Just perfect...

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

To all those who have watched it: I hope you enjoyed it as much as I do.

if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

I've 200 Spaghetti Westerns, so I watch a lot that most people would consider of borderline merit, so I'm very capable of overlooking production shortcuts for the sake of the bigger picture. I couldn't with this one. It wasn't so much awful as it was really incompetent.Fred Williamson does well in the lead role...but he should stay away from script writing!!! Or at least hire a consultant that knows something about the period? Get a continuity editor? Learn some basic physics? Technically the history, physical possibility of a thing happening, etc., was actually as bad as Quentin Tarantino. Which is interesting because this is obviously the basis for Django Unchained, and it really shows what an idiot Tarantino is that he couldn't improve on this cow pat.The errors are legion. Makes me rate Spaghetti Westerns higher. Ever the worst of the worst never make any of the glaring mistakes this one does. The worst has to be the attitude change in the female lead. When? Why? How? No. Just happens. 13 shots from two six shooters. People 200 yards behind a person they're chasing firing six shooters, some pointing up into the air, in what would simply have been a waste of ammunition. No one reloads even once in the movie. Dynamite 2 years before it was commercially available. Joshua looses hardware constantly...and then it's magically back in the next scene. And some stuff that is just so non-sensical and pointless that even Tarantino would cringe. Well, I guess not, because he remade it. The scene where the old outlaw dies. Besides what he did would take hours, it's just POINTLESS! Not to mention it spawns yet another continuity error in the following scene. You could write five pages on the continuity errors section of this page.I gave it a 2 instead of a 1 because the scenery was nice, it was a western and Fred was OK. It is the first SW in my collection of 200 that I will not be archiving. Yep. First ever, watch and dump. Given my elastic tastes in the genre, that's really saying something.

I remember seeing this movie years ago, and my memories of it were that it was a pretty decent western. So when I got the chance to see it again I took the opportunity. Sadly, time had faded the negative things about this movie.To be sure, there are a few positive things I can say. Williamson is an imposing figure, dressed in black. The scenery, often covered in packs of snow, is impressive. Combining the scenery with the musical score makes for some haunting sequences.But most of the movie doesn't work. To begin with, the characters. Williamson's character isn't well developed; he doesn't have that many chances to speak, or have an opportunity to make a character. The bad guys are even thinner characters, all of them seemingly alike.There is also a lot of poor direction. Take the scene with the rattlesnake, for instance. There should be some tension and suspense with such a deadly animal, but there is NO feeling at all! It's presented in the dullest way possible, a feeling that keeps coming up in the rest of the movie.Although some of the music is haunting, the low budget of the movie means that the same bars of music are played over and over, which becomes annoying. But a bigger problem (and the main problem I had with the movie) is that this movie is VERY slow and padded. Although it runs only about 82 minutes, a good chunk of this could easily been taken out with a snappier pace and some wise editing. Though this would probably resulted in a running time not qualifying for a feature-length movie.One last thing I would like to bring up: The pan-and-scanning of this widescreen movie is TERRIBLE. You can't properly read the opening and closing credits, and when there is more than one character on screen, one of them is often cut off (sometimes ALL of the characters are chopped offscreen!) This movie needs to be seen in its full widescreen glory, but since the movie is now in the public domain, it seems very unlikely anyone would spend the expense to release this movie on DVD restored.

This film I consider a very good example of how a film may elicit a variety of responses. I have learned not to take too seriously the comments by others or I may miss a real gem. Not that I would put this film in the gem category but definitely the good side of in-between. I am amazed to read how some abhorred the music. I recall how the music in Keoma drove some people crazy while others (like me) liked it. In Joshua the music fit the film perfectly, especially the low growl when the camera turned to the black rider. So (as we well understand) people's tastes vary. I went for the acting in this one also. I even liked the bad teeth on those ugly bad guys. Though I prefer an unpredictable story line, this film can be good when one prefers sometime something simple. Credibility got stretched for my taste but the music saved it for me. Not bad. I won't forget this one.

This really isn't as bad as the other review makes it sound. It does have a simple plot, and actually moves along fairly quick. Not much time is spend on any sort of character development, but we've all seen these types of characters in every other western anyhow. It's true that there is not a lot of dialog from Fred Williamson, but his character (Joshua) is a lone cowboy sneaking along quietly through the desert. What would he say? And to who? The film has a real nice gritty Italian look to it and its starkness works fairly well with the story. It's not going to be the greatest movie you've ever seen but it's interesting enough to watch once. I saw this on DVD which was made for a letter boxed version. They didn't shrink the image or pan and scan etc. So sometimes the picture is cut off a little. It was slightly annoying to watch.