The Fat Black Pussycat (1963)

The Fat Black Pussycat belongs to an intriguing sub-genre - beatnik murder mysteries/crime thrillers. Other movies in this tiny sub-genre include The Moving Finger (1963) and The Beat Generation (1959).

A detective, Dave Walsh, is assigned to a murder case. The victim, a young woman, was part of the beatnik subculture and Dave finds himself having to enter what is to him a very strange world. He’s not really hip to it at all.

There’s a connection to a beatnik hangout, The Fat Black Pussycat Cafe. That’s where Dave’s investigation starts.

There’s another murder. And the detective’s briefcase gets stolen. That doesn’t seem like a big deal but we have seen someone doing something very suspicious indeed to that briefcase.

He doesn’t make much headway with the beatniks. They don’t like squares and they don’t like cops and he falls into both those categories. He does have hopes of getting some information from a pretty lady anthropologist named Janet. She lives down the hallway from the apartment in which a crazy beatnik party has been going on. She’s conducting an anthropological study of the beatniks.

It becomes apparent that there’s a serial killer on the loose. The killer is obviously a psycho which is bad enough but he may be a beatnik as well which makes him even more dangerous.

So far it sounds like a routine serial killer movie but there are some nicely bizarre touches. A black cat (an actual cat of the feline variety) keeps turning up at the crime scenes. A psychiatrist at New York State University has a theory - the cat is picking up the brain waves of the psycho killer.

So you get half-baked psychiatry and half-baked paranormal phenomena - a winning combination in my book.

The murders continue. This movie has a remarkably high body count. And the murders are quite bloody by the standards of 1963.

These beatnik movies are interesting because they were all made within a fairly narrow timeframe. By 1963 the beatnik subculture was about to be swept away by new youth subcultures. Swinging London was already well underway. The Mods had started to appear in England. The Beatles had their first number one hit in 1963. The Flower Children would soon make their appearance. Which makes the short-lived beatnik moral panic rather amusing.

Given the production history of this movie it is of course quite likely that the original version was shot somewhat earlier than 1963.

Harold Lea wrote and directed this film and it seems that it marked both the beginning and the end of his film-making career.

This movie was apparently very extensively and radically revised and re-edited and with lots of extra footage shot to replace existing scenes. This was probably done without any input from the film’s original director. The Something Weird DVD includes the many deleted scenes. It’s obvious that the original version of The Fat Black Pussycat was an entirely different movie. And the identity of the murderer was changed. It’s not hard to see why the changes were made. The deleted scenes include some very feeble comedy. I believe that the paranormal stuff involving the cat was among the material that was added, and that’s the element that gives the movie its weird interesting vibe.

There’s no nudity, apart from the opening credits sequence. There’s some sex but it’s so incredibly tame that those scenes hardly qualify as sex scenes.

The Fat Black Pussycat is an oddity but I like oddball movies. And I like beatnik movies. If you don’t set your expectations too high it’s quite a fun movie. Recommended.

This movie is part of a Something Weird DVD double-header, paired with The Black Cat (1966). The Fat Black Pussycat gets a very decent transfer. As usual with these Something Weird double-headers you get some equally oddball extras including a truly bizarre cat-themed burlesque routine.

Eleven Days, Eleven Nights (1987)

Eleven Days, Eleven Nights is an obvious Italian attempt to cash in on the success of the 1986 Hollywood hit 9½ Weeks. With Joe D’Amato directing you expect plenty of sleaze but that’s not quite what you get.

The setting is New Orleans (the movie is clearly aimed at the American market).

The premise is that Sarah Asproon (Jessica Moore) is writing a book about her first hundred lovers but poor Sarah has only managed to collect ninety-nine so far. She fixes that problem quickly and efficiently by seducing a total stranger on a ferryboat. The total stranger is young architect Michael (Joshua McDonald) and he thinks all his Christmases have come at once.

