Apache Blood

Included as part of the 44-film spaghetti western collection I bought last year, the description of 1975's Apache Blood should have sounded alarm bells in my head. I didn't recognize anyone in the cast, and it sounded like a cheap knock-off of Chato's Land and Man in the Wilderness.  I take that back. That is an insult to both those movies. This movie is awful, simply awful. One of the worst I've ever seen.

When his village is wiped out by a cavalry troop, Apache warrior Yellow Shirt (Ray Danton) goes on the warpath with a small band of braves. A small five-man patrol commanded by Lt. Hawkins (Troy Nabors) has received orders to return to the fort, but is slowed down when their scout, Sam Glass (Dewitt Lee), is attacked by a bear. Badly wounded, Sam is left for dead by the patrol and must now fend for himself. Nothing is going to stop Yellow Shirt though, and with no supplies and barely any water, Sam must race across the desert to safety before the Apaches catch up to him.

Through the good, bad and awful, spaghetti westerns almost always have their charm (however twisted and/or bizarre). The only problem? Apache Blood is not a spaghetti western. It was made by Americans with Americans for Americans....very poorly. Filmed on a shoestring budget in the Arizona desert, there is little redeeming about the effort. Lee was the writer here, but from the finished product, I'm guessing he came up with an idea more than an actual script. Dialogue? Yeah, that must have been left on the cutting room floor. Here's a quick synopsis. Scout hurt, scout left behind, scout runs, Indian chases him. That's literally the entire movie with maybe 20 lines of dialogue the whole way.

That all leads me to a somewhat out there conclusion.  Is this dreck supposed to be some sort of existential hogwash, a western story at its most simple? Survival above all else, is that all it could be trying to say?...............No, it's just an awful movie. The above questions would require some sort of pre-production planning that I'm pretty sure didn't happen in preparation for Apache Blood. It reeks of amateur, homemade movies, friends going out into the desert with a video camera and goofing around for a couple hours. Acting? Not so much. Interesting story? That neither. Let me get back to you on something worthwhile, even mildly positive.

'Apache' clocks in at an epically long 89 minutes.  Want a shortcut? With so little dialogue, I watched it on fast-forward in about 40 minutes. Whole scenes have Lee's Sam walking across the desert, the camera following him. Cut to Danton's Yellow Shirt doing the same albeit at a quicker pace. Repeat that 10 to 15 times, and you've got a movie. A chase story could/should have been interesting, but this is dull, repetitive and did I mention dull?

A saving grace out there is that this is an exploitation western. Lots of violence -- somewhat graphic -- "highlights" the Apache on cavalry action. It is bizarre in a sense concerning the violence. It can't get anything else right, but the frontier violence? Oh, they hit that one on the nose. The ending itself borrows generously from the infinitely better The Naked Prey, but it packs a surprising punch. One of the meanest, dirtiest, downright vicious endings I've ever seen, and then in a 3-minute recap of sorts, we see everything else from the movie's first 80 minutes. Bizarre doesn't begin to describe this train wreck. In a sick, weird way, the general oddness of the last 10 minutes makes the first 80 or so somehow worthwhile.

If for some reason you enjoy torturing yourself, this movie is available in its public domain glory to watch at Youtube. It starts HERE with Part 1 of 7.  Enjoy....if you can.

Apache Blood (1975) zero stars/****