RED BLOOD YELLOW GOLD

Well, if you like ugly, insane Mexicans this is the film for you. Laughing maniacally with chicken gizzards dripping from their lips and stale tequila encrusted on their beards, this lot are the most sanitorially challenged bunch I've seen in a long apprenticeship of mutoid watching. And that's just the women. Honestly, I spent most of this film trying to work out whether the females in this were played by transvestites or whether they really were the product of some form of unpleasant Sicillian inbreeding experiment. That's to say nothing of the laugh-a-second "let's put this idiot into a clay pot and shoot at his head for entertainment" fun and games. Or their leader's quite brilliant attempts to force a dumb man to talk.

In fact, at this point something has to be said about the unwholesome prediliction that such despot banditos have for burying people up to their necks in the sand. Is it some form of bastard Feng Shui? You know, "Well, it hasn't been that good a season on the pointless grimace and eye rolling front, but a couple of heads gridling in the sun to the Noth East will solve that one..." They should sell this idea down at Habitat - it would go down a storm. Authentic charboiled heads plus beaker of water just out of reach, adds just the right sparkle of insouciance to your des res.

Oh yes, the plot. Well, Red Blood Yellow Gold entertains the enjoyable notion that just about everyone involved in the American civil war was in it for their own fiscal good. Most notably villainous dude Major Lloyd (the frighteningly German looking Gerard Herter) who, along with some traitorous chums, manages to make off with a wagonload of gold from the Southern camp. Working with the reasonable supposition that to catch a thief you should use a thief, the aggrieved General decides to put not one but three habitual miscreants (Hilton, Byrnes and Martin) on the trail. Keeping them under control is Lt Logan (Milo Quesada, best remembered as the the sadistic witch baiter "Satchell" in Jesus Franco's The Bloody Judge), himself under suspicion of being a Union spy.

Before long the aforementioned muchachos turn up to complicate matters further, but things are kept to a generally simplistic level. There are no deep meanings or hidden subtexts here, just an enjoyable horseback romp in which athleticism and pacing are pushed to the fore. There is some great photography and an incomprehensible ending that involves the Mexican's village being bomabarded by coffins on pulleys!

On the whole, I don't like this as much as the other Nando Cicero/George Hilton collaboration, Last of the Badmen. It does display a similarly cynical world-view as well as a juxtaposition between gravity and levity, but doesn't have the underlying bleakness of their earlier piece. Considering that the director went on to be best known for helming above-average saucy comedies throughout the seventies, it seems more likely that his former outing was a youthful aberration. Edd "Kookie" Byrnes went on to co-star with Hilton in Castellari's Any Gun Can Play, and looks pretty good in this agreeable nonsense.

Matt B