Sarah heads off happily to her publisher to tell her she has now hit her target of 100 but her publisher isn’t satisfied. Her publisher thinks that the hundredth lover should be a bit more memorable than an anonymous coupling on a ferry. She suggests that Sarah should find Michael and at least have a brief fling with him. Sarah does so and offers Michael eleven nights of sexual fun and games before his marriage.

Michael thinks it’s a great idea. He’s getting married to a sweet girl named Helen in eleven days’ time and the idea of spending those eleven nights having hot steamy sex with Sarah really appeals to him.

What Michael doesn’t know is that Sarah is a bit kinky. Michael has never done anything kinky before and he’s a bit bewildered. He’s in over his head.

To say Sarah is kinky is an oversimplification. She likes playing games. She likes playing sex games. Sarah’s games always seem to involve humiliating Michael but although he is freaked out by her he can’t keep away from her. She’s just so hot.

His fiancée Helen starts to get the feeling that he’s lost interest in her. Which he has. Nice girl Helen can’t really compete with sexy bad girl Sarah. Helen is perhaps a bit too sweet. She doesn’t drive him crazy with desire the way Sarah does.

Sarah’s games are a little bit cruel but not overly so and she assumes that since this is his last fling before marriage Michael probably won’t mind if things get a bit wild. And Sarah is totally honest with him right from the start. She’s offering him eleven nights of hot no-strings-attached sex. It’s not as if she’s promising him love and commitment and home-baked cookies.

Michael isn’t cut out for this sort of thing. He thinks he is but he isn’t. He’s a guy who should just marry a girl-next-door type like Helen and settle into cosy domesticity. He starts to get all mopey and miserable.

It’s hard to like Michael. He’s pathetic, and he’s a hypocrite. The fact that Joshua McDonald is a very poor actor doesn’t help.

Michael is not just a creep, he’s incredibly dumb. He really thinks he can spend every night having wild sex with Miss Kinky Boots and that Helen won’t realise what’s happening. In fact of course there’s not a woman in the world who wouldn’t be able to figure out what’s going on. When the man she’s about to marry suddenly isn’t interested in touching her it’s a pretty fair bet he’s found another woman.

Sarah is more sympathetic because she’s honest and if Michael can’t handle the situation it’s not like she’s forcing him to keep coming back for more.

Jessica Moore (whose real name is Luciana Ottaviani) gives a pretty solid performance. She is certainly sexy and uninhibited.

Look out for Laura Gemser in a minor role as Sarah’s publisher.

It’s 9½ Weeks but with the woman calling the shots.

How you react to this film (and to the ending) depends entirely on how you react to Michael and Sarah. It depends on whether you buy the idea that Michael is an innocent victim who has been led astray by a femme fatale. Personally I don’t buy that idea at all. Sarah has been totally honest with him and she has tried to keep her side of the bargain.

And it depends a lot on whether you regard Sarah as a femme fatale. I don’t really see her that way. She loves playing erotic games but she really has no intention of hurting anyone. Maybe she’s naïve in thinking that nobody will get hurt, but she is not a woman who actually enjoys hurting people. And while she likes to play around with dominance-submission games she’s not a genuine dominatrix. She’s just being playful. The fact that people do end up getting hurt is in some ways accidental. Sex is always a potentially dangerous game and there’s no way to be certain you can avoid emotional entanglements.

There’s plenty of nudity and sex and while it’s softcore it’s fairly explicit softcore, and there are kinky sex games, but this movie really doesn’t feel all that sleazy. It gives the impression that D’Amato was trying to do what Emmanuelle had done back in the 70s - make a sex movie aimed to a large extent at women and couples. There had been some American movies in the 80s that had aimed for mainstream success with steamy eroticism. Whether that market really was still viable is perhaps debatable. 9½ Weeks had done poorly on initial release but had made a mint through video rentals and since Eleven Days, Eleven Nights was presumably aimed mainly at the video market it was probably reasonable to assume that that market did still exist. The idea that women enjoy sex movies if they’re done in a classy way is pretty sound. And Eleven Days, Eleven Nights was commercially very successful.

