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In praise of Lucio Fulci’s vio­lent, venge­ful Spaghet­ti westerns

25 Jul 2021

Words by Adam Scovell

Portrait of a man with a pensive expression, lying in a field amongst thorny branches.
Portrait of a man with a pensive expression, lying in a field amongst thorny branches.
The Ital­ian hor­ror maestro’s hand­ful of entries in the genre show­case his pen­chant for bloody retribution.

Though pri­mar­i­ly known for his vis­cer­al hor­ror films, Ital­ian mae­stro Lucio Ful­ci worked across many gen­res. Begin­ning with a range of come­dies in the 1960s, the director’s 50 or so films left few gen­res untest­ed. Undoubt­ed­ly, his work in hor­ror defined him, caus­ing may­hem and con­tro­ver­sy in a range of fan­tas­tic films, from splat­ters like Zom­bie Flesh Eaters and The House by the Ceme­tery to dark, psy­cho­log­i­cal ter­rors such as A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Tor­ture a Duck­ling. This, how­ev­er, wasn’t all Ful­ci was capa­ble of.

Though hor­ror seemed to bring out the best and most lurid of his film­mak­ing capa­bil­i­ties, Ful­ci also showed prowess in the west­ern (more specif­i­cal­ly, the Spaghet­ti west­ern). Ful­ci made just five films in the genre and, even then, two are them are very loose inter­pre­ta­tions of what con­sti­tutes a west­ern. Yet they show­case anoth­er side to the director’s tal­ents and deserve greater recog­ni­tion in his body of work.

Mas­sacre Time, also known as The Brute and the Beast, was Fulci’s first west­ern and shows the pen­chant for vio­lence that would char­ac­terise his lat­er work. Fol­low­ing the bat­tle between a ranch and a prospec­tor (played by Fran­co Nero in the same year he first played Djan­go), Mas­sacre Time is incred­i­bly vio­lent for a 1966 west­ern and must have shocked, even in a post‑A Fist­ful of Dol­lars world. As Ful­ci him­self once famous­ly sug­gest­ed, Vio­lence is the Ital­ian art!” and so Ital­ian west­erns had a nation­al inter­est in push­ing things fur­ther than their Amer­i­can counterparts.

Some of Mas­sacre Time’s action has the sort of fan­tas­ti­cal absur­di­ty that would lat­er be satirised in films like Enzo Barboni’s They Call Me Trin­i­ty. Char­ac­ters front-flip through the air and shoot with alarm­ing accu­ra­cy in the most enjoy­ably stylised fash­ion. Yet such style is cou­pled with Fulci’s deter­mined­ly grit­ty approach to vio­lence more gen­er­al­ly. Vio­lence is far from clean-cut in Fulci’s cin­e­ma and his west­erns are no dif­fer­ent. In fact, Ful­ci saw the film as dif­fer­ent to oth­er Ital­ian west­erns of the age, telling Star­burst Mag­a­zine in 1982 that it was a fan­tas­tique” and had a dual­i­ty of tone, both soft-spo­ken and extreme­ly vio­lent.” The switch between these tones makes a first view­ing espe­cial­ly effec­tive, with its jolts between mood exhilarating.

If Mas­sacre Time’s nar­ra­tive is sim­plis­tic, it is delib­er­ate so to empha­sise the char­ac­ters’ deter­mi­na­tion in the face of increas­ing lev­els of plight. The film has two real cen­tre­pieces that are built towards: its final shootout (as per usu­al in this par­tic­u­lar brand of west­ern), and the vio­lent fall of the main char­ac­ter at the two-thirds mark. The lat­ter sequence is espe­cial­ly accom­plished, with the prospector’s pub­lic lash­ing at the hands of Junior Scott (Nino Castel­n­uo­vo) high­light­ing the pre­cise visu­al lan­guage wield­ed by Ful­ci. The sequence is extend­ed and lin­ger­ing, each whiplash utter­ly ago­nis­ing. Nero’s char­ac­ter is even kicked into a fire, as if each par­tic­u­lar instance of pain just isn’t quite enough. He must be total­ly bro­ken before he can rise again.

A weathered man with a rugged beard wearing a large black cowboy hat and a shearling coat, set against a dusty, rustic background.

Ful­ci returned to the genre in the 70s with a run of west­erns. In 1973, he began one of the strangest minor trends in Ital­ian Cin­e­ma: the White Fang films. Based (increas­ing­ly loose­ly) on Jack London’s 1906 nov­el fol­low­ing the hero­ic dog of the title, as well as cash­ing in on the recent suc­cess of Ken Annakin’s adap­ta­tion of The Call of the Wild, Ful­ci direct­ed the open­ing two films of the three: White Fang and The Return of White Fang. Though not strict­ly west­erns, their set­tings, char­ac­ters and style does con­form to the genre’s tropes. Both starred Fran­co Nero again (as well as the excel­lent John Stein­er as the vil­lain), the end­ing of the first film is a dyna­mite-filled shootout at a dam, and the shenani­gans of the sequel ful­fil most of the require­ments of the typ­i­cal fight for a gold­mine” west­ern narrative.

