Cut Throats Nine

Army officer Sgt Brown – Bronson in some versions – is charged with escorting seven ruthless convicts to the prison at fort Green. He's got a personal interest in the motley crew: One of them was responsible for the murder of his wife.

The journey has barely gotten underway when the coach is ambushed by mountain men after the shipment of gold which the coach is supposed to routinely carry. None can be found and so they slaughter the cavalry escort and send the carriage off at a frantic pace.

Brown manages to get to the front and grabs the reins but cannot bring the panicked horses under control and is thus compelled to jump clear with his daughter Sarah, who is accompanying him on the trip, before the vehicle runs off the track.

Taking command of the situation, the Sergeant determines to bring the men to the fort. It a 400 mile trek across difficult terrain in the middle of winter. There's little in the way of provisions and one of the convicts has sustained a broken leg in the crash.

Hardly the situation to encourage honour among thieves – or cut-throats – then, with the injured man dispatched during the night by one of his erstwhile companions. Brown, however, responds punitively: The remaining six prisoners will carry the dead man with them regardless.

After a while another motive beyond survival and revenge or escape emerges: In a piece of simultaneously extra-diegetic symbolism and plot trickery, the men's leg chains are made of gold – that same gold the mountain men were seeking…

A New York Times critic once said Sergio Leone's The Good the Bad and the Ugly would have been better termed "The Burn, the Gouge and the Mangle". It's probably a good things they never saw this Spanish entry, which just about lives up to its reputation as the most violent Euro western ever made – though Guilio Questi's Django Kill for one gives it a run for its money – thanks to rape, murder, torture, and gruesome, lingering and excessive gore effects – exploding heads, burned bodies, slashed stomachs leaking entrails etc – as the death trip really gets underway and the battles of wills and wits between the Sergeant and his charges escalates.

There's a bit more to Cut Throats Nine than simple nastiness for nastiness sake, however, with some interesting ideas and use of technique – freeze frames segueing into flashbacks; hard-boiled voice-over (always an expedient trick when making a low budget film that's to be dubbed into various languages), a moment of hallucinatory reverse motion – and a thoroughgoing sense of bleakness to rival – even surpass – Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence.

The best point of comparison would however seem to be Henri-Georges Clouzot's The Wages of Fear for its equally nihilistic worldview, denying the values of honour, heroism and – indeed – basic greed. For what good is money if you aren't going to be around to use it?