Arde baby, arde

About the only thing I liked in Dead Aim was its highly logical and original notion that out on the great plains and deserts there were a lot of people who would succumb to the elements or to violence where there would be no one to bury them. That's where James Westerfield comes in, the traveling undertaker who buries folks. His job must have taken a certain amount of nerve because in the case of several of them they could really have been ripe.

So traveling undertaker Westerfield in his final film role finds a toddler on a desert and saves him from a rattlesnake. The kid who lost his parents, father to a robber, mother to the desert, grows up to be Glen Lee. He serves as Westerfield's assistant and in the meantime learns some skill with a colt. And then of course he becomes a source for Westerfield's trade.

Being on in the desert his education has been neglected in certain matters so when he catches sight of Venetia Vianello, he decides to pursue the areas he's been lacking. The fact she belongs already to Virgil Frye does complicate things and serves as the basis for the rest of the story.

This was a Mexican production that aspired to pasta status, but fails to meet even those standards. It's got some dull stretches in it and a musical score which does not measure up to that which you hear in spaghetti horse operas.

There are a lot of fine south of the border westerns which you can catch occasionally on Spanish language television in the USA. Dead Aim just isn't one of them.