Death Walks in Laredo (1967)

Original title:  3 Pistole Contro Cesare

AKA:  Tre Pistole per un Massacre, The Pistol, the Karate and the Eye

Director:  Enzo Peri

Writers:  Piero Regnoli, Enzo Piero, Carmine Bologna

Composer:  Marcello Giombini

Starring:  Thomas Hunter, James Shigeta, Nadir Moretti, Gianna Serra, Delia Boccardo, Umberto D'Orsi, Femi Benussi, Ferruccio De Ceresa, Vittorio Bonos, Adriana Ambesi, Gino Bardi, Gianluigi Crescenzi, Enrico Maria Salerno, Nicola Di Gioia, Jose Galera Balazote

More info:  IMDb

Plot:  A gunman teams up with his long-lost brothers--a French hypnotist and a Japanese kung-fu expert--to fight a villain who is obsessed with Roman emperor Julius Caesar, to the point of having built a palace, complete with slave girls, a huge sunken bath and his own "Praetorian Guard", and who is trying to cheat them out of a gold mine left to them by their father.

My rating:   6/10

Will I watch it again?   No.

You read the plot right.  It's kind of bonkers which makes it more watchable than most of your B-grade spags.  For starters meet your villain, Julius Cesar Fuller!

Yup.  He lives in opulence, like the Caesar of old in a Roman style mansion in the middle of the desert (here the American West as portrayed by location filming in Algeria!), complete with a bevy of beautiful women and the world's largest bathtub (or a big pool for us peasants).  The story has three men come together who all have something in common, they all the same father who was a notorious lothario.  By the end of the movie you find out they're not the only ones and by far!  Each of these three men are distinctive in that one has tricked-out, James Bondian weapons like a multi-barreled pistol that can kill four men at once as well as a pair of pistols that can fire from the butts.  Another brother knows karate (poorly as judged by the fight choreography) and another is a hypnotist with an uncanny, supernatural ability to stop people cold in their tracks!  They're all going to their dead father's homestead to claim their property.  But Fuller has taken it and the town for his own.  

As fuckin' fun as that sounds, it doesn't live up to the potential.  The action is OK, the humor is light, the villain is weak, dull and only has his gimmick lifestyle and a cloudy right eye to stand apart from other Spaghetti Western baddies, and the 82 minute length is further shortened by three, yes THREE musical/dance numbers that waste some time.  Star Thomas Hunter does a fine job.  He looks at home in a Western much like Clint or some of the other big names of the Italian Westerns.  I was surprised to see that his movie career lasted about 11 years from '66 to '76 with 20 features and that's it.  Based on this picture I would've expected more.  The music is pretty good.  As a fan of the genre I've been listening to Spaghetti Western scores for decades and I instantly recognized the theme song and sang along with it.  That was fun.  this is one of the better middle-of-the-road Spags and it's worth checking out if you've seen all the great films in the genre but want to avoid the dregs (and there are a lot of those).