Very well executed

Lack of good storyline.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

Unfortunately for God's Gun that is not meant in a good way. God's Gun is not an awful film but at best it's mediocre, with talented people on board and some great ideas on paper it could have been a good film but the potential is not properly used.God's Gun has its merits with the film having some gorgeous scenery and well-tailored costumes(Lee Van Cleef's wig is just atrocious though). The music score is derivative of Ennio Morricone somewhat but it's a clever, atmospheric one that suits the film well. A few performances are decent, the best being from a charismatic and intensely steely Lee Van Cleef in a double role. Sybil Danning doesn't have much to do but she does bring compassion and heart to her character and to the film. Apart from acting like he was drunk in the final scene, Jack Palance is an entertaining villain, he does bring a menace to the role but an enjoyable hamminess too.Most of the acting however is very weak. Leif Garrett's Johnny really fails to engage, in some scenes he overdoes it and in others he appears completely disengaged, while the secondary and extra roles look under-rehearsed. But in the acting stakes the biggest disappointment was the complete waste of Richard Boone, his character is barely in the film and Boone sleepwalks his way through it. The amateurish dubbing doesn't help, for most of the actors dubbed the voices do not fit the actors or the characters, the worst offenders being for Boone and in the church scene towards the end, it's even out of sync with the mouth movements and in a sloppy way. Nor do the uninteresting caricatures that passes for characters(only Van Cleef's vengeful brother character intrigues a little) or the stilted script which also has a lot of padding and corny melodrama. There were some great ideas in God's Gun but not much interesting is done with them in the storytelling, a lot of it having a muddled and trying-to-do-too-much effect, with an embarrassingly overwrought ending and overlong, unneeded and overdone rape scenes(especially the one in the saloon). God's Gun is stodgily paced and apart from the scenery it does look as though it was made on the cheap, the camera work was distractingly bad with jerky movements and shots that are too wide and too long in places, at its worst at the end which was enough to make one sea-sick.Overall, not awful but strange and rather mediocre. 4/10 Bethany Cox

Priest Lee Van Cleef stands up to Jack Palance and his vicious outlaw gang, only to be promptly murdered. This sends young Leif Garrett on a search to find the father's twin (also Van Cleef) who puts on his brother's collar and proceeds to give the outlaws a serious case of the willies!A low-budget Isreali backed spaghetti western, this re-teaming of Van Cleef with his Sabata director "Frank Kramer" is pretty good fun despite the derision of others who snicker at the casting of Leif Garrett. He was actually a decent kid actor before the silly overblown teen-idol hoopla.Van Cleef, Palance, and the ravishing Sybil Danning are all great and keep things pretty lively throughout, even if things get a bit amateurish and corny at times.However, Richard Boone is sadly wasted on a half-formed sheriff character, dubbed by another actor!

God's Gun is a spaghetti western shot in the Negev desert of Israel thereby leavening it with a bit of bagels, cream cheese and lox. A whole bunch of American players got a trip to Israel to participate in this western produced by Israeli film makers Goran and Globus.The idea might have been taken from that short lived James Garner series Nichols, something Garner did between Maverick and The Rockford Files. Lee Van Cleef stars and plays two roles, a Catholic priest and a retired gunfighter.One day a really obnoxious band of outlaws led by Jack Palance comes to town and starts shooting the place up killing a few of them, robbing the citizens and raping the women, even the saloon girls. When Lee Van Cleef the priest brings back one of them who committed a murder, Van Cleef is in turn gunned down in the street. That sends young Leif Garrett who is probably the altar boy at the church off looking for the gunfighter.This was years before the Catholic priest sex scandals started breaking all over the country so those who might have seen this in theater weren't snickering at the relationship between Van Cleef and young Leif. Now when viewed it probably brings many a guffaw among the cynical movie goers. I've always maintained that the androgynous Leif Garrett as a juvenile was definitely the prettiest of all the teen idols. Later on Garrett did a western, Peter Lundy And The Medicine Hat Stallion where his androgynous look was exploited to the max.Richard Boone is in this as well, playing an elderly drunken sheriff who is pretty ineffectual against Palance's gang. He sounds like his dialog was badly voiced over and not in his voice. That same year he did the John Wayne classic The Shootist and Boone sounded just fine there.I hope all the players got more than a trip to Israel and a spaghetti dinner for this film. I hope their salary checks cleared before one foot of film was shot.

The strangest thing of all about this terrible western is that while it has the look feel and especially the SOUND (loud, overdone) of a spaghetti western, most of the talent involved in the top positions were not European, including the director. Also, the three male leads did not sound right. The lead Lee van Cleef, sounded like himself most of the time , but Jack Palance and Richard Boone were dubbed. This is especially clear with Richard Boone who has a very distinctive voice. If someone out there can tell me why you would dub a distinctive sounding American actor's voice into English, please tell me. I liked the plot twist of the twin brother but this is a bad movie. Enough said!