What makes these weak­er films enter­tain­ing is the sheer fact that Ful­ci was try­ing to, on paper at least, make a series of fam­i­ly films. It’s unsur­pris­ing to find the direc­tor unsuit­ed in the most amus­ing­ly inap­pro­pri­ate of ways. The vio­lence in these films is still shock­ing. Bod­ies are buried in trees, wounds are severe and gap­ing, the eyes of the dog are gouged out by eagles and bears respec­tive­ly, and the gen­er­al nar­ra­tive is one that con­sis­tent­ly requires vio­lence to con­tin­ue its flow. It makes for two remark­ably odd films whose inap­pro­pri­ate­ness for their intend­ed audi­ence is, in hind­sight, part of their charm.

If Fulci’s take on the west­ern had a high­point, then it undoubt­ed­ly occurred the year after his last White Fang film, when he made the aston­ish­ing The Four of the Apoc­a­lypse…, loose­ly adapt­ed from a Bret Harte short sto­ry. The film’s bib­li­cal atmos­phere is heady and dizzy­ing as we fol­low four down-and-out lowlifes led by Fabio Testi try­ing to out­run trou­ble, most­ly in the form of a sadis­tic out­law called Cha­co (Tomas Milan). The film’s style is dra­mat­i­cal­ly dif­fer­ent to most Spaghet­ti west­erns around it, feel­ing at times clos­er to films like Clint Eastwood’s High Plains Drifter or even Ale­jan­dro Jodorowsky’s El Topo.

Fulci’s film may be one of the most bru­tal and sadis­tic west­erns ever made, more like Cor­mac McCarthy in Blood Merid­i­an’ ter­ri­to­ry than any­thing else. Chaco’s char­ac­ter was based loose­ly on Charles Man­son and there’s some­thing of the col­lapsed hip­py dream in his mix­ture of rogu­ish charm and utter sadism. Nev­er trust a man with cross­es under his eyes. In a pro­longed sequence of rape and tor­ture, Cha­co drugs the group of four with psy­che­delics, rapes Bun­ny (Lynne Fred­er­ick) and tor­ments the group, hav­ing not been con­tent with flay­ing a man strapped to a tree moments before. It’s in strange halfway realm between the psy­che­del­ic and the Old Tes­ta­ment, a night­mar­ish vision of a hope­less Utah that turns into a typ­i­cal­ly effec­tive 70s revenge film with a sat­is­fy­ing pay-off.

One inter­est­ing aspect that runs as a strain through­out all of Fulci’s west­erns is how heavy vio­lence feels. When bul­lets col­lide with chests and limbs, the wet slap of their impact feels more grit­ti­ly real­is­tic than the shootouts gen­er­al­ly found in the era’s west­erns. As in his lat­er Hor­rors, injury for the most part is shown to hurt. The vio­lence of The Four is espe­cial­ly vis­cer­al, and yet is filmed with pre­cise com­po­si­tion that under­stands the place­ment of the body in the land­scape; the dirt under the nails that Ital­ian west­erns gen­er­al­ly had such dex­ter­i­ty in conveying.

Two people, a man and a woman, embracing in an outdoor, rural setting.

In his last west­ern before com­mit­ting almost com­plete­ly to hor­ror, Ful­ci remind­ed view­ers that the west­ern could still be a vehi­cle for dra­ma as well as vio­lence and thrills. Sil­ver Sad­dle was made in the dying days of the genre as hor­ror tru­ly took prece­dent and the 70s turned to the 80s. The film fol­lows a boun­ty hunter (Guil­iano Gem­ma) whose vio­lent past hides secrets. By chance, he is forced to pro­tect the son of the fam­i­ly whom he loathes; his own descent into vio­lence ini­tial­ly caused by an ear­ly mem­ber gun­ning down his father before he com­mit­ted his first act of killing in revenge when only a child.

Ful­ci made the most of things in his final west­ern, in par­tic­u­lar in the film’s action sequences which again add a bloody real­i­ty to the more flam­boy­ant shootouts. If the film is a step down from The Four, it’s because of that film’s strengths rather than any inher­ent weak­ness of Sil­ver Sad­dle (that is besides its struc­ture which fires its load of action a lit­tle too ear­ly). It’s cer­tain­ly hard not to love a film whose main char­ac­ters are called Roy Blood and Snake (Geof­frey Lewis).

Some of the film’s visu­als are espe­cial­ly mag­nif­i­cent, even painter­ly. One sequence, when Snake is search­ing the dead of an attacked stage­coach in the mid­dle of a vast panora­ma, is as beau­ti­ful as any­thing in more respect­ed films of the genre and era, and cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Ser­gio Sal­vati pro­duces some of his finest images before com­mit­ting with Ful­ci to the film­ing of the rot­ten walk­ing dead.

Fulci’s west­erns show­case a direc­tor who could con­fi­dent­ly move between a range of gen­res, what­ev­er the cir­cum­stances. The inter­est in these films is two-fold; in how dis­tinct they feel to oth­er films in the genre and how they show the ear­ly rum­blings of a direc­tor soon to find con­fi­dence in his pulpy, hyper-vio­lent voice. On the one hand, they feel unique in their blend­ing of typ­i­cal Spaghet­ti west­ern themes and visu­als with a director’s grow­ing sense of per­son­al inter­ests. On the oth­er, they pre-empt the films that would fol­low, hint­ing at the even gori­er plea­sures the direc­tor would find him­self cre­at­ing in the years after the dust of the Spaghet­ti west­ern had firm­ly settled.

Lucio Fulci’s Mas­sacre Time is being released as part of a lim­it­ed edi­tion Blu-ray box set, Vengeance Trail’, by Arrow Video on 26 July.

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