Directed by Lucio Fulci
Written by Ennio De Concini
Starring:
- Fabio Testi as Stubby Preston
- Lynne Frederick as Emanuelle ‘Bunny’ O’Neill
- Michael J. Pollard as Clem
- Harry Baird as Bud
- Tomas Milian as Chaco
- Adolfo Lastretti as Reverend Sullivan
Rating: 
No director wore pessimism as defiantly as Lucio Fulci, whose career-long flirtation with nihilism and misogyny accusations cemented him as Italian exploitation’s resident prophet of despair. Which makes this western feel almost subversive within his own body of work: a film that takes his corrosive outlook and filters it through a blood-scorched American odyssey that paradoxically aches for transcendence. The anachronistic music floats over dust and brutality as four societal remnants — a wily gambler (Fabio Testi), a pregnant prostitute bearing both shame and stubborn hope (Lynne Frederick), a death-fascinated Black drifter (Harry Baird), and a spectacularly self-destructive drunk (Michael J. Pollard) — are forced into uneasy alliance across the merciless frontier. Their path leads first to the austere benevolence of the Quakers, then into the orbit of Chaco (Tomas Milian), a feral embodiment of appetite and cruelty who seems to incarnate the void Fulci so often contemplates. The bones of Ford’s Stagecoach are visible, yet Fulci replaces classical humanism with spaghetti severity, forging communion through suffering rather than civility. Just when extinction feels cosmically assured, he overturns expectation: a newborn child fractures the fatalism, an image of renewal wrested from carnage. Frederick’s performance aches with quiet strength, Testi’s humanity grounds the chaos, and Fulci, in perhaps his most disarming gesture, tempers fatalism with restrained spiritual conviction. Harsh yet compassionate, it remains one of Italian genre cinema’s most unexpected affirmations of life.
