Let’s face it: The Acid West was going out of style by the time Blaxploitation was taking the country by storm. Combining the two disparate genres was a simple yet magical idea. Instead of commenting on Post-Civil Rights racism, the ass-kicking brothers could take aim at rich white slave owners as well as the typical Western outlaw scrubs. There aren’t a whole lot of Jive Westerns out there, much less many good ones. Fred “The Hammer” Williamson featured in two of the more entertaining examples of this curious hybridization. There was the sublimely ridiculous, ultra-violent, and profane (yet still PG rated) Boss Nigger, along with this more mainstream 20th Century Fox offering.

Take a Hard Ride was director Antonio Margheriti’s follow-up to The Stranger and the Gunfighter, another Western hybrid experiment that paired weary genre vet Lee Van Cleef with Hong Kong superstar Lo Lieh, who travel the untamed frontier with guns and flying guillotines close at hand.

The always poker-faced Van Cleef is the connective tissue between Marghereti’s two Acid Western fusions, of course; his presence at the very opening of Take a Hard Ride, where he rips off Charles Bronson’s Harmonica by playing an eerie ditty on his own harmonica, establishes the appropriate Spaghetti tone with alchemical precision. From there, it’s less than two minutes before old Lee, playing his usual morally ambiguous bounty hunter archetype, guns down a wanted man and his buddy in front of a church. But don’t let his disturbingly casual attitude towards ending human life let you think he’s a bad guy. Even though he’s instrumental in getting the film’s protagonists into all kinds of crappy situations, as well as orchestrating the massacres of several groups of people (duplicitous honkys, one and all), he just might have a heart of gold under his oily, leathery, cordite-stained exterior.

His persistent pursuit of Jim Brown, who has a sack of gold belonging to the estate of recently deceased Dana Andrews, draws in lowlifes from all four corners of the map. It’s clear from early on that his journey into Sonora will be fraught with peril. An early trip to the watering hole almost ends in disaster if not for the timely appearance of cardsharp Fred Williamson, who happens to carry around sacks full of poisonous snakes. Fred and Jim decide to join forces, each “watching the other’s tail”, bonding through frequent gun battles, sleeping on horseback. The two will Take a Hard Ride through a gauntlet of ignorant white oppression.

Don’t let that innocent PG rating on the poster fool you. They could have appealed to the Militant Black audience and retitled the film Jim Brown’s Wild West Honky Massacre without misrepresenting the product in any way.

After much ado, the boys’re eventually joined by mute “Indian” Jim Kelly, who does such a halfassed job with his fisticuffs, and his one dimensional character, that it’s curious why he was even included. A French actress named Catherine Spaak supplies some eye candy for what is otherwise a testosterone laden sausage fest. The story works into a rut once we’re back to the familiar Stagecoach model of “strangers bicker and travel, getting into gun battles every 10-15 minutes”. Despite what the classical structure, and Jerry Goldsmith’s unabashedly old-fashioned score, attempt to evoke, the essential blaxploitation nature bleeds through with each and every righteous killing. Yet, save for the alarmingly brutal murder of an innocent supporting character, none of the violence has any sort of impact.

None of the cast members look particularly beleaguered, battle-scarred or otherwise affected by the corrosive desert sands. A gritty atmosphere is never quite established, even though the Canary Islands locations look convincingly John Fordian, the action flows blisteringly, and the ever sneering face of Lee Van Cleef as he watches the carnage from the sidelines never ceases to be creepy. So how does Take a Hard Ride feel so inconsequential in light of its hair-raising body count and surplus of Black Power?

Margheriti (directing under his Anglo nom de plume of Joseph Manduke) has a feel for grand Western vistas, and throws us the occasional artistic composition between the action sequences, which were directed by Hal Needham with the passion he would later apply to destroying cop cars with Burt Reynolds. Some lame “intrigue” with Fred Williamson’s morality leads to naught save for a pointless, dusty fist fight that adds nothing to the story except some slight homoerotica. Of course the brothers are going to remain together, to blow away more faceless waves of Caucasian horsemen and possibly detonate several pounds of dynamite to, uh, blow away even more of them.