Eleven Days, Eleven Nights is a lot more entertaining than 9½ Weeks. Highly recommended if classy well-made erotica is your thing.

The 88 Films Blu-Ray offers a very good transfer and an audio commentary by Troy Howarth.

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 (1972)

Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, released by Toei in 1972, was the second of the Female Prisoner Scorpion movies. These fit into the very successful Japanese pinky violence genre but are also women-in-prison movies. They do however have a flavour of their own that distinguishes them sharply from other women-in-prison movies.

The extraordinary Meiko Kaji returns for this second outing.

Nami Matsushima (Meiko Kaji), nicknamed Matsu the Scorpion, is a prisoner in a maximum-security women’s prison. She is considered so dangerous that she is kept in solitary confinement in a cell which is in fact merely a hole in the ground. Just to make sure she is kept chained. The Warden also has a personal grudge against her.

What makes Matsu so dangerous is her patience. She is prepared to wait a very long time for her revenge. She often appears so passive that one might think she has lapsed into catatonia. But all the while Matsu watches and waits. Sooner or later her enemies will make a mistake. If you wait long enough everybody will eventually make a mistake. When that happens Matsu strikes, just like a scorpion.

Of course Matsu escapes, along with six other women prisoners. They find themselves in a weird almost post-apocalyptic landscape. They find refuge in a village buried beneath volcanic ash.

They are being hunted, but these women are very dangerous prey.

What makes this movie so interesting is that it abandons any pretence at realism. This is more like a folk tale. It has some of the flavour that you get in Japanese stories of the supernatural. There are hints of the supernatural, or at least hints that we are in a world that is not the world of everyday reality. Matsu is like a figure from a story of ghosts, demons and monsters.

This feeling is increased by some extremely interesting choices by director Shun'ya Itô. He directed the first movie in this series but this second film is very very different. The colour palette he uses is all blues and greys. This has now becomes one of the most tiresome of all cinematic clichés but in 1972 it was fresh and original. It emphasises the feeling that we are in a kind of fairy tale/folk tale world.

He uses lots of disturbing camera angles, freeze frames and moments of total silence. Matsu often appears as if she is in the frame, but perhaps in another plane of existence, cut off from ordinary reality. At times we wonder if she is a woman or a ghost.

He uses colour boldly. He will suddenly switch from blues and greys into an explosion of reds.

This is an incredibly brutal movie. The brutality is made slightly more bearable by that subtle feeling of unreality. It’s worth mentioning that while most of the male characters are vicious sadists the women in this movie are just as vicious.

There is a temptation to approach this movie in feminist terms but while it might be valid I don’t think that’s a rewarding approach in this case. When Japanese movies in the 70s dabbled in politics they invariably did so in excruciatingly obvious and heavy-handed ways. When this movie gets into political territory it loses direction badly. Fortunately soon afterwards it make another much stranger and more interesting detour, into the world of dream and the unconscious.

Meiko Kaji is incredibly intense, even by Meiko Kaji standards. She does not get a single line in the movie until very close to the end and she speaks a total of half a dozen words. Apart from that the only time we hear her voice is when she sings the movie’s theme song.This all adds weight to the suspicion that she is not really of this world. Perhaps she was once a woman but is now something else.

You can see this as a female revenge movie but it’s more complicated than most such movies. If you look at other female revenge movies made at that time, such as the excellent Hannie Caulder (1971) or Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1974), they’re quite straightforward. They’re about women seeking vengeance on men who have done them great wrongs. But Matsu (in both the first two Female Prisoner films) takes her revenge on women who have wronged her as well as men. And in Female Prisoner Scorpion: Jailhouse 41 the lines between good and evil are not always clear-cut. Is Matsu a woman seeking righteous vengeance or some kind of avenging angel or even an avenging demon?

We also do have to consider the possibility that Matsu is in fact totally insane.

This is a bizarre movie, a blend of surrealist dreamscapes and pop art and exploitation. It has no right to work but it does work. And there are plenty of wild crazy visual flourishes. Highly recommended if you’re not afraid of the bizarre.

