Night of the Serpent (1969)

Original title: La notte dei serpenti

aka Nest of Vipers

Alcoholic gringo Luke (Luke Askew) has been taken in by one of the archetypal gangs of bandits/revolutionaries that dominate Italian Mexico and the border regions of the US to Mexico. The charming people use Luke as their mascot and punching bag. The band’s leader is not completely without morals – even if it’s the sort that’ll not hinder him from killing quite ruthlessly – yet he’s not above lending Luke out as the perfect scapegoat and one-time killer for the plans of the police chief (which means he is his own kind of little violent potentate) of a neighbouring village. That man (Luigi Pistilli) has gotten in on reaping the fruits of a semi-accidental killing, and he and his not quite so willing co-conspirators just need somebody like Luke to either kill a child, or at least take the fall for the deed.

Turns out they couldn’t have chosen a worse alcoholic, for Luke’s mandatory trauma is just the right one to get him to leave off the tequila, take up his gun, and do some very practical things to assuage his guilt.

Just when I thought I finally truly had seen all the good films the Spaghetti Western had to offer and was basically down to Demofilo Fidano films (a fate as worse as death, and probably more painful than most deaths), along comes Giulio Petroni’s Night of the Serpent. I shouldn’t be too surprised, really, because Petroni’s handful of westerns is always at least interesting.

As a director Petroni here fluctuates between competently regurgitating stylistic elements of the genre he’s working in (his fast eye zooms are particularly dangerous there) and breaking them up or in with moments reminding me of completely different things. There are, for example, a handful of scenes staged as if they belonged into an old west gothic, or perhaps an atypical giallo. Particularly the initial murder-by-accident comes to mind here, but there are bits and pieces of this sort sprinkled throughout the film, turning it at times into something stranger or perhaps more personal than your typical Spaghetti Western.

Petroni also adds quite a few other strange moments to the film – there’s for example the mildly perverse subplot about two of the conspirators – the local priest and the local prostitute – and the rather unhealthy thing that’s going on between them. These moments give the film a peculiar mood and demonstrate a good degree of disgust towards your typical bourgeois, towards minor authority figures (and the film is good at emphasising how tiny these people’s authority is in the large run of things) who only ever misuse their little power and then whine about the consequences.

Consequently, the film’s positive figures are a self-destructive loser with something to feel as guilty about as his enemies, the local female shaman peyote popper, and a kid who explains he likes a certain of his relations best because that one doesn’t hit him as hard when he beats him up. Oh, it really is 1969, isn’t it?

Night isn’t quite as cynical (I’m tempted to say noirish, given the philosophical outlook) as some other Spaghetti Westerns, so it finds a kind of happy ending that might actually see the surviving characters grown through the violent proceedings. In another fine twist, it does so not in the traditional manner but by breaking up the climactic show-down through some surprising business I’m unwilling to spoil. Petroni is again playing with the expected formula here and at the very least deserves a smile and a bit of praise for that, as well as for turning what could have been a bog standard example of its genre into something a little different, without ever leaving the formula too far behind.

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In short: Dune Warriors (1991)

Welcome to drought plagued post-apocalyptia. A scouting party of decidedly evil warlord William (Luke Askew) takes the small, peaceful village of Chinley (who knows how it is spelled?) that is a water-y paradise in the desert, waiting for William to come and complete the invasion. Val (Jillian McWhirter), the daughter of one of the village elders, knows it’ll be over with any idea of democracy or non-slavery once William takes over, so she sneaks out into the desert to find warriors to get rid of the scouts and fight William.

She’s in luck, too, for fleeing one of those Filipino post-apocalypse movie mainstay groups of angry little persons, she is saved by Michael (David Carradine), who just happens to be William’s arch enemy, even though he isn’t telling that yet. Michael helps Val find the usual bunch of fighters – there’s her new love interest Dorian (Blake Boyd), his friend, the self-declared “scoundrel” John (Rick Hill), who were running a scam in the fine sport of motorcycle jousting, John’s friend, martial artist Ricardo (Dante Varona), and shotgun toting Miranda (Maria Isabel Lopez). Not the magnificent seven, but they’ll have to do.

So soon enough, things will explode, people will be shot, knifed and sworded (technical term), David Carradine’s legs and Maria Isabel Lopez’s breasts will be shown off, and peasants will be trained as warriors. To mix the Seven Samurai formula up somewhat, this village does have its very own traitors.

I often grump about the films directed by Filipino exploitation film king Cirio H. Santiago because I find most of them even more boring than they are shoddy – the capital sin in low budget cinema – but from time to time, I find one I actually enjoy watching.

Dune Warriors does have it rather easy to conquer me (I suspect William would be jealous if I were a village), for if there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s Seven Samurai style films. Not that anyone would confuse Santiago’s approach to the material with Kurosawa or Sturges or Sayles, but it’s a perfectly fine scaffold to hang one’s action scenes on, and a straightforward structure for a plot. Quite unexpectedly for Santiago the director (I generally respect his work as a producer quite a bit more), he doesn’t mess up the traditional structure, but keeps so close to it this is actually a Santiago film I’d call tight. At the very least, the film moves from one fight to the next with pleasant pace, not getting bogged down in bad comedy, or distracted scenes full of nothing.

Santiago still doesn’t like to move his camera much, it seems, yet this time around, the film isn’t killed by the nailed-down camera set-up of doom, and the action sequences are actually edited together from of so many different shots, I suspect you could make three other Santiago films from them. It’s not pretty but it’s dynamic enough to make the action scenes actually entertaining, with many a stunt double throwing himself backwards, random explosions, David Carradine posing with his sword while wearing boots and no trousers, copious blood squibs whenever somebody thought about using them, and a rusty assortment of cars, motorcycles and – of course - dune buggies. It’s not deep, either, but Dune Warriors sure as heck is fun to watch.

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