Prolific B-filmmaker Lucio Fulci made Four Of The Apocalypse just after his violent giallo thrillers like Lizard In A Woman's Skin and Don't Torture The Duckling, and before he kickstarted the Euro-splatter genre with Zombie Flesheaters in 1979. With a pedigree like that, you can tell that Fulci specialized in the darker side of human nature. In The Four Of The Apocalypse, when the blood starts to flow - and it seems to appear more often than necessary - Fulci rises to the task and is not afraid to show it.
This is the West as rewritten by Leone, Peckinpah and company - lawless, brutal, and certainly no place for the righteous. Fabio Testi plays Stubby Preston, a super-suave card shark who rolls into town just as gambling is declared illegal. The sheriff (played by Run Man Run's sheriff Donal O'Brien, locks him in a cell with the so-called scum of the earth: the visibly pregnant woman of the night Bunny (played by the late British actress Lynne Frederick), an unnervingly upbeat African American named Bud, and the weird-looking cherubic Michael J Pollard, most famous for his role as the slightly brain-damaged CW in Bonnie And Clyde, here on his downhill career slide as Clem, the slightly brain-damaged town drunk.
Hooded killers cut a swathe through the rest of the town in a display of gloriously slow motion wholesale butchery while sheriff plugs his ears - and this is before the end of the credits! The four cell mates hitch their wagon southwards, bickering and sniping at each other, all to Greek Chorus courtesy of an abysmal 70s West Coast pop group. Along comes the mysterious half-Indian Chaco, played with demented abandon by a very different Tomas Milian. He soon shows his true talents - hunting, torture and administering peyote like a crazed psychedelic priest.
The harsh landscape suddenly becomes nightmarish and surreal, and the film frequently makes trips across the border into grand guignol territory, which is great news for lovers of Fulci's zombie quartet. But it's not all gloom; there are moments of genuine tenderness and heartbreak in the unlikely pairing of a gambler and a pregnant prostitute. And speaking of pregnant, you're going to need a cast-iron stomach to handle this one, possibly the last word in nihilist splatter westerns: the 1975 Four Of The Apocalypse.
This is the West as rewritten by Leone, Peckinpah and company - lawless, brutal, and certainly no place for the righteous. Fabio Testi plays Stubby Preston, a super-suave card shark who rolls into town just as gambling is declared illegal. The sheriff (played by Run Man Run's sheriff Donal O'Brien, locks him in a cell with the so-called scum of the earth: the visibly pregnant woman of the night Bunny (played by the late British actress Lynne Frederick), an unnervingly upbeat African American named Bud, and the weird-looking cherubic Michael J Pollard, most famous for his role as the slightly brain-damaged CW in Bonnie And Clyde, here on his downhill career slide as Clem, the slightly brain-damaged town drunk.
Hooded killers cut a swathe through the rest of the town in a display of gloriously slow motion wholesale butchery while sheriff plugs his ears - and this is before the end of the credits! The four cell mates hitch their wagon southwards, bickering and sniping at each other, all to Greek Chorus courtesy of an abysmal 70s West Coast pop group. Along comes the mysterious half-Indian Chaco, played with demented abandon by a very different Tomas Milian. He soon shows his true talents - hunting, torture and administering peyote like a crazed psychedelic priest.
The harsh landscape suddenly becomes nightmarish and surreal, and the film frequently makes trips across the border into grand guignol territory, which is great news for lovers of Fulci's zombie quartet. But it's not all gloom; there are moments of genuine tenderness and heartbreak in the unlikely pairing of a gambler and a pregnant prostitute. And speaking of pregnant, you're going to need a cast-iron stomach to handle this one, possibly the last word in nihilist splatter westerns: the 1975 Four Of The Apocalypse.