Kid Vengeance (1977)

Simply A Masterpiece

good back-story, and good acting

It is neither dumb nor smart enough to be fun, and spends way too much time with its boring human characters.

One of the most extraordinary films you will see this year. Take that as you want.

Leif Garrett did this film a year after God's Gun (aka Diamante Lobo). In the previous film, Garrett was quite good in a challenging (for several reasons) role, but his performance felt a bit tentative (also for several reasons). In this film, just one year later and for the same infamous producers, he was confident, sure-footed and turned in a very fine performance. The film was his to carry, and he did so quite well. Garrett was one of Hollywood's most promising young actors at the time, when too many child actors were, at best, barely adequate. True, it was a low budget, cranked out film, but Leif was a class act. Lee Van Cleef had played similar roles before - many times. He could have phoned this one in, and sometimes it looked as though he did. Jim Brown, following up a legendary professional football career with a number of turns as a film actor, handled his assignment competently. The only other actors with anything significant to do were Glynnis O'Connor, who sometimes overacted and wasn't as good as in some of her later roles; John Marley, good as always in the sort of role he has played many times; and David Menachem, an Israeli child actor who did several other American films but somehow didn't catch on. He should have; he was quite good. The production values were much better than God's Gun. The script was much more coherent, the dialogue more speakable, the direction more fluid. At least part of it was shot in New Mexico (the rest in Israel). Being in the US meant that the production was controlled by a SAG contract, always an advantage. Kid Vengeance (also available at one time or another under several other titles: Vengeance, Vendetta, Take Another Hard Ride) gave Garrett the chance to launch a serious career as an actor. He demonstrated that he was up to the challenge. But then the music producers came along. Too bad.

A lot of critics will probably hate this movie because of the fact, that it has teen pop star Leif Garrett seeking vengeance of Spaghetti-Western legend actor Lee Van Cleef. Think of it, in modern terms. It's like watching Justin Bieber VS Javier Bardem in a violent revenge western movie. In my opinion, it didn't bug me so much, because I didn't realize who Leif Garrett was, before watching this movie and didn't care. He wasn't that famous and annoying. One thing that is annoying about this film is how nobody can remember what the title of this movie directed by Joseph Manduke was. Some people think the movie is call Vengeance; while others think it calls Bad Azz Muthaz: Kid Vengeance. Its call Kid Vengeance, most of the time. Plus, some people got this 1977 movie mixed up with another movie from 1975. 'Take on Hard Ride' is another Western movie that Jim Brown and Lee Van Cleef was involved. I don't know how America got confused with the title translations. It didn't help that the film is sometimes call 'Take another Hard Ride' in some theater. Some people think this is a prequel or sequel to it, and it's not. It only has a little bit of similarities to that older film. Other people say it's relate to 1975's God's Gun, because it was shot in Israel. There was a brief flourishing during the 1970s that used the Negev desert in Israel as location for the filming of westerns. The film was produced by the cousins Yoram Globus and Menahem Golan known for leaving their crew for days in the harsh environment. It was a miracle that the film was even shot, because some people refused to return to the location after God's Gun. Lee Van Cleef is reunited with then 15-year old Leif Garrett, who also appeared in God's Gun, but this time around, Garrett is not his apprentice, but his sworn adversary. Don't be fooled in whatever this movie is call: the vengeance in this movie might be exacted by a kid, but it's by no means a kiddie movie. This is your typical dark late-era Spaghetti Western, violent and pretty unrelenting, with a fairly high body count. Lee Van Cleef stars as an evil Willy Nelson look alike, headband wearing evil bandit, name McClain who kills the boy's father and rape his mother. He then kidnaps his sister (Glynnis O'Connor) to be sold later as a sex slave. I don't know he know what McClain's gang was supposed to be; it felt like a bunch of white guys trying to act Hispanic or something. Politically correctness was tossed out of the window in this film indeed. Well, Tom (Leif Garrett) starts following the gang through the desert, picking off the bandits one by one, killing them in gruesome fashion, using bow and arrow, rocks, scorpions and snakes. In other words: everything the desert has to offer, can and will be used against them. Still, how the kid gets a snake into the saddlebags or put a scorpion in a guy boot is left to the imagination. The scene where the rocks dropped on his head in slow motion is laughable. On the way, Tom meets a prospector name Isaac (play by ex-football player Jim Brown) who teams up with Tom after his gold has been stolen by the bandits. I really don't know why he was in this film with his limited screen time. It was better, just to cut him from the film. I didn't even think he needed the help of Jim Brown most of the time. It felt like I was watching a weird version of Huckleberry Finn or something. Jim Brown seems so out of place. Van Cleef, Brown and Garrett do their best, but eventually the film looks as cheap as it probably was. It was full of one shot kills, bad dubbing that was out of sync, dead people blinking, scenes that you can't tell if it's night or day, and gunsmoke appears about 5 seconds before you hear a gunshot. The actors look tired. As working conditions must have been very difficult due to the heat of the desert, and in some scenes Van Cleef is visibly suffering from the atrocious heat. The quality of the DVD isn't good. It looks like a bad VHS copy with scratches, and discoloring. There are some good things about the film. I love that the film deals with Tom's coming to age revenge story. There is a pretty good scene in the beginning where Tom's father teach the boy, the different between hunting and killing. I do have to say the rabbit, they hunt do look like it was killed on film. I don't know if it's animal cruelty or not. I have a feeling, somebody probably indeed ate it. I do like Francesco Masi's fine musical score, it fits the cold tale of revenge. I do like the poster to the film with Garrett arching an arrow. Badass. Overall: if you like 1970's western, then you're probably like this. If you just happen to see it on TV or somewhere. You might think it's awful or average. In my opinion, it's rare to see a kid killing evil outlaws in film nowadays, so this movie might be a treat because that taboo.

