The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 17-23
Four of the Apocalypse (1975)
Directed by Lucio Fulci
Although rightly known for his giallo films, filthy Fulci also made a handful (or is that a fistful?) of sleazy spaghetti westerns. Like his gialli, Four is low on narrative (a malformed one at that), but high on sensation. In Four, with its soft and diffused lighting—peculiar for a western—there are short bursts of visceral moments surrounded by dross.
An amalgam of Bret Harte’s “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” and “The Luck of Roaring Camp,” Four concerns a ragtag quartet of outsiders wandering a rugged, hilly terrain: a pregnant prostitute (Lynne Frederick); a pretty boy card shark (Fabio Testi, the poor man’s Joe Dallesandro); a drunk (Michael J. Pollard); and a madman (Harry Baird) who “speaks” to the dead. Thomas Milian, a scene-stealing bandit named Chaco, infiltrates the group to rape and pillage. Amid the bright red blood there’s a birth in a wintry nowhere town populated by men (recalling, along with its pop soundtrack, McCabe & Mrs. Miller), softening Fulci’s ever-present nihilism. Tanner Tafelski (February 21, 26, 7:30pm; February 25, 10pm at the Spectacle)