Arrow have released all four Female Prisoner Scorpion movies in a Blu-Ray set.


I’ve also reviewed the first Female Prisoner Scorpion movie, Female Prisoner #701: Scorpion.

Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989)

Sinbad of the Seven Seas is a 1989 Cannon Films adventure fantasy with an interesting history. It was originally a Luigi Cozzi project. Cannon then decided it would be cool to do a series instead. Cozzi dropped out and Enzo G. Castellari came in as director. Cannon took a look at the huge amount of footage that Castellari had shot and decided it was totally unreleasable. Cozzi was brought back to try to rescue something from the disaster.

With those things in mind you’d expect this movie to be a trainwreck. In fact it’s magnificent.

Cozzi’s first step was to add a prologue which tells us that this is a story told by a mother to her little girl. That’s perfectly appropriate for an Arabian Nights tale since the Thousand and One Nights had a similar framing story, the tales being stories told by Scheherazade to the king.

The plot is stock standard stuff. The city of Basra is a joyous place ruled over by a kind and wise caliph until an evil wizard named Jaffar (John Steiner) casts a spell that turns the city into a cauldron of evil and misery. Jaffar also intends to force the caliph’s beautiful daughter Princess Alina (Alessandra Martines) to marry him. Alina is currently engaged to a prince named Ali who is a member of Sinbad’s crew.

Sinbad is off adventuring when all this happens. He is shocked and dismayed when he returns to Basra.

Naturally he is determined to thwart Jaffar’s plans but the problem is that Jaffar has used his magic to scatter the sacred jewels of Basra to the four corners of the Earth. Only the sacred jewels can restore peace, sanity and happiness to Basra. Sinbad and his brave crew set off to retrieve the jewels. That’s all there is to the plot.

What follows is a series of crazed action set-pieces as Sinbad and his men battle assorted monsters, ghostly knights and wicked sexy amazons. The amazons are particularly dangerous - their main weapon is seduction.

This is obviously not an expensive movie but it looks wonderful. Jaffar’s lair looks more like a mad scientist’s laboratory from a 1930s movie serial than a wizard’s haunt but that just adds more fun and craziness.

The very imaginative production design looks strange and exotic, as it should. There’s no real attempt to maintain the Arabian Nights look. The movie is like a mashup of elements from multiple fairy tales and adventure stories from lots of different historical periods and settings with a few science fiction elements thrown in as well. Anything that seems like it might be fun gets thrown into the mix. Vikings are cool, so let’s have a Viking in the movie. Mediæval knights are cool so we’ll have some of those as well. Mad scientists are fun so let’s make the villain a combination of a mad scientist and a sorcerer.

Some of the effects are cheesy but mostly the effects are clever, inspired and pretty convincing. The monsters are varied and they look terrific. The scenes with the ghostly knights are superb. The knights are just empty suits of armour but they’re very creepy.

All the action scenes are done with style and imagination.

The pacing doesn’t let up. The plot is so simple that there’s no need to waste time with boring exposition. The movie rushes from one frenetic action sequence to another. We know that Ali and Alina are in love so there’s no need for endless romantic buildups. When Sinbad encounters a crazy good wizard with a beautiful daughter we know that she and Sinbad will fall for each other so there’s no need to slow things down while they figure that out.

Muscle-bound bodybuilder Lou Ferrigno had starred in Cozzi’s wild insane Hercules movies. He makes a more than adequate hero. John Steiner chews every piece of scenery he can get his hands on. The actors playing Sinbad’s crew (which includes a dwarf, a Viking and a samurai) put everything into their performances. Alessandra Martines doesn’t have to do much more than look beautiful and frightened which she manages to do quite successfully. The amazon queen is suitably seductive.

Jaffar is an amusing villain. He’s very evil but very cowardly.

The violence is all cartoonish without any gore. There’s no nudity, there are no sex scenes. This is a fairy tale told to a kid.

Sinbad of the Seven Seas makes very little sense but it’s crazy fun from start to finish. Highly recommended.

