How sad is this?

best movie i've ever seen.

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a fun movie but certainly doesn't deserve the high praise it's getting in a lot of these reviews. About all it has going for it is Lee Van Cleef and he is mostly wasted. Lacks all the finesse and most of the originality of even many of the other Leone rip-offs.P.S. If you are a Mexican village under the evil domination of Bad Hombres and Lee Van Cleef arrives and promises to help out, your village elders might want to view this movie before accepting his help.

Yeah! Who'll be the first to hit the ground indeed! Another good one from a genre Italians excelled at. This one starts with a kid witnessing the murder and rape of his family in a botched robbery while taking note of the killer's tattooes, jewellery etc before being rescued by a mystery stranger type. It's your standard weekday in the wild west.Fifteen years later, he's now a grown up sharp shooter (played by a young looking John Philip Law from the unintentionally hilarious Eyes Behind the Walls and the cheesetastic Night Train to Terror). John's all about the vengeance and spends his days at the ranch shooting things and staring at his families grave and just getting madder and madder and madder.Meanwhile, at a rock busting prison, Ryan (played by Lee Van Cleef, of Sabato Vs Herbie, Dinner with Sabato and The Cook, the Thief, his wife and Sabato) is being released from prison after being framed by somebody or other, and wouldn't you know that the moment Ryan drops into town two goons with the same spurs as the guys who wasted J P Law's family turn up and get plugged by Ryan.You know the drill, these guys kind of hook up in a standoffish manly way while Ryan tries to get to his old gang and extort money from them before the young kid can waste them in revenge for his family. The main bad guy is Luigi Pistilli (of Bay of Blood and The Eerie Midnight Horror Show), so that's a good choice there. Cue loads of shootouts, double crosses, and a fairly atmospheric climatic shootout in a dust storm.Throw in a catchy Ennio Morricone soundtrack, such weird sights as John P Law buried up to his head in the sand and force fed salt, and you've got a good old mean spirited Spaghetti Western you should track down.Alternatively, you could wait until Tarantino steals all the good bits of the film, casts Samuel L Jackson, and calls it something kind of like Death Rides a Cutthroat or The Great Big Duel of Cemetery (who they also call Hallelujah, Trinity, Ringo, or Django, yo).Did I say steal? I meant 'pay homage to'

Fifteen years after the brutal massacre of his family by vicious outlaws, Bill (John Phillip Law) is finally ready for revenge, having perfected his gun-slinging skills; however, the young man finds himself facing competition from recently released criminal Ryan (Lee Van Cleef), who is also gunning for the murderous gang.Death Rides a Horse marks my very first foray into the spaghetti western genre outside of the relative safety of Sergio Leone's better known movies, and while it's not quite on a par with the Leone classics, the film is still a solidly entertaining adventure that certainly can't be accused of not trying…Between the film's brutal, rain-lashed opening massacre and its wind-swept gun-fight finalé, Death Rides A Horse delivers almost all the elements one might reasonably expect from the genre: a dashing, gun-slinging hero hell-bent on revenge, a grizzled ex-convict with a score to settle, loathsome villains, wonderful widescreen cinematography, a jail-break, a lynch-mob, fist fights, whisky drinking, poker playing, lots of rapid-zoom close-ups of eyes, a cool Ennio Morricone score, a village of scared Mexicans, and just a little gallows humour.Where the film suffers somewhat is with its rather pedestrian plot, that offers too few genuine surprises, and which, at almost two hours, resorts to padding out the action by having the lead characters take it in turns to put themselves in mortal danger, only for one to be saved by the other. This nonsense takes some swallowing, but director Giulio Petroni's stylish handling, some gritty violence, and a fine performance from Van Cleef ensure that the film never drags.While this might not be a top-tier spaghetti western, it's impressed me enough to make me want to check out further non-Leone movies.

As with other spaghetti Westerns, the characters here are mean, the landscape is bleak, and the music is haunting. It's a stereotyped image of an Old West that never was. But the genre makes for generally interesting movies.In "Death Rides A Horse" the story is a typical revenge yarn. It's fairly predictable, though there's a nifty plot twist toward the end. The two main characters seesaw back and forth as dual protagonists, each with the same apparent objective, yet each with a different level of maturity and suspicion of the other. The rest of the characters seem mostly like background props, stick figures, lacking uniqueness and personality.People here rarely smile except when they express a jeering, scornful attitude toward someone else. They're all angry and violent. Women exist to be abused. And the bad guys are predictably stupid; when they have the chance to kill the good guys, they make excuses why they need to wait.I might have liked this film more if the DVD had been better. In the copy I watched the colors were washed-out; some images were grainy or blurry. And the sound was bad.Yet even allowing for a poor DVD, the film lacks technical quality. Editing is as bad as the dubbing. Dialogue trends banal. The score, though haunting, repeats too often. And the visuals convey the impression that the producers spent all of twenty dollars on production design.As one of the two leads, Lee Van Cleef gives a respectable performance. But John Phillip Law, the second lead, looks lost throughout the film. He is so wooden and stilted that a blue-eyed mannequin could have animated the character better, and no doubt cheaper.To really appreciate this film, or rather to overlook its faults, the viewer needs to be a hardcore spaghetti Western fan. The genre does offer some really high quality films. "Death Rides A Horse" isn't one of them.