Well, it's been a little while since I saw a film which sucked on such a grand scale that it demanded an appearance in the worst ten films of the year.
So, it is with a strange sense of masochism I celebrate the sheer awfulness of Redemption and name it the worst western I have ever seen.
This is a movie which left the cinema screens after a blink of an eye earlier this year. Metrodome Distribution didn't publicise it - and I can entirely see why after ordering a copy through Lovefilm.
Actually, if Redemption was intended as a mickey take of the likes of Unforgiven or The Good the Bad And The Ugly, it might have scored higher.
But the fact that it takes itself so seriously makes it all the more lame.
So what's it about? It's darned hard to say, as they might have uttered in the Wild West.
I reckon there's something about a tough guy outlaw (Dustin Leighton) who takes part in a robbery of a Mexican family which, in his eyes, goes too far.
The girl from said family has been forced into prostitution and he is out to save her.
He tries to discover her whereabouts and finds her in a town called..... Redemption.
By the way, has anyone ever noticed that every single 'town' in the Wild West has only one street? I wonder when they decided side streets were a good idea?
Anyway, standing in the way of his rescue act are a gunslinger, a couple of renegade soldiers and a mad clergyman who is as keen on shooting people dead as reading bible verses.
Why any of these people are bothered about the Mexican lass is again beyond me.
The movie is startlingly badly made.
Some of the opening scenes are so dark I couldn't fathom what was happening.
But that is just the start. I spotted scenes which were blurry, baulked at a horrendously cliched script and was incredulous as punches were thrown and the slaps were heard after the actor moved.
And then there is the acting. Well, actually there isn't. There is a sort of hamming up the like of which I last saw when my son was six years old and pretending to be a cowboy.
This is summed up by Clint James whose bearded army captain sounded amazingly like Donald Sutherland's hippy soldier in Kelly's Heroes
Our hero (Leighton), meanwhile, goes through the entire film conducting a bad Clint Eastwood impression.
The whole thing just left me wondering what director Robert Conway was thinking. It gets a pathetic 1/10.
0 Comments