Verdict
Summary
If you like Yojimbo, then you’ll find this knock-off tolerable, but otherwise, there’s little to like about this movie.
Plot: Kain (David Carradine), a mercenary warrior, happens upon a village with two clans warring over a water well.
Review: The first thing you’ll notice when you watch this movie is that it’s a dead ringer for the Akira Kurosawa classic, Yojimbo. I don’t mean that it’s like Yojimbo or follows the same structure – I mean it’s Yojimbo. As in, there are shots in the movie that was lifted from the Kurosawa flick. It’s storytelling at its laziest, but if you’re going to plagiarize someone, Kurosawa’s film is a great subject.
David Carradine plays the lead and mostly seems incredibly bored. Maybe it’s all the boobs in the movie. If you long for the days of gratuitous female nudity in cinema, I suggest you stop reading this review and watch this movie immediately. Wherever Carradine’s view lies, there are naked boobs, including, at one point, a woman with four of them. It’s literally a boob-a-thon.
The other characters are not much better. There’s a lizard puppet that I found oddly endearing – but I can’t say the same for any of the human characters. It mainly was stock characters – the conniving villain, the beautiful ingenue, the helpful elderly companion – nothing new to see here. Because they chose to follow Yojimbo, there are no surprises, and no characters can elevate themselves from their pre-destined roles.
Also, the pacing is plodding because it’s just Yojimbo in Monument Valley. Carradine spends most of the movie skulking around and playing both sides against each other – it’s all pretty pedestrian. The soundtrack is nothing special, and I doubt I would recognize it if you played it for me now. The sets are okay (I swear I saw a cardboard cut-out for a villager at one point). The costumes are standard post-apocalyptic fare – when the characters have costumes (did I mention the boobs?)
There is not much more to say about this movie. I don’t like films that take plots verbatim of better films and just re-mount them with different characters. Even if no one saw Yojimbo (or Fistful of Dollars or Last Man Standing) and was seeing this story for the first time, I would still refer them to one of the other versions. This is just a very watered-down version of a much better film. See it for the boobs, or if you want to see David Carradine looking at boobs. Otherwise, you can skip this one.