Seven Dollars on the Red is another fairly typical Italian western, from the days when the spaghetti western sub-genre was knocking them out ten-a-penny. Like a very large amount of others, this one essentially has a revenge-themed story underpinning it. The film opens with a gang of Mexican bandits storming a house and slaughtering all the inhabitants except for a young boy who the leader takes an immediate shine to and instead decides to take under his wing rather than kill. The boy's father returns to find his wife murdered and son abducted and we then fast-forward to at least a decade in the future where we have the father both seek vengeance against the bandits and retrieve his son who is now a young man.
Western regular Anthony Steffen plays the tortured hero here, in what is a pretty forgettable western on the whole. The main distinctive element is the fact that the son character has grown up to be a total bell-end of a man, at least as bad as his adopted father; possibly even slightly worse. The fact he is such an irredeemable violent chump kind of goes against what you expect, as it means that a typical father-son reconciliation becomes decidedly unlikely. Events eventually boil down to a final duel in the town square where the son character even finds time to shoot his adopted mother dead for a trivial reason. Needless to say, it all ends in a somewhat downbeat manner, which was a little interesting I have to say but aside from the ending and nihilistic son, I found this one to be very middling otherwise.
Western regular Anthony Steffen plays the tortured hero here, in what is a pretty forgettable western on the whole. The main distinctive element is the fact that the son character has grown up to be a total bell-end of a man, at least as bad as his adopted father; possibly even slightly worse. The fact he is such an irredeemable violent chump kind of goes against what you expect, as it means that a typical father-son reconciliation becomes decidedly unlikely. Events eventually boil down to a final duel in the town square where the son character even finds time to shoot his adopted mother dead for a trivial reason. Needless to say, it all ends in a somewhat downbeat manner, which was a little interesting I have to say but aside from the ending and nihilistic son, I found this one to be very middling otherwise.