The 101 Films DVD has no extras apart from the trailer but the transfer is excellent.

I’ve also reviewed Cozzi’s Hercules (1983) and Starcrash (1978). They’re both fabulous movies.

Good Little Girls (1971)

Jean-Claude Roy’s Good Little Girls was based on the 1858 novel Les petites filles modèles (which translates into English as Good Little Girls) by the Countess of Ségur. The novel has not just been updated to the 1970s it’s been turned into a sex comedy. Which, surprisingly enough, works extremely well.

The Comtesse de Fleurville (Michèle Girardon) makes a successful living as a television sex therapist and as you might expect she has a fairly free-wheeling attitude to sex. She has two daughters, Madeleine (Jessica Dorn) and Camille (Marie-Georges Pascal). They’re keen to emulate their mother’s sexual adventurousness.

A car accident brings Madame de Rosbourg (Bella Darvi) and her daughter Marguerite (Cathy Reghin) into their lives. The two newcomers move into the Comtesse de Fleurville’s spacious chateau.

There are now three girls but there will soon be a fourth. The de Fleurvilles’ neighbour Madame Fichini was going to send her daughter Sophie (Sylvie Lafontaine) off to boarding school but she is persuaded to allow Sophie to move in with the de Fleurvilles.

The four girls are all sex-mad and obsessed with the pursuit of boys, especially the handsome François. Meanwhile the family doctor, Dr. Luçon (François Guérin), is attending to the sexual needs of the comtesse and Madame de Rosbourg and to the equally voracious sexual needs of the maid Elisa as well. The poor man is on the verge of exhaustion.

We’re surprised when the rather butch Madame Fichini joins the parade of women eager to be seduced by the doctor. We had the impression that men were probably not of interest to her and that she was more interested in finding her way into the Comtesse de Fleurville’s bed.

Madame Fichini is a firm believer in strict discipline and Sophie’s back shows evidence of that. But Sophie seems to share her mother’s belief in discipline.

The women hear that in the nearby woods there is a workman’s camp and that the workmen have been stuck there for months without women. They are now sex-crazed and no woman can safely enter the woods. Naturally two of the girls immediately head for the woods. They do encounter a young man there but much to their disappointment it turns out that his intentions are entirely honourable. His name is Julien and he’s part of a religious group and he’s into spirituality rather than carnal pleasures.

Julien gets invited to a party at the de Fleurville chateau. The girls have not given up hope that they can convert him to the pleasures of the flesh.

There’s not much more than that to the plot but it’s executed with a certain amount of style.

I’ve come to rather enjoy the sex comedies of the 70s. It’s fascinating to see how they differ from country to country. The British sex comedies aimed for good-natured schoolboy naughtiness. The Italians aimed for style and sophistication. The Japanese went for inspired craziness. French sex comedies on the other hand are somewhat whimsical and oddball.

Good Little Girls is witty and charming and it’s cheerful lighthearted fun. There is nothing approaching graphic sex and while there’s plenty of nudity it’s limited to topless scenes and the occasional bare bottom. There’s a certain likeable innocence to this movie. The girls are boy-crazy but they’re really very nice girls.

Nucleus Films released this one on DVD on their aptly-named Naughty label. The transfer is acceptable but clearly there’s been no attempt at a full restoration. For which they can hardly be blamed since it would be unlikely to be financially viable for such a niche film. It’s in French with English subtitles.

Jean-Claude Roy made rather a lot of movies and the ones I’ve seen have been quite interesting with a certain distinctive flavour. I’ve reviewed several of his movies. I highly recommend the quirky Justine’s Hot Nights (1976). Éducation Anglaise (1983) is also quite good as is Scandalous Photos (1979) which has the advantage of starring the always wonderful Brigitte Lahaie. In fact Miss Lahaie makes an appearance in Éducation Anglaise as well.

Good Little Girls is tame but classy erotica and it’s highly recommended.