When the spaghetti western genre died in Italy, spaghetti western star Lee Van Cleef went to Israel and made a couple of westerns there, "God's Gun" and "Kid Vengeance", which I just watched. It's a pretty cheap-looking affair - producers Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus were pinching pennies even back then. But despite the low budget, the movie is surprisingly involving. It's surprisingly grim, with Van Cleef making a great villain. Surprisingly, a lot of the grimness comes from Leif Garrett, who you may not believe is quite good as an innocent youth who is so traumatized by the murder of his parents that he starts to hunt down and kill (in sometimes brutal ways) the gang members responsible. Jim Brown is also good in a sympathetic role, one that refreshingly doesn't make his race an issue. Maybe this isn't a fabulous western, but if you are a fan of European westerns, chances are you'll find this kosher western very entertaining.

This movie sucks. I hated it, every last minute that I allowed to waste my time. It's sorta nice to see that movies can still inspire sheer, honest dislike even after being taught to be accommodating about art. But I think that this is where we draw the line, at least with Westerns. This one was filmed in Isreal by Italians and with American/Isreali money, and is a fantastic example of a movie that probably never needed to be made. It is lame, formulaic, predictable, writes itself, contains zero surprises or charisma, works as "anti-fun" in that you could potentially have more fun staring at a blank TV screen, and it sucked the will to live out of my eyeballs. With about four minutes to go I shut the DVD player off and went for a walk.Hell, I like low budget, foreign made Westerns, especially when they are made by Italians and starring someone like Lee Van Cleef. I even like the "look" of The Holy Land standing in as the wild west, which looks like the moon at times. But I have my limits. This time out Van Cleef gets to play the bad guy, a rapist and leader of a gang of thugs who exist merely to inhabit a very unimaginative Israeli made Western until being killed by the needs of the plot. The main problem is that Van Cleef doesn't make a very evil villain here, which is surprising considering his truly vile Angel Eyes from THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY. Angel Eyes is the archetype for the Western Gringo Villain. This time out, his character apparently had either plenty of white shirts to change into, or his own laundry delivery out in the middle of the Gobi Desert. He is spotless, suave, well groomed and has the same dry Lee Van Cleef sense of humor -- other than his being a dirtbag and a rapist, I actually kind of liked the guy.THE PLOT: Leif Garrett plays a 12 year old kid who gets to witness his parents being raped and murdered by Van Cleef's motley bunch of misfits and then spends 40 days and 40 nights in the wild taunting and killing them by such tactics as the poisonous snake in the old saddlebag trick (it's not a rattler but some kind of middle eastern Adder variety, and how the kid gets it into the saddlebags is left to the imagination), the old scorpion in the cowboy boots trick, and other imaginative methods of execution that don't really involve having the kid kill anyone. Eventually he meets up with Jim Brown, who doesn't seem to be very interested in being in the film at all. He plays a prospector and there is an annoying subplot about a group of inbred brothers who try to steal his claim which goes nowhere. I think they were supposed to be funny too, which only adds insult to injury for having to watch their on screen "antics". The only thing more disturbing is the way that Garrett's character reacts to having KILLED people, or at least directly causing their deaths, which is about the same way that he might have reacted to falling off his skateboard. It's not his fault though, because the movie just doesn't care how he might have felt about it.Eventually there is a big showdown, and if you've ever seen one Western before you'll be able to predict how it ends up, except that by then we have established a sympathy bond with Van Cleef, who never allows himself to really be as scummy as his gang and insists on being protective + helpful to Garrett's kidnapped, jailbaitish sister, and doesn't jump her pretty bones because he has a little bambino back at home who loves his poppa. Like, yeah right. The most annoying aspect of the film is that as you sit there witnessing it's length you can successfully predict what will happen next right up until the moment when I decided I'd had enough of this crap. Maybe something does happen in the final 4 minutes or so that redeems the rest of the movie, but I rather doubt it and am willing to risk the loss, because like the movie itself, I just don't care.2/10: Check out GOD'S GUN with Van Cleef instead for a better taste of Matzoh Ball Western. Made by the same people in the same place with the same money, and has the distinction of actually being "fun".