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Little Carlos (Luis Castro) is a troubled child sadly missing a
father figure. & when he learns that his father was, before his
untimely dead when trying a stagecoach stunt, a stuntman in
Italo-Westerns together with his grandfather Julian (Sancho Garcia), he,
instead of going on a schooltrip, heads off to Almeria, where his father
& gramps were shooting the films. But what was once a buzzing area
swarming with filmcrews has now become the rundown Texas-Hollywood, a
Western town for tourists where Julian does second-rate stuntshows with
a small crew of losers, for an even smaller audience.
Still, Carlos
befriends the old man & his associates & they soon start a
father-son relationship ... that is, until Carlos' mother Laura (Carmen
Maura), a rich businesswoman in the process of creating a holiday
resort, steps in ... & she not only takes Carlos back but also buys
the land on which Hollywood Texas is stending to tear it down &
build her resort. But she has not accounted for the inventiveness of
Julian, seemingly an old drunk but still man enough to incite his fellow
cowboys to protect their country (even though it was never
theirs in the first place). So he buys the whole bullet supply from a
nearby armsdealer (incidently 800, hence the title) & barricades
himself & his fellow actors inside the town, giving the demolition
company contracted to tear down the city & later the authorities a
fierce fight. & even Carlos finds a way to rejoin his gramps...
But
when the situation gets ever tighter, rifts in the group occur, as
fellow actor/stuntman Cheyenne (Angel de Andres Lopez) questions
Julian's authority, & when all the actors are offered jobs in the
new resort, he finally sees a chance to win leadership over the group,
telling everybody what really happened when Carlos' father died - that
Julian, due to heavy drinking, fucked up the stunt. But even though left
by everybody, even Carlos, Julian doesn't give up (& it's better
that way since the jobs in the holiday ressort were a blatant lie by
Laura).
In the end he & Cheyenne have a final duel in which Julian
is shot ... but Laura has since seen the error of her ways & it
makes her a better person (what ?), & to Julian's funeral, even
Clint Eastwood, of whom he claimed to be a lifelong friend, shows up ... True,
this movie has extensive action & is occasionally really funny too,
but despite many a bullet, the overall appearance is just too
bittersweet, I might even go so far & say, too Disney - after all,
this is a movie about a little boy who, not content with the upbringing
of his businesswoman mother, learns the real values of life from his
simpler grandfather, & in the end even the mother sees the error of
her ways.
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