Wang ming tu

77 minutes of wildly outrageous spaghetti western excellence, The Fugitive mixes fantastic gun-fu style action with the standardised Shaw Brothers martial arts formula, all scored by some of Ennio Morricone's finest music, it's almost as if someone was peaking at my Christmas list. Featuring a plethora of badass moments, the majority coming from leading man Lo Lieh, amidst the flurry of wonderfully gratuitous blood sprays, there's no denying the unique approach to this hybridisation of crowd-pleasing genres, often so over-the-top that you could never take it seriously. But that's where its charm lies and I couldn't ask it to do more. The threadbare story is perhaps its weakest element, but anyone who loves a good revenge tale can easily overlook this, besides, who needs a great story when you score your revenge with Morricone?