Most undeservingly overhyped movie of all time??

Good story, Not enough for a whole film

It’s an especially fun movie from a director and cast who are clearly having a good time allowing themselves to let loose.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

07/12/2018 I've watched alot of cowboy movies in my 69 years of life. The 1950's Gene Autry's, Lone Ranger movies in black & white, right up to the John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Steve McQueen and into Roddie Yates aka Clint Eastwood movies. Clint being my all time favorite old western actor as he played the hired killer in "The UnForgiven" my #1 favorite movie of all time in my book with at least a dozen Plus views by me and possibly more? This movie "Death Rides A Horse" is easily one of Lee Van Cleef's best movies that he ever made. He's on par with ol' Clint in his old western acting skills. Nothing more needs to be said after that. Watch for yourself and then you can decide??? Of course, I think this novie's great. Bon Appetit

One can hardly blame young Bill Meceita (John Phillip Law) for wanting vengeance. As a child, he'd had to watch while a particularly rotten gang of bandits murdered the rest of his family (taking the time to rape his sister and mother first). As an adult, he hooks up with a stranger named Ryan (Lee Van Cleef), who has his own reasons for wanting to get back at the gang.As Luciano Vincenzonis' script plays out, Bill and Ryan will take turns bailing the other out of trouble. Ryan warns Bill that his lust for vengeance could be deadly, but as it turns out, the two of them do need each other. Among the targets of their missions: banker Walcott (Luigi Pistilli) and saloon owner Burt Cavanaugh (Anthony Dawson)."Death Rides a Horse" is an awesome title (although Law himself is not fond of it) for this very long, meticulously paced Spaghetti Western saga. Gorgeously shot by Carlo Carlini in Technicscope, it features yet another grandiose and effective soundtrack composed by the legendary Ennio Morricone. Violent without being gory, it's still pretty grim and powerful. This doesn't mean, however, that the script is without a sense of humour.Van Cleef, showing us what screen charisma is all about, once again gets to play a character who is a truly cool customer. He remains a pleasure to watch, but is very well supported by the sincere Law. Dawson ("Dial M for Murder", "Dr. No") and Italian cinema veterans Pistilli ("Your Vice is a Locked Room and Only I Have the Key", "A Bay of Blood") and Mario Brega (Leones' "Dollars" trilogy, "Once Upon a Time in America") are villains par excellence.At the core of this film is the interesting relationship between the older and younger man, as Ryan imparts wisdom and becomes something of a father figure in Bills' life.Stylish and exciting, "Death Rides a Horse" leaves a vivid impression on the viewer.Eight out of 10.

This is a fun movie but certainly doesn't deserve the high praise it's getting in a lot of these reviews. About all it has going for it is Lee Van Cleef and he is mostly wasted. Lacks all the finesse and most of the originality of even many of the other Leone rip-offs.P.S. If you are a Mexican village under the evil domination of Bad Hombres and Lee Van Cleef arrives and promises to help out, your village elders might want to view this movie before accepting his help.

This is one of the good spaghetti westerns, but it could have been great. It tries too hard to re-weave the magic of For A Few Dollars More, indeed it comes from a similar creative team (Vincenzoni, Morricone, along with several cast members), but the pity of life is, you can't recapture old magic, you can only forge ahead.Similarly to For A Few Dollars More, there's two gunmen to sympathise with, one played by Lee van Cleef, and one younger more handsome one. Van Cleef plays Ryan and John Phillip Law plays Bill, both trying to beat the other to the punch. The difficulty is, Law comes off as a Alan Ladd's understudy for Shane and this is at times a damned dark movie, into which he doesn't seem to fit. The ladies / androphiles are in for a treat though because he's darned handsome, not hard to see why he was cast as a bare-chested angel in Barbarella.Both men have got an old grudge to settle and are after the gang of men responsible. We're back to A Few Dollars More territory in the setup (back-story of Mortimer), and with the gang (Mario Brega and Luigi Pistilli reappear). The only evocative name (a critical Leone-ian ingredient) in the whole film is Cavanaugh, and that's a recycle from For A Few Dollars More as well, and the efficiency of the bank robbery scene seems to be a visual quotation of Indio's rescue.I absolutely love parts of the film. The opening rain-soaked scene (minus a tad of expository dialogue) is pretty spectacular, as is the trick shot sequence. There's also craft in allowing connection with the senses of the character, you can feel Ryan take his gloves off, you can feel his face burn after his curious shaving technique.The effective scenes in the movie are all about horror, and I feel that many of the dark interior scenes had the same pungency of Pierre Lhomme and Henri Decaë's work for Jean-Pierre Melville. However the son-I-never-had buddy movie aspect of it diminished things somewhat. It's also a movie where there are occasional longueurs of the type that you would never see in a Leone movie, and there are lines that fall flat as the movie sprawls on to just under two hours. I felt that an editor could make judicious subtractions to this movie without damaging it at all.Petroni and co seemed to have trouble ending the movie, finishing with what seems like a condensation of the plot of The Magnificent Seven, and they never discovered how to inject humour without mawkishness, the Eastwood ingredient. It's a great watch, but so sad that it doesn't quite come across as its own movie.