Five Bloody Graves is a western from the notorious director Al Adamson. Al was a maker of z-grade exploitation movies such as Blood of Dracula's Castle (1969) and Horror of the Blood Monsters (1970). Because of this I am rather fond of the man. Anyone who knocked out copious numbers of low budget psychotronic movies from the golden era of the b-movie sure can't be all that bad in my book. And from my admittedly limited exposure to his movies, I have to say that what I have seen has been entertaining enough. Five Bloody Graves is possibly the best of the bunch so far I reckon. It takes the form of a revenge western, with a lone cowboy seeking retribution against an Apache who killed his wife. Enter a stranded stagecoach of cannon fodder...I mean upright citizens, plus a duo of good-for-nothing gun runners and we have the bare bones of a story.
This one is unusual from the start in that it includes voice-over narration from Death himself. Some people hate voice-overs but I don't mind them as they allow us to just cut to the chase and get on with it, not relying on a host of tedious exposition scenes and in this example that is effectively what they achieve even if the device was most probably included for budgetary, rather than artistic, reasons. It would only be fair to say that despite a release year of 1970, this sure as hell is not a revisionist example of the western genre. It has a decidedly old-school presentation of the Indians as mindless killers, who aren't so much characters as they are dangerous obstacles for the white folks to deal with. This type of presentation was really out-of-date by the 60's, never mind the 70's! But I think it's partly on account of this completely unprogressive approach that makes this one kind of enjoyable as it gives it an even more exploitative approach which is always kind of fun even when you know it is wrong.
From an acting perspective we have the king of the low budget trash-fest himself, John Carradine, on hand in another role as a cranky old git. While the soundtrack was pleasingly inappropriate at times with a score made up of library music which bizarrely included the theme to the 'News at Ten', one of the most famous bits of TV music in the UK and so utterly strange sound-tracking a gun-fight in a low budget western! This musical insanity is only equalled by the later slasher movie Delirium (1979) which featured the theme music from 'Mastermind'! Anyway, the story plays out pretty much as you think it will with little in the way of surprises, although I have to award an extra point for a particularly evil character being sentenced to 'death by ant'. On the whole, this much maligned film really wasn't all that bad at all. I have been watching a fair few run-of-the-mill spaghetti westerns recently and I have to say that this one entertained me more than most of those on account of it being stranger. Good work Al...
