Apache Blood (1975)

Ray Danton
Dewitt Lee

Inventory

• Bear fighting
• Cactus calthrops
• A music box
• Rattlesnake chucking
• Wild pigs
• Biting the head off a live lizard

Summary
The movie opens with the notorious Apache war chief Yellow Shirt chasing, killing, and scalping an army courier. A narrator provides a bit of back story, which shows Yellow Shirt to have a legitimate beef with the U.S. Cavalry. The courier, we soon discover, was bringing a message to a small surveying team consisting of a Major, five troopers, and a civilian scout, telling them to return to the fort because Yellow Shirt is on the war path.

The directing, camera work, and editing are unspeakable. For some reason, this movie contains a lot of extreme closeups, occasionally of miscellaneous body parts, such as feet, and more frequently with the camera not well centered on the actor's face. These are normally reaction shots, either one of the troopers trying his best to look concerned or Yellow Shirt simply looking inscrutable. The frequent and inexplicable cuts within a scene bring to mind a seriously low-end music video.

This film actually made a respectable effort to depict the Apaches as great and mysterious warriors. None of them speak, which meant that they didn't have to fake Apache and pay for subtitles. The sad fact is that they end up looking like the least competent group of bad guys since Hogan's Heroes as the entire band is killed, one-by-one, by a nearly dead cripple. The climactic chase scene at the end could easily have been called the The World's Slowest Indian.

The movie staggers to an end three times. In the first, our hero is shot dead by a soldier a hundred yards from the safety of the fort. Not shot dead, as in Dawn of the Dead, where it was bitterly ironic, or as in Platoon, where it was allegory. This is clearly a case of the two Lee brothers, sitting around the table, trying to find an ending.

"Wait, I know. What if I shoot him just before he gets to the fort? No one will see that coming."

The movie then has a five-minute montage of the key scenes, in a slightly jumbled order. This may have been an attempt to get arty, as Sam dies, but he wasn't present for many of the scenes, so it makes no sense at all. Finally, the movie ends a third time with the camera panning slowly over a charcoal portrait of Yellow Shirt for three minutes, while someone sings a song called, "A Man Called She", which is just as bad as it sounds.

Dewitt Lee was one of the co-writers, along with his brother Jack, both of whom figure in the ridiculous ending. What's interesting is that they appear to have made exactly one more film, The Legend of Jedediah Carver, that would appear (according to IMDB) to have the exact same plot.

Ray Danton had a successful acting career that ended soon after this disaster (go figure), but not before he played Derek Flint in a television movie. He did go on to become a highly successful television director. On a personal note, Danton went to school at Carnegie Tech, as did your humble reviewer.

Since the cast and crew are all clearly American, this doesn't actually qualify as a spaghetti western, particularly as it was filmed in central Arizona. I'm including it for completeness, since it showed up on the DVD.

Dialogue
Considering that almost two-thirds of the movie has no one speaking and that less than half the cast say a single word, it's just not possible to find a single quotation that captures the dialogue in this movie.

Story

If this isn't the worst movie that I've ever seen, I must have suppressed the memories of those that were worse. Honestly, a high school drama class could have done a better job.

Music

The oddest part of this movie, which is saying a lot, is that the soundtrack is actually pretty good (excepting the completely bizarre concluding song). Ed Norton is listed as having provided original music, but considering that he only composed for three movies (and based upon "A Man Called She", I've got a good idea why), but served as sound editor for literally hundreds of television episodes, I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that much of it was put together using stock music. At least Norton made a serious effort to find music that fit the action on the screen, even when the dialogue, acting, or cinematography didn't.

Acting

The best acting by far is by the spouses of the two protagonists, to whom the movie cuts at regular intervals. Neither speaks a line, but both do a nice job of wandering around the set and trying to look busy.