There's one saving grace in this movie: the scenery. It was shot in some rugged and truly beautiful country in Utah, but Al Adamson is such an incompetent hack of a director that he doesn't really do anything with it--it's just kind of "there" in the background, and the few times where you get a glimpse of some of the spectacular views that SHOULD have been seen a lot more often, it looks like Al just happened to be pointing the camera at that particular spot rather than actually having planned the shot (although "Al Adamson" and "planned the shot" are two phrases that don't usually belong in the same sentence). Few things in this film make sense, starting with the title--even if anyone could figure out exactly what a "bloody grave" actually is, there are a lot more than five people killed, the only graves shown are at the end of the picture, and there are only four of them. Having a title that is not only senseless but untrue should give you an idea of what's to come, and since this is an Al Adamson movie, it doesn't fail to live up--or down--to that expectation.
The "action" is laughably inept, as it invariably is with any Adamson film. Scenes seem to be inserted out of nowhere. At one point there's a shot of the survivors of an Indian attack holed up among some big rocks in a dry, desert area awaiting another attack. The next shot shows a half-dozen Indians charging through a lush, green valley, yelling and whooping. The next shot is of the same people in the same group of rocks, but you can't see or hear the Indians. The next shot is the yelling and whooping Indians charging through the valley again. Then back to the shot of the people in the rocks. And that's it. There's no Indian attack, the valley the Indians were charging through is never seen again and, come to think of it, neither are the Indians. As further proof of Adamson's razor-sharp film-making skills, during an attack on a ranch house the number of Indians keeps changing--six attack the house, two of them are killed and one rides away. So where are the other three? Then one Indian fires a burning arrow at a ranch house from a distance of about five feet, and the house proceeds to burn to the ground in about ten seconds. Throughout the movie there's a hilariously pretentious voice-over from "Death" that makes no more sense than anything else. Adamson did manage to get a few professional actors for the picture--John Carradine, Scott Brady, Jim Davis, Paula Raymond--but he also populated it with several of his usual gang of inept "discoveries": Kent Osborne, John Cardos, Vicki Volante. Cardos isn't all that bad, actually, but Osborne and especially Volante are awful. Darlene Lucht (here billed as Tara Ashton) plays one of the prostitutes on a wagon attacked by the Indians, and she's actually not bad at all (and a real beauty, to boot). But the idiotic script (an example: Ben, who's supposed to be the Indian "expert", says that Yaqui Indians are actually Apaches but that the Mexicans call them Yaquis. That is flat-out untrue; Yaquis and Apaches are two entirely different tribes), the badly done "action" scenes, the confused editing, the wildly inappropriate music score (while Joe Lightfoot is chasing the man who raped and murdered his wife, the music that's playing is a pseudo-jazz/rock tune you'd hear in a '60s teen musical with go-go dancers in a cage doing the frug in a "hip" nightclub) all combine to make this even more of an atrocity than the usual Adamson epic. I realize this is an Al Adamson picture, but this one is a stinker by even his almost non-existent standards. Don't waste your time.
The "action" is laughably inept, as it invariably is with any Adamson film. Scenes seem to be inserted out of nowhere. At one point there's a shot of the survivors of an Indian attack holed up among some big rocks in a dry, desert area awaiting another attack. The next shot shows a half-dozen Indians charging through a lush, green valley, yelling and whooping. The next shot is of the same people in the same group of rocks, but you can't see or hear the Indians. The next shot is the yelling and whooping Indians charging through the valley again. Then back to the shot of the people in the rocks. And that's it. There's no Indian attack, the valley the Indians were charging through is never seen again and, come to think of it, neither are the Indians. As further proof of Adamson's razor-sharp film-making skills, during an attack on a ranch house the number of Indians keeps changing--six attack the house, two of them are killed and one rides away. So where are the other three? Then one Indian fires a burning arrow at a ranch house from a distance of about five feet, and the house proceeds to burn to the ground in about ten seconds. Throughout the movie there's a hilariously pretentious voice-over from "Death" that makes no more sense than anything else. Adamson did manage to get a few professional actors for the picture--John Carradine, Scott Brady, Jim Davis, Paula Raymond--but he also populated it with several of his usual gang of inept "discoveries": Kent Osborne, John Cardos, Vicki Volante. Cardos isn't all that bad, actually, but Osborne and especially Volante are awful. Darlene Lucht (here billed as Tara Ashton) plays one of the prostitutes on a wagon attacked by the Indians, and she's actually not bad at all (and a real beauty, to boot). But the idiotic script (an example: Ben, who's supposed to be the Indian "expert", says that Yaqui Indians are actually Apaches but that the Mexicans call them Yaquis. That is flat-out untrue; Yaquis and Apaches are two entirely different tribes), the badly done "action" scenes, the confused editing, the wildly inappropriate music score (while Joe Lightfoot is chasing the man who raped and murdered his wife, the music that's playing is a pseudo-jazz/rock tune you'd hear in a '60s teen musical with go-go dancers in a cage doing the frug in a "hip" nightclub) all combine to make this even more of an atrocity than the usual Adamson epic. I realize this is an Al Adamson picture, but this one is a stinker by even his almost non-existent standards. Don't waste your time.
