This is a low-budget flick with a weak plot, bad acting, boring gun fights, and lots of phony dying.
What annoyed me the most is all of the anachronisms. They have a man with dreadlocks in one scene. Has anybody ever seen a dreadlocked cowboy in authentic Old West photos!? The female member of the posse is wearing Destiny's Child-esque midriff shirts. During the 1800s surely she would have been seen as being half-naked and in violation of public decency laws. One guy is wearing a leather jacket that you could imagine on a motorcyclist, but not a 19th-century cowboy.
The most irritating anachronism was the sheriff and her deputy. Look, decades before the U.S. Amendment that gave women the right to vote and a century before Margaret Thatcher was PM of the UK, I highly doubt that two women led law enforcement in any town. Further, I highly doubt that during the Jim Crow era a black person, of either gender, was the mayor of a multiracial town. These two women looked more like cheerleaders than keepers of the peace. Worse, they were passive and static characters that barely spoke a word. Yes, the Old West may not have had the rigid gender and racial hierarchies that would have been scene in contemporary Boston. Still, this is just fantasy to have such diversity in leadership during a stringently oppressive time period.
Plus this movie robs from soooooo many other films. Like "New Jack City," a person kills a relative like Wesley Snipes' character killed Allen Payne's. Like "Set It Off," some of the main characters proverbially "go out in a blaze of smoke." Like "Posse," there is a river washing scene, but it lacked all the hot nudity.
There are only a few good things about this film. I loved seeing Raymond Cruz, who played DiStefano in "Alien Resurrection," and Gabriel Casseus, who played Midget/Kyle in "New Jersey Drive," again. I am glad that good male actors of color are still finding roles. The casting director did a great job hiring the son of David Carridine's character. They looked so much like each other, I had to check the credits to see if they were related.
It turns out that the director of "Gang of Roses" is also the director of this flick. Who is giving this man so much money to make bad Westerns with black characters? This film went straight to DVD for a reason. Oh yeah, one more positive: this film had French subtitles. Soooo many low-budget films don't have foreign language subtitles. I am glad this work did. I encourage more film companies to follow suit.
