Best movie of this year hands down!

A Disappointing Continuation

Clever and entertaining enough to recommend even to members of the 1%

The movie runs out of plot and jokes well before the end of a two-hour running time, long for a light comedy.

One of those Col. Tom Parker-ish vehicles for the rising pop musician, but even at their worst, the Elvis movies would manage a moment of wit that made them bearable. Little Rita nel West is a decidedly inferior offering in the category. All but one of the musical numbers terrible, with star Rita Pavone English-dubbed for dialogue, Italian lip-synched for the songs. The Monkees did this sort of thing better. Little Rita is one big labored joke, a clunky spoof of spaghetti Westerns so lacking in subtlety that it's easy to tell that the movie was made for an audience no older than twelve. Little Rita's appearance in defiance of her chronological age seems to have been expressly engineered for that demographic. Then after an hour of cinematic imbecility she sings "Tu Sei Come", a longing, melancholy ballad perfectly shot day for night, and with one song nearly redeems this silly movie.

Known as Crazy Westerners or Little Rita in the West. This movie is directed by Ferdinando Baldi, this film was suppose to be a funny musical spoof of Spaghetti Westerns genre! Little Rita (Rita Pavone) has a dream: she dreams of a better world with her Indian Chief pal Bisonte Seduto (Gordon Mitchell) and her German friend Francis (Lucio Dalla). In some versions, Rita is known as Little Jane, and her Indian Chief Pal name is Sitting Bison, Silly Bull, and others. So she has decided to blow up all the gold she can put her hands on by stealing from famous cowboys and outlaws. One by one, Little Rita track down some the Old West biggest legends such Ringo (Kirk Morris) and Django (Lucio Rosato) and go toe to toe with them. Kirk Morris playing Ringo looks and is dressed more like Clint Eastwood's No Name, and Lucio Rosato looks like a mirror image of Franco Nero's Django. It was until she met Black Star (Terence Hill) that she finally met her match. Hill's character Black Star was called Texas Joe in the German version by the way. In an obvious attempt to exploit the later success of 1970's Trinita played by Terence Hill, this film was rereleased in France with all the music sequences edited out and the character of Black Star baptized Trinita. A certain amount of jocks and puns was also added in the French translation of the dialogue supposedly to reinforce the comical dimension of the film. The fair amount of jokes are hit and misses. It poke fun at the anti-capitalist idiosyncrasies of some of the early political westerns, scripted by Franco Solinas. The movie is full of cheese moments that are just hilarious or awful. The bullet hitting a bullet scene was pretty awesome. Twice. It got a bit silly when a bullet go into another man's gun. The gold rocket launcher was just insane. It made me laugh, but gees, I didn't know they had gold rocket launcher in the old west. I guess this movie is really not going for historic accurate with such references such as dirty movies, machine guns, golf clubs and the silly gold bullet proof vest. Sorry, but bullet proof vest don't work that way. You can't get shot at, and not have any bullet holes in your shirt, or no kick back react to getting blasted at. The action scenes are pretty OK, but it's those one shot kill that make Spaghetti Westerns so messy. Bodycount: ca. 10 Gringos, ca. 13 Mexicans. It's weird in a way, that after a bit of action and death. Everybody starts singing and dancing as if the Wicked Witch was dead. The movie is full of clumsily choreographed dancing scenes. I do like the scene in which an Indian brave pantomimes the various ways of torturing a prisoner to death. That was pretty funny. There is a lot of mediocre songs sung by Italian pop star Rita Pavone. Pavone sings with a high-pitched, shrill voice and a strong Turin accent, which makes it hard to understand her lyrics. Rita Povone sounds like an annoying chipmunk in some of these songs. "Little Rita", "You are like", "For a gunshot" "A sheriff that you are respected" are songs that is hard to tell apart, because they all sound the same to me. It's catchy, but it doesn't help that the songs were not dub in English, while everything else is. The dubbing is awful. Not only does it not match, but characters names keep changing throughout the film. It was a bit funny that the Native American Silly Bull was talking in one scene as if he was a German. The editing isn't that good. Some scenes ending very quickly after the last line of dialogue and giving the film a rushed feel in a few places. The picture quality is decent - only light grain, but colors are slightly faded and there is minor speckling and print damage throughout. During some scenes, there is a slight bar on the left of the screen that changes colors - this is mostly covered by over-scan and not generally noticeable during watching. This movie is insultingly stupid to Spagnetti Westerns fans. To have Rita Pavone, a pop singers make fools out of Western legends like Ringo and Django is just lame. Reportedly Pavone was very dynamic and her restless behavior on the set led to minor incidents with other actors. To give you an example of what I meant by this, let's say American produce a film in which Lindsey Lohan play a cowboy who kill off all the great American Westerns characters like Clint Eastwood's Man with no Name or John Wayne's Rooster Cogburn because they were a bit greedy. That would angry you. Thus this is why this film isn't that good. The film wasn't for any Spagnetti Westerns fan, it was intended to be a showcase for Italian pop star Rita Pavone. It mocks or parodying typical most love characters. The Title sequence to this movie is like Grease or Pink Panther, a stupid cartoon that really doesn't help make the movie any better. While Rita Pavone is pretty cute, and her singing isn't nails scratching on a chalkboard horrible. Just seeing her in this film seem out of place. That's why this movie has no home in Spagnetti Western collection.

The 'Spaghetti Western' fan's Bible, 'The Good, The Bad and The Violent' by Thomas Weisser really gives this movie a hard time, even voting it one of the Top 10 Worst Spaghetti Westerns Of All Time(No.9 to be exact)...but that's all a little too harsh. Compared to the Franco and Ciccio efforts, or any movie by Demofilo Fidani, or indeed any of the cheap, shoddy Sartana cash-ins; this is quite a solid little movie.And it's good for a laugh.Weisser and his cohorts even admit that the sequences in the movie featuring Django are quite droll. As are the scenes with Johnny Ringo and Black Star(called Black 'Stand' in the subtitles of the version I watched). Indeed, the scenes which parody the Spaghetti Western cliches are extremely stylish and very well done.The song and dance numbers, often cut from American prints, are quite bizarre and I feel that this movie would be better served on a double-bill with 'Head', the Monkees movie.A word of warning though, if you see this movie on the Japanese DVD then you'd be as well turning the English Subtitles OFF if you want to follow the plot as they make no sense whatsoever...especially in the lyrics to the songs. Or keep them on and get an extra few laughs for your money.All in all I enjoyed this fun movie and it's certainly an alternative to, say, the vile misogyny of something like Cut-Throats Nine.

Weird Mixture of Western-Parody and Musical. Rita Pavone looks strangely androgynous in this movie, I can't say if she's really a woman or not. O_Othe musical scenes are typical 60s style,and a bit annoying. The overall atmosphere is light-hearted, although the jokes are VERY dated.I only know the german-dubbed version, so I'm sure the italian dialogue had to be extensively rewritten to make sense in german. This is generally a enjoyable,but still very strange western-parody with outlandish musical songs and equally weird dancing sequences.Good for your weekend thrash video night. :-)