Crazy Desires of a Murderer (1977)

Crazy Desires of a Murderer (I vizi morbosi di una governante) was released in 1977 making it a fairly late entry in the giallo cycle. It’s included in Vinegar Syndrome’s Forgotten Gialli Volume 3 Blu-Ray boxed set and it certainly qualifies as a forgotten giallo.

Filippo Walter Ratti’s directing career had begun way back in 1946, with Crazy Desires of a Murderer being his last directing assignment. Ratti also qualifies as a forgotten director.

Ileana (Isabelle Marchall) is a young bubbly blonde who has just arrived back in Italy after an extended holiday in the Far East. She sets off for her home, her home being a castle. The castle belongs to her aged father, the Baron De Chablais. Ileana arrives at the castle with a group of friends in tow. She’s picked them up on her travels. Her daddy is not pleased. The old baron’s memory is failing but he does remember that he hates having guests.

What Ileana doesn’t know is that one of her friends has been using her as a drugs courier.

The baron is very rich. He’s a collector of Asian art and antiquities and his collection is worth a fortune. The De Chablais clan has the kinds of family secrets that you expect in a family that lives in a gothic castle.

The old baron had had a very young Thai wife. She died very young some years earlier, leaving a son. Something traumatic happened before she died, an event that left the son totally insane. No-one seems to know where the son is. He is assumed to be confined in an asylum somewhere. The viewer however knows that the son is still alive, kept locked up in a dungeon. The son, Leandro, amuses himself with his hobby - taxidermy.

So far the movie seems just as likely to turn out to belong to the gothic horror genre as the giallo genre, but it is a giallo.

There are two servants, Berta and Hans. Among his other duties Hans is responsible for keeping Leandro safely locked up.

After a night of booze, sex and erotic charades (yes really) the young people turn in for the night. One of them will not live to see the morning. It’s a shocking and brutal murder.

Anyone in the castle could have committed the murder. There are plenty of plausible motives. There is a fabulously valuable emerald that belonged to the baron’s late wife. That would be worth killing for. There are plenty of sexual intrigues that could lead to jealousies that could in turn lead to murder. The servants seem to be as debauched and sleazy as the guests. Even they could be suspects. The middle-aged family doctor has his secrets as well so he can’t be ignored as a suspect. The police commissario (Corrado Gaipa) is elderly and crippled but he’s no fool. He is however baffled. He knows there are a lot of secrets he needs to uncover if he hopes to catch the killer.

The acting is quite competent. Filippo Walter Ratti also proves to be competent as a director. Ambrogio Molteni’s screenplay contains a few twists and plenty of red herrings.

There’s not much gore but there are a couple of gruesome scenes involving eyeballs. One of those scenes is very gruesome indeed.

There are quite a few topless scenes and sex scenes but overall it’s fairly tame for 1977 (some sources suggest the movie may have been made a few years earlier).

Crazy Desires of a Murderer is a fairly routine giallo with fewer murders than you might expect. There’s really only one spectacular killing and it’s the aftermath that is shocking rather than the murder itself.

Vinegar Syndrome’s Blu-Ray (from their Forgotten Gialli Volume 3 boxed set) provides an excellent 16:9 enhanced transfer. This set also includes Autopsy (1975) and Murder Mansion (1972). The latter is well worth seeing.

Crazy Desires of a Murderer is apparently still not available uncut in the UK but Vinegar Syndrome’s release is the full uncut version.

Where this movie does score is in the creepy scenes set in the castle dungeons and the atmosphere of decadence (a common enough feature of the giallo genre). Overall Crazy Desires of a Murderer is reasonably entertaining and it’s recommended.

The Quick and the Dead (1995)

Sam Raimi's The Quick and the Dead (1995) is a western with a definite spaghetti western vibe.

A Mysterious Stranger rides into town. A gunslinger who doesn’t say very much and mostly gives the impression of being tortured and dangerous. But the twist is, the gunslinger is a girl! Since she doesn’t talk much you could call her The Woman With No Name (although eventually we discover that her name is Ellen). The fact that the gunslinger is female and is played by Sharon Stone who was, in the wake of Basic Instinct, briefly a very big star was the movie’s main selling point. In fact, its only real selling point. The producers figured that was enough but they were wrong and the movie performed poorly at the box office.

