Friday, November 30, 2018

HARD BREED TO KILL (1967) **


A gang of bank robbers led by Slim Pickens attack a rancher, kidnap his wife, steal his horses, and leave him for dead.  As Slim and his men head into Indian territory, the rancher nurses his wounds and takes off in hot pursuit.  While the robbers endlessly bicker, the rancher picks them off one by one to reclaim his wife and exact his revenge.  

Well, when Rafael Portillo, the director of the Aztec Mummy movies makes a Mexican western with Slim Pickens, you can be damn sure I’m going to watch it.  Portillo offers up a handful of nicely shot scenic vistas, which lends the otherwise cheap-o film a much-needed shot of production value.  It’s also a bit grislier than some of its contemporaries.  We get a few slashed throats and a scene where our hero impales a bad guy on his walking stick. 

However, that’s not quite enough to make Hard Breed to Kill a quality south of the border oater.  The film suffers from a repetitive nature that prevents it from gathering much momentum.  After a solid set-up, it eventually devolves into an endless series of scenes of bad guys looking for water, making camp, nodding off, and shoving off in the morning.  The flashbacks (in which the wife remembers her husband teaching her how to survive in the wild) serves to flesh out their relationship, but it ultimately slow things down even more. 

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