Sergio Sollima could handle moral ambiguity and jarring plot twists in even his laziest work; his nihilistic style would doubtless have improved this frivolous material. Margheriti/Manduke is too in love with deep focus and the natural splendor of the Canary Islands to worry about characterization or nuance. Despite his prolific output of exploitation fare, there is nothing truly exceptional in his body of work, though he did well enough to be casually name-dropped in Inglourious Basterds.

For its  artistic shortcomings, Take a Hard Ride still delivers on a base level, and fans of 70s cheese will delight in its Jive Turkey trappings. Those expecting anything other than a lot of dead white dudes will be sorely disappointed. Hell, even those who stick out the entirety of their Hard Ride will be let down by its colossal anticlimax. Is Van Cleef supposed to be a Death figure, or a manifestation of White Guilt? Why doesn’t he recieve his just desserts? Is it just because he’s that cool that he can get away with being pure evil? Oh well, that’s how it goes in the Acid West.

Sergio Martino’s eerie and harsh Mannaja (US title A Man Called Blade) was one of the last Spaghetti Westerns ever made. This melancholy and superbly shot 1977 film reflects not only the end of a cinematic era, but the final death of idealism before we all marched into the “dismal tide” of the 1980s. The film has three solid leads, one of which only appears in the beginning and end of the film. The grim and laconic hero Blade (crime caper star Maurizio Merli), the sadistic and enraged Voller (a greasy and relentless John Steiner), and the unpredictable Burt Craven (mop top nutcase Donald O’Brien, who looks and plays like sort of a toned down version of Klaus Kinski).

The opening of Mannaja appears almost medieval; you can’t tell you’re watching a western until you see the gun belts three minutes into the movie. A mud encrusted Craven is running through a swamp, with an unseen person in hot pursuit. Here, O’Brien’s manic face is the perfect mask of fear and panic, and the rolling fog lends to the scene’s unsettling atmosphere. It turns out Blade is chasing after him. Craven pulls a gun on him, but Blade is ready with his signature axe.

Blade is a bounty hunter who is not only quick and accurate with a gun, but lightning fast with his hatchets as well. Blade can chop off your hand or impale you in the forehead quicker than you can shoot him down. Though the choreography of Merli’s axe throwing is a rather clumsy and unconvincing, it’s still brutal and shocking when Blade takes someone down with his axe; think of the scene in Kill Bill 1 when The Bride dispatches one of Crazy 88s with an axe to the head. There’s just something about an witnessing an axe impalement that just you want to yell out, “Aaaah, that’s gotta hurt!!”

Blade drags Craven into town to get a $5,000 bounty, but the town has no marshal or sheriff in town to pay up. He tries to get lodging so he and his captive can move on the next day, but Voller and his thugs, who are also mayor’s henchman, tell him to take a hike. This lack of hospitality inspires Blade to fuck with Voller, and voila, the story begins. Blade later tries to muscle in on Voller’s job as security escort for the local shipment of silver, so he goes to Mayor McGowan (Phillipe Leroy), who also owns the silver mine, to get Voller’s job. Blade eventually discovers Voller is behind a rash of highway robberies, and it’s only a matter of time before the two will have it out. But it turns out Blade didn’t just enter that town randomly; he has vengeance on his mind as well.

Mannaja is full of symbolic violence (including a riveting and gruesome miners’ riot), out-of-nowhere double-crosses, and several impressive set pieces. One superb scene involves four thugs hunting down a supposedly blind Blade inside a cave. The lighting and editing in this scene is clear yet disorienting; you really feel you’re spelunking to your death in this sequence. Mannaja also has obvious political overtones, focusing on McGowen’s cruelty to his workers and his Puritanical rule over the mining town.

I also enjoyed the music of Mannaja. At first, I found the weird, Italian-accented baritone voice singing in English a little jarring, but once I started listening to the lyrics, the slow pace of the singing made perfect sense:

You … alone.
A solitary man.
And when the sun goes down
Your memory’s back around
When you … and your heart
Is breaking down

Like … a wolf
At night,
You look for home.
Took all your soul apart,
And make you run away
‘til now
And your mind … won’t forget.

Then a higher pitch, faster chorus comes in with:

This here was your father’s land
Nothing that you can pretend
You want justice,
And you love peace.

When the time has come to kill,
To destroy who loves to kill.
Then your hand … will snap the axe,
And your hatchets … will be satisfied.

Or to put it more succinctly, A Man Called Blade ain’t nutin’ to fuck with.