There are lots of gunslingers in town (the town is called Redemption). They’re there for a gunfighting competition organised by John Herod (Gene Hackman), a slimy individual who runs the town. The competition will be a series of gunfights with the last man left alive walking off with a huge cash prize.

The Woman With No Name has, naturally, a secret. She has come to Redemption for revenge. She wants revenge for something that happened many years earlier. At the time she was just a little girl so of course the man she wants to kill doesn’t recognise her. She enters the competition.

The only other notable contestants are the Kid, played by Leonardo DiCaprio (who looks about twelve years old although he was twenty at the time), and Cort (Russell Crowe).

Cort doesn’t want to be there. He was once a killer and an outlaw but he got religion and became a preacher. He doesn’t believe in killing any more. Herod intends to force him to fight. It’s not clear if Herod wants Cort dead or just humiliated.

There are about sixteen gunslingers in the competition but we know that the only ones likely to survive long enough to make it to the movie’s inevitable final showdown are the ones played by top-billed cast members. Which means Sharon Stone, Gene Hackman and Russell Crowe. The others, played by supporting actors, are just there to get gunned down one by one which means that most of the movie’s interminable series of gunfights generate no suspense whatsoever. Crucially, we have no reason to care what happens to these guys. We just want them to get killed off as quickly as possible so we can get to the important climactic gunfights.

That’s the movie’s single biggest problem. It’s too long and there are too many gunfights and it gets repetitive. It lessens the impact of the gunfights that really matter, the ones involving the movie’s stars.

Cort is of course forced to fight. Ellen isn’t interested in winning the competition but she will have to fight as well. Eventually only four gunslingers are left alive and none of them have any interest in winning the money. They have other motivations.

I’ve never been the biggest Gene Hackman fan but he’s OK here. Herod is of course just a stereotypical western sinister bad guy. He’s a bit too much of an evil comic-book super-villain which means the final confrontations become simplistic good vs evil battles.

I don’t think I’ve seen more than one or two of Leonardo DiCaprio’s movies so I have no feelings one way or the other about him as an actor. He’s adequate here in a not very interesting rôle.

I’ve only seen a handful of Russell Crowe’s movies but I thought he was superb in Master and Commander. The Quick and the Dead was his first Hollywood movie. He has the most interesting part and gets to do some real acting and he’s very impressive.

Sharon Stone (whom I loved in Basic Instinct and Total Recall) spends a lot of time brooding. The Quick and the Dead really did nothing for her career. On the plus side there is some attempt to give her character some complexity. Unlike the other gunfighters she is not a natural killer. She is repelled by killing but her desire for revenge compels her to kill. She doesn’t like what it is doing to her. This inner conflict is the movie’s biggest strength and it’s handled reasonably well.

Another problem is that the central premise is just a little bit silly and far-fetched. OK, there’s a big cash prize but realistically why would any gunfighter enter a competition in which his chances of being killed are ridiculously high?

The look of the film is an uneasy mix of grunginess and cartoonish exaggeration.

Lady gunfighter movies were nothing new. Raquel Welch had made such a movie, Hannie Caulder, way back in 1972. Hannie Caulder is also a revenge western and it also dealt with the consequences for a woman of becoming a killer. Hannie Caulder is a much more successful and thought-provoking movie than The Quick and the Dead and in my view Raquel Welch’s performance is slightly more impressive than Sharon Stone’s. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with Stone’s performance but Welch was absolutely superb in Hannie Caulder.

It’s interesting that in the same year this big-budget major-studio Girls With Guns western was made another Girls With Guns western appeared, Jim Wynorski’s ultra low budget Hard Bounty. Hard Bounty has its problems as well but it’s more interesting and more fun than The Quick and the Dead.

This movie is by no means a total loss. The climactic showdowns, when we finally get to them, are tense and well-staged with a few surprises. The Quick and the Dead is worth a look but don’t set your expectations too high.