Take A Hard Ride

Take A Hard Ride (1975)

Runtime: 103 minutes

Directed by: Antonio Margheriti (i.e. the guy who directed many Italian films, including the infamous Yor: The Hunter From The Future)

Starring: Jim Brown, Fred Williamson, Lee Van Cleef, Jim Kelly, Catherine Spaak

From: 20^th Century Fox

The past few weeks I wasn't planning on watching both blaxploitation and Westerns; it just turned out that way. Last week I stumbled upon this movie, where the two are combined, and figured it'd be perfect to talk about here. Plus, what a cast of badasses.

The plot: Pike (Brown) works doing ranch hand things for his rich boss Morgan. The boss dies of a heart attack, but not before telling Pike to take 86,000 bucks down to his ranch in Mexico for his family. Everyone finds out about this, from a bounty hunter (Van Cleef, of course) to a huckster known as Tyree who lets loose snakes to cheat at cards (Williamson). Pike and Tyree form an uneasy alliance as they travel down to Mexico while dealing with the threat of the bounty hunter and others, while meeting up with such characters as a redhead prostitute from New Orleans (Spaak) and a half-Indian half black guy who has his tongue cut out but knows martial arts. A preposterous character, but pretty cool too and believe it or not he was played by the decidedly not mixed Jim Kelly.

The movie... it's not as awesome as it could have been given the cast, but it's still an entertaining time; there's plenty of sons of bitches who get shot and there's both intentional and unintentional comedy. For example, everything revolving around Kelly's character. After all, legendary cowboy Harry Carey Jr. is also in this movie and his character is in the desert, squatting down and taking a dump with Van Cleef gets the jump on him. Carey's character's name... DUMPER. No kidding. I laughed and laughed.

This movie was actually filmed in the Canary Islands but it is a nice replacement for the actual American Southwest and there are some unique locations you see during the film. A proto-machine gun gets used... yeah, like I said this movie is entertaining even if I was hoping for something to knock my socks off. Oh, and as of this moment the movie is on YouTube. It's not too hard to find.

I'll be back Saturday night.