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All Mike Sturges (Steve Reeves) and his brother Roy (Sergio De Vecchi)
want is to track down the rustlers who have stolen their cattle ... but
it's there bad fortune that they camp too close to the traintracks one
night, and then a train is robbed of its gold shipment, the two are shot
at and wounded through no fault of their own, and without trial or
anything they are convicted to labour camp by an over-ambitious Sheriff
(Guido Lollobrigida). In the labour camp, Roy dies, but Mike vows revenge,
incites a rebellion, and soon the guards are overcome, and while many of
the other convicts are recaptured by bounty hunters or die on their way
through the desert, Mike makes it through alive, gets new clothes and
information from a whore he knows (Rosalba Neri), puts two and two
together ... and sets out on a road to revenge: Thing is, he figures the
Sheriff who sent him to the labour camp didn't do this out of pure
ambition, but he was/still is in league with Mayner (Wayde Preston), an
old acquaintance of Mike's whom he has met only the night of the robbery
near the train tracks. So Mike follows one clue after the next until he
can track down the weakest link of the gang in a hut in the mountains and
thus lure the Sheriff and his henchmen out into the open, to gun them down
one by one. When Mayner arrives on the scene, he soon sees Mike has the
upper hand, thus rushes to the site where the loot is hidden - but Mike
tracks him down, withstands the temptation to become Mayner's partner (and
share the loot), and defeats him in a fight fair and square ... but
instead of killing him, he takes him to the labour camp he has escaped of,
to have him worked to death there ... Ex-Mister Universe
and peplum superstar Steve Reeves' last film is arguably also his best:
While most of his earlier costume efforts were little more than simplistic
pieces of escapism relying more on his physique than anything else, A
Long Ride from Hell is a rather intelligent piece of Western, and
Reeves' acting, if not outstanding, is rather adequate (though he still
has a couple of scenes to show off his muscles to be sure). Even within
the spaghetti Western genre, which was already beginning to wane in the
late 1960's due to oversaturation, this was a very decent effort, the
story is (mildly) original and offers surprises, the direction is solid,
and the whole thing is made with care. That said though, A Long Ride
from Hell, while a very decent last film for Reeves as it would be for
most any actor, is hardly a classic and little more than a footnote in
genre history - point is, the film might be good but it's not special in
any way: The spaghetti Western genre has given birth to quite a number of
undisputed and highly original classics, original for a wide variety of
reasons, and to many more so-bad-they're-good trainwrecks of movies that
one likes to show at parties - and A Long Ride from Hell quite
simply is neither, it's just a very ok film but neither as attractive as
the really good nor the bad ...
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