Son of a Gunfighter (1965) Directed by Paul Landres

(Review originally written at 10 November 2007)

*** This review may contain spoilers ***

The movie has a rather good typical genre revenge-story but the story gets almost completely ruined by the movie its poor directing and annoyingly bad dialog.

It's not that the movie has a bad story but it's still a poorly written. And the things they say! Oh man, the spend 3 lines on things they could say with just 5 words. Some of the dialog is ridicules and at times completely redundant for the movie. Really some of the worst dialog writing I have seen in a long time. How did those actors ever agreed to say all those lines?

Unfortunately the movie also feels the need to put in a female character and love-story. I mean no offense but women in westerns have just never quite worked out. Even in the best westerns, the women still felt out of place and did not worked out. I understand that it's PC and good for marketing reasons but some genres are just not created to have female characters in it. But on top of that the love-story in this movie feels rather forced and out of place and is just not quite believable, since Pilar seems like a complete bore and shallow character, that no tough gunfighter would ever fall for.

It also seems silly that the biggest spoiler and surprise of the movie is also in the movie it's title. What's up with that!?

The musical score for the movie was unexpectedly great. I liked it surprising much! One of the very few highlights of the movie.

The directing was very poor and it ruined some of the potentially good moments of the movie. It also made some of the action seemed bad and ridicules. It's the sort of clumsy action you would normally expect to see in a '30's movie or a "The A-Team" type of series. Characters come and go in the movie and evil and good guys keep switching constantly. The main character isn't even introduced until 10 minutes into the movie. The main villains are disappointing and underused. Never fully showed in the movie why they are being considered such legendary and bad villainous characters in the West.

Also non of the actors are really any great ones but then again, they also aren't really helped by the dialog in the movie.

Still some of the action makes the movie worthwhile to watch, at least for the genre fans. Some action sequences are surprisingly big (seemed to me they'd watched "The Magnificent Seven" before making this movie?) and even though some of the action seems to constantly repeat itself, it's still great to watch!

4/10