A Man Called Sergio, the accompanying documentary about the making of Mannaja, puts the film in a whole new perspective. For example, the film was mostly shot in a dilapidated western set, and Martino used the crumbling structures to create a convincingly dirty, muddy, and dying town. The huge Dobermans that Voller lugs around were an inspired choice to make him appear more evil, and naturally there’s a funny story behind the dogs. Martino also talks about Sam Peckinpah’s influence upon Mannaja.

Mannaja is the fitting finale to the cinematic madness launched by The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, a mournful swan song to the end of the Spaghetti Western. It is not only Blade riding off into the sunset in Mannaja, but a whole genre as well.

Big Man Japan is a mockumentary about a long haired, flowered shirt wearing burnout named Sato who resembles a faded rock star. This small, thin man lives alone in his house, feeding stray cats, eating his favorite food “super noodles,” having bricks thrown through his windows, and waiting for his cell phone to ring.

For the first 10 to 15 minutes, Sato is being casually interviewed; the first question is what he thinks of the weather, and he responds by saying how much he likes his umbrella. Sato carries it with him all the time because it is very compact and “only gets big when it needs to, and then it’s very useful.”

Eventually Sato gets phone call, and then he’s off to a local power plant plastered in angry painted signs about littering, destruction of public property, and misusing energy. The small man is then is taken where the cameras cannot follow, and a power surge follows.

Next thing you know, Sato is now a 50-foot tall CGI-generated giant fighting the first in a series of bizarre monsters whose sole interest is destroying buildings. Sato and these monsters do battle in what is not so much a Godzilla free-for-all as a demonstration of the world’s worst dog catcher.

The monsters that Sato faces serve as distortions of himself. These creatures appear as psychosexual demons taunting him with their distinctly human faces. His adversaries include the Strangling Beast (who only wants to throw castles and buildings around, lay his eggs, mark his turf, or otherwise inseminate the ruins), the Leaping Monster (who has the intellect of an 8-year-old who only wants to jump around, no matter what it breaks), the stink monster (who appears for a public sexual encounter and is unaware that it stinks of 10,000 pounds of feces), the Cyclops creature (whose eye is attached to a long tendril which descends from its groin), and finally the “Child Monster,” who is weak and sickly, and only trying to get home.

Big Man Japan is a profile of Sato, the last of Japan’s Big-Men who are seemingly normal humans bred to do battle with the giant monsters that periodically appear in Japan. These Big Men transform into giants themselves via high voltage electroshocks to the nipples. Sato’s father had destroyed himself trying to become “bigger than the rest,” so Sato’s grandfather raised him and returned as the family’s Big Man champion; unfortunately, the grandfather has exposed himself too much high voltage recharges, and has rendered himself senile. Big Man Japan is thus a story of a somber man who becomes his country’s biggest spectacle as he wrestles all manner of horrors in his underwear.

Films like Jean Claude Van Damage, They Call Me Bruce, and Zebra Man (another Japanese film about a faded superhero in the modern world) deal with fallen heroes, myths descended into the grim and grit of modern life and humor. Big Man Japan follows suit, but manages to balance its self-deprecating realism with the wide eyed absurdity that made such heroes so interesting in the first place. It’s largely a parody of Ultraman a Japanese super-hero franchise later imitated in North America by the Power Rangers in 90s.

There’s also some gentle fun poked at the loss of traditional culture (the sacred growth ceremony once attended by geishas and crowds is now performed like an old habit by Sato and a priest in a storage room), the non conflict oriented post-war Japanese (Sato tries to talk to the stink monster into just leaving the town instead of fighting it), and the flip side of such passive aggression, and the obsession with violence (best illustrated in the final scene’s surreal duex ex machina, which make the superhero team come off as a gang of bullies, degrading and humiliating their chosen “bad guy” target).

In some patches, Big Man Japan does become more dead than just dead pan, and the jokes fall flat, but the more quiet moments make the clever scenes all the brighter. The third film from the Six Shooter series, which gave us Let the Right One In and Time Crimes, has mostly succeeded here with their third genre fusion of superhero, mockumentary, and comedy.

Big Man Japan is an entertaining and grandiose weird tale and modern fable about being emotionally stunted, by family, country, duty, and cowardice. The bigger they are, the harder they fall, indeed. Literally.