrap categorie western eigenlijk? 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10