Learning that he has inherited a share in a silver mine from his uncle, actor Joe (Anthony Steffen) journeys to the town of Landberry to stake his claim. He arrives to find the town in thrall to the Berg (Eduardo Fajardo) and his gang of thugs. Worse, Berg refuses to acknowledge Joe's claim on the mine, saying instead that he won the place, lock, stock and barrel in a card game; apparently he never loses.
After Joe and Berg have played cat and mouse with one another, confirming the former's prowess and the latter's ruthlessness, one of Berg's ex-employees comes out of hiding and supplies Joe with the proof he needs, that Berg forced Joe's uncle to sign over his stake, then arranged to have him killed in an accident, but is then gunned down by one of Berg's goons. Joe barely manages to escape…
Armed with this new evidence, the sheriff feels compelled to go confront Berg. Berg professes disappointment that his old childhood friend should have suffered a stirring of conscience and not turned out bad, shoots him dead and sends a horse back into town with an ultimatum for the citizens: hand over Joe or else. But while most run for cover a few – including a saloon girl, a sottish barber and his ward – decide that enough is enough and, High Noon like, stand their ground with Joe…
While hardly the most original spaghetti western, Un Uomo chiamato Apocalisse Joe / Apocalypse Joe offers a number of pleasurable riffs on the established formula circa 1971 – Sabata and Sartana are the two obvious names / reference points – in presenting a surprisingly moral trickster type protagonist who prefers to use his wits as much as his gun. (Or, rather, the two in combination, as when in the opening sequence he takes out five opponents single handedly with a pistol concealed behind Yorick's skull during a performance of (Johnny) Hamlet)
Though Anthony Steffen often comes in for criticism as wooden and uncharismatic, I can't say I've ever had any particular issues with him, in either gialli or spaghetti westerns. As in The Stranger's Gundown he looks rugged enough and brings the requisite degrees of enigma and stoicism, though here tempers this with a lighter touches in terms of the aforementioned Shakespearian thesping, while Eduardo Fajardo provides a fine foil as his dastardly nemesis.
With equally fine supporting play – even it the characters are strictly at the level of clichéd heavies, saloon girls and old timers – a quality Bruno Nicolai score – so, good, in fact, that portions of it seem to have been reused or recycled in a number of other films, like My Name is Shanghai Joe – and competent helming from a director, Leopoldo Savina, who knows what his target audience want and gives them it in spades, with a final Grand Duel that seems to go on forever, yet displays enough dynamism and inventiveness to avoid becoming boring – as a whole Apocalypse Joe is hard to fault. Not a pasta masterpiece, but a satisfying helping of spaghetti.
German distributor X Rated / Cult's Region 2 PAL DVD is par for the course, in terms of a decent widescreen original aspect ratio presentation of a production whose age shows at times and choice of equally bad English and German audio tracks. The extras comprise various versions of the opening credits – German, Italian, English – a trailer, and, for no obvious reason other than being released by the same company, a trailer for Mannaja .
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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