Massacre Time

Tom gets a letter at the mine and comes home to find the Scott family running his town. His brother Jeff is permanently drunk, the townspeople have gone quiet, the arrangement is settled. The plot is familiar, and the plot is not what holds the film up. Producers hired Lucio Fulci for his first western precisely because they wanted a violent director. The most notorious scene proves the point: Tom, played by Franco Nero, is flogged with a bullwhip by the psychotic son of the family. It runs long, carries no music and shows the wounds. That sequence was cut by British censors for decades. The screenplay is by Fernando Di Leo, who would go on to become one of the central figures of Italian crime cinema. George Hilton plays the brother, and the relationship between the two men is the best thing here. Its flaws are conventional plotting, weak connective scenes and a score below the standard of its era. Who it is for: fans of the harsher wing of the spaghetti western. Who it is not for: viewers expecting classic western pacing.