Movies made for television aren't supposed to be original, different, and/or experimental. The producers had a demographic in mind, just as their counterparts in episodic television. You can monkey with a sure thing so long as you don't take it places where the aficionados fear to tread. A trigger-happy, made-for-television western first aired on the TNT cable network, director Gene Quintano's "Dead for a Dollars" amounts to a pastiche of Italian westerns, with "Young Guns" star Emilio Estevez shooting his weight in bad guys while fleeing from Red leg Colonel Skinner and Reager (Howie Long of "Firestorm") with his gunslingers. The resemblance between Estevez and "A Stranger in Town" star Tony Anthony is unmistakable. Coincidentally, Anthony starred in several European oaters, most popularly "The Stranger" franchise. Whether or not they intended it to be an Italian western tribute, the sun-drenched, scenic Spanish locales that substitute for the rugged southwest are those that we've seen in the "Dollars" trilogy. Incidentally, Quintano penned the scripts for the landmark 3-D western "Comin' At Ya!" (1981) as well as wrote the Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, & Waylon Jenning's oater "The First Kill." Apart from loquacious expository dialogue scenes, the action rarely slackens. You'll have no trouble distinguishing the good guys from the bad guys. Skinner and Reager are appropriately villainous. Probably the most objectionable scene is when the Stranger shoots endless holes in the floorboards around his boots and then drops through it to safety! Clearly, this is a reference to a Buggy Bunny cartoon. The surprises are few, but "Dead for a Dollar" delivers the goods.
Review of Dollar for the Dead
