Cut-Throats Nine

Bleak Spanish Western shows the beast called man at his ugliest

With the help of a couple soldiers, Sergeant Brown (Robert Hundar) and his daughter (Emma Cohen) escort a chain gang of seven convicts to the prison at Fort Green, which is located on the other side of a mountain range in the Rockies. Will they make it there alive?

"Cut-Throats Nine" (1972) is a Spaghetti Western produced by Spaniards with no Italians. It’s infamous for being the most violent & gory Western up to that time. Actually, it was initially filmed without much gore, but the American distributer suggested reshooting certain scenes to make them way grislier. Examples include a slit throat, someone shot in the face, a foot hacked off, ashen corpses and close-up stabbing scenes with entrails. There’s also a rape sequence. Obviously it’s not a fun flick.

Personally, the gore doesn’t move me, although I’m sure it was avant-garde at the time and reminiscent of the same in the original “Last House on the Left” (which debuted a month after this film). Disregarding the bloody violence, this is basically a survival story, except with the tone of a non-goofy Spaghetti Western. The wintery setting recalls “Day of the Outlaw” (1959), “The Great Silence” (1968) and “The Hateful Eight” (2015), but this is the least of these.

If you can handle the unrelentingly grim and dishonorable milieu, it’s worth checking out. Emma Cohen was certainly a winsome beauty in a girl-next-door kind of way. And I like the serious adventure/survival element. Yet it’s plagued by what usually hindered Euro Westerns back in the day: Caricatures rather than characters, overkill dourness and dubious dubbing with cheesy-stern voices.

The film runs 1 hour, 30 minutes, and was shot in northeastern Spain near the border of France at Aragonese Pyreneo, with indoor scenes, etc. done in Madrid.

GRADE: B-