Best movie of this year hands down!

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Five Bloody Graves is a western from the notorious director Al Adamson. Al was a maker of z-grade exploitation movies such as Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969) and Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970). Because of this I am rather fond of the man. Anyone who knocked out copious numbers of low budget psychotronic movies from the golden era of the b-movie sure can't be all that bad in my book. And from my admittedly limited exposure to his movies, I have to say that what I have seen has been entertaining enough. Five Bloody Graves is possibly the best of the bunch so far I reckon. It takes the form of a revenge western, with a lone cowboy seeking retribution against an Apache who killed his wife. Enter a stranded stagecoach of cannon fodder...I mean upright citizens, plus a duo of good-for-nothing gun runners and we have the bare bones of a story.This one is unusual from the start in that it includes voice-over narration from Death himself. Some people hate voice-overs but I don't mind them as they allow us to just cut to the chase and get on with it, not relying on a host of tedious exposition scenes and in this example that is effectively what they achieve even if the device was most probably included for budgetary, rather than artistic, reasons. It would only be fair to say that despite a release year of 1970, this sure as hell is not a revisionist example of the western genre. It has a decidedly old-school presentation of the Indians as mindless killers, who aren't so much characters as they are dangerous obstacles for the white folks to deal with. This type of presentation was really out-of-date by the 60's, never mind the 70's! But I think it's partly on account of this completely unprogressive approach that makes this one kind of enjoyable as it gives it an even more exploitative approach which is always kind of fun even when you know it is wrong.From an acting perspective we have the king of the low budget trash-fest himself, John Carradine, on hand in another role as a cranky old git. While the soundtrack was pleasingly inappropriate at times with a score made up of library music which bizarrely included the theme to the 'News at Ten', one of the most famous bits of TV music in the UK and so utterly strange sound-tracking a gun-fight in a low budget western! This musical insanity is only equalled by the later slasher movie Delirium (1979) which featured the theme music from 'Mastermind'! Anyway, the story plays out pretty much as you think it will with little in the way of surprises, although I have to award an extra point for a particularly evil character being sentenced to 'death by ant'. On the whole, this much maligned film really wasn't all that bad at all. I have been watching a fair few run-of-the-mill spaghetti westerns recently and I have to say that this one entertained me more than most of those on account of it being stranger. Good work Al...

There's one saving grace in this movie: the scenery. It was shot in some rugged and truly beautiful country in Utah, but Al Adamson is such an incompetent hack of a director that he doesn't really do anything with it--it's just kind of "there" in the background, and the few times where you get a glimpse of some of the spectacular views that SHOULD have been seen a lot more often, it looks like Al just happened to be pointing the camera at that particular spot rather than actually having planned the shot (although "Al Adamson" and "planned the shot" are two phrases that don't usually belong in the same sentence). Few things in this film make sense, starting with the title--even if anyone could figure out exactly what a "bloody grave" actually is, there are a lot more than five people killed, the only graves shown are at the end of the picture, and there are only four of them. Having a title that is not only senseless but untrue should give you an idea of what's to come, and since this is an Al Adamson movie, it doesn't fail to live up--or down--to that expectation.The "action" is laughably inept, as it invariably is with any Adamson film. Scenes seem to be inserted out of nowhere. At one point there's a shot of the survivors of an Indian attack holed up among some big rocks in a dry, desert area awaiting another attack. The next shot shows a half-dozen Indians charging through a lush, green valley, yelling and whooping. The next shot is of the same people in the same group of rocks, but you can't see or hear the Indians. The next shot is the yelling and whooping Indians charging through the valley again. Then back to the shot of the people in the rocks. And that's it. There's no Indian attack, the valley the Indians were charging through is never seen again and, come to think of it, neither are the Indians. As further proof of Adamson's razor-sharp film-making skills, during an attack on a ranch house the number of Indians keeps changing--six attack the house, two of them are killed and one rides away. So where are the other three? Then one Indian fires a burning arrow at a ranch house from a distance of about five feet, and the house proceeds to burn to the ground in about ten seconds. Throughout the movie there's a hilariously pretentious voice-over from "Death" that makes no more sense than anything else. Adamson did manage to get a few professional actors for the picture--John Carradine, Scott Brady, Jim Davis, Paula Raymond--but he also populated it with several of his usual gang of inept "discoveries": Kent Osborne, John Cardos, Vicki Volante. Cardos isn't all that bad, actually, but Osborne and especially Volante are awful. Darlene Lucht (here billed as Tara Ashton) plays one of the prostitutes on a wagon attacked by the Indians, and she's actually not bad at all (and a real beauty, to boot). But the idiotic script (an example: Ben, who's supposed to be the Indian "expert", says that Yaqui Indians are actually Apaches but that the Mexicans call them Yaquis. That is flat-out untrue; Yaquis and Apaches are two entirely different tribes), the badly done "action" scenes, the confused editing, the wildly inappropriate music score (while Joe Lightfoot is chasing the man who raped and murdered his wife, the music that's playing is a pseudo-jazz/rock tune you'd hear in a '60s teen musical with go-go dancers in a cage doing the frug in a "hip" nightclub) all combine to make this even more of an atrocity than the usual Adamson epic. I realize this is an Al Adamson picture, but this one is a stinker by even his almost non-existent standards. Don't waste your time.

Ben Thompson is a messenger of Death. We are constantly reminded of this through the CRAP FEST that is Five Bloody Graves, by DEATH himself no less! Crappy narration aside, there are plenty of things to keep the watcher engaged, or more accurately, perplexed. Beautiful scenery is destroyed by bad acting. Promising character development and story lines are killed by senseless violence, most notably a rape scene. This is probably an accurate portrayal of what occurred in the Old West, but this seems like lazy film-making. I wish the Indians had won. One redeeming feature of the film is John Carradine in his role as a sleazy preacher. While this is easily one of the crappiest westerns I have ever seen, I truly don't believe it deserves a rating as low as 1.8. That's not to say it doesn't deserve a low rating. Maybe a 3 or 4 perhaps? Death demands it!!!!

Al Adamson! Truly one of the Princes of schlock filming and a true heir to Edward D. Wood Jr.s Throne of cheese! Adamsons films have everything that makes the true crap movie so frightening: Illucid scripts, continuity errors of epic proportions, acting somewhere between barely OK to truly awful, former movie greats fallen into rough times, no budget whatsoever, cameos by the director himself (not in the Hitchcock manner, more in the Ed "Glenn or Glennda" Wood way)... you name it.Said that, this is one of his less crappy movies (we are talking about Adamson standards here though), mainly because of a really good director of photography (newly immigrated Vilmos Zsigmound, who later would shoot movies like Maverick and Assassins) and a gorgeous background scenery.But be not fooled! There is still plenty of badness provided, starting with the mind numbing narration by Death himself, reaction shots that don't match either the scene before or after (most often then not not even the time of day!), gratuitous violence of the disturbing kind etc. etc. etc.Watch out for appearances of B-movie legend John Carradine, the movies own screenwriter Robert Dix, 50s Western staple Victor Adamson and ubiquitous Scott Brady.To see Adamson at the peak (or rather bottom ) of his art, be sure not to miss the unbelievable "Dracula vs. Frankenstein", a movie that puts Plan 9 to shame! Highly recommended for fans of Adamson is also David Konow's great biography: Schlock-O-Rama: The Films of Al Adamson