R. Nathan Hund I've 200 Spaghetti Westerns, so I watch a lot that most people would consider of borderline merit, so I'm very capable of overlooking production shortcuts for the sake of the bigger picture. I couldn't with this one. It wasn't so much awful as it was really incompetent.Fred Williamson does well in the lead role...but he should stay away from script writing!!! Or at least hire a consultant that knows something about the period? Get a continuity editor? Learn some basic physics? Technically the history, physical possibility of a thing happening, etc., was actually as bad as Quentin Tarantino. Which is interesting because this is obviously the basis for Django Unchained, and it really shows what an idiot Tarantino is that he couldn't improve on this cow pat.The errors are legion. Makes me rate Spaghetti Westerns higher. Ever the worst of the worst never make any of the glaring mistakes this one does. The worst has to be the attitude change in the female lead. When? Why? How? No. Just happens. 13 shots from two six shooters. People 200 yards behind a person they're chasing firing six shooters, some pointing up into the air, in what would simply have been a waste of ammunition. No one reloads even once in the movie. Dynamite 2 years before it was commercially available. Joshua looses hardware constantly...and then it's magically back in the next scene. And some stuff that is just so non-sensical and pointless that even Tarantino would cringe. Well, I guess not, because he remade it. The scene where the old outlaw dies. Besides what he did would take hours, it's just POINTLESS! Not to mention it spawns yet another continuity error in the following scene. You could write five pages on the continuity errors section of this page.I gave it a 2 instead of a 1 because the scenery was nice, it was a western and Fred was OK. It is the first SW in my collection of 200 that I will not be archiving. Yep. First ever, watch and dump. Given my elastic tastes in the genre, that's really saying something.

Uriah43 With the Civil War just ended a Union soldier by the name of "Joshua" (Fred Williamson) is looking forward to starting a new life and is on his way to meet his mother who had been staying with a young couple who are about to be married. Unfortunately, upon arriving there he learns that 5 men have killed his mother and abducted the young woman (played by Brenda Venus). Since the trail is still relatively fresh and the posse has abandoned the search Joshua decides to hunt down the murderers on his own. And none of these outlaws have ever faced anything so deadly. Now rather than reveal any more of this movie I will just say that it had a fairly interesting plot. However, the music played during several of the action scenes was rather annoying, the character development needed improvement and some of the scenarios lacked any sense of realism. To top it off, I didn't especially care for the ending either. In essence then, what should have been a pretty good Blaxploitation Western turned out to be slightly below average and I recommend it only to those who might be interested in a film of this sub-genre.

Poseidon-3 Blaxploitation figure Williamson starred in and wrote this western revenge saga which bears a passing resemblance to the equally cheap "Cry Blood, Apache". He plays a returning Civil War soldier coming to meet his mother Jackson who is a domestic for Hendrick and Venus, a farmer and his mail-order wife. When a gaggle of dusty outlaws stops in for some drinks and vittles, they begin to eye Venus and a scuffle breaks out in which Jackson is killed. When Williamson finds out that his mother is dead, he sets out to systematically eliminate the quintet of killers who, incidentally, have taken Venus with them for comfort. Like many films before and after this one, a lone man stalks and kills a series of bad guys, always finding a way to get each one alone. This wouldn't be so bad if the killings had been handled in any sort of creative or arresting way. Williamson cuts a nice figure, all in black, against the dusty landscape and he's intimidating to be sure. Unfortunately, with an exception or two, he makes the other actors look like they just got the script seconds before the cameras rolled. Hendrick does okay with his small role and Vega isn't bad as a woman who briefly distracts and aids Williamson during his quest. Bartlett, as the ringleader of the villains, is nice to look at, but has no remarkable personality to offer. Willingham plays a character named Weasle and is excruciating to listen to, always screeching and laughing obnoxiously. The worst, however, is Venus. It's impossible to imagine that the sounds she emits through her voice-box could come from a human being and not a marsupial who is being dangled over a vat of boiling sulfur and oil. Her character is very badly conceived to begin with, but she sinks it even further with her thoroughly inept portrayal. By the time she's ready to be rescued, the audience has already been praying for most of the movie that she'll be shot in the head! Whoever's idea it was to make the kidnap victim completely unbearable should have been straightened out right away! The other major debit of the film is the agonizing musical score. The same six-note sequence is played, with an occasional variation, over and OVER and O-V-E-R throughout the course of the movie! Every once in a while, something else is played, but mostly it's this same droning, horrid bit of music that threatens to continue forever. Williamson makes this passable, but it surely isn't good.

hokeybutt JOSHUA: THE BLACK RIDER (3 outta 5 stars) I am almost tempted to give this movie 5 out of 5 stars because it is almost perfect in its simplicity... a western movie can't get much more straight-forward than this: a man's mother is killed... and he spends the rest of the movie tracking and killing the men who did it. But, really, the acting is kind of poor and the direction is uninspired. There isn't really much dialogue so you can't say the script was well-done. Also, the movie is kind of slow... but personally I don't usually count that as a flaw... I *like* movies that take their time. Fred Williamson plays the title character... the bounty hunter bent on revenge for his mama's demise. The bad guys kidnap a woman along the way and rape her a few times but by the movie's end she has inexplicably allied herself with one of her assailants. Practically the entire soundtrack of this movie is a 90 second piece of faux-spaghetti-western music that gets repeated again and again and again... towards the end of the movie it almost becomes comical when that same old theme is repeated yet again. I think you need to *really* be a fan of westerns to like this one.. otherwise you are probably going to be bored beyond belief.