I'd streamed some TCM yesterday. Finally got to see Dark of the Sun. Wow. Great flick. Then there was another Rod Taylor actioner, The Deadly Trackers. The film opens up with much promise: narration over photographs of the action. Then Taylor (the bad guy) shoots a bank teller who tells Taylor he made a mistake what with sheriff Richard Harris running things. From that gun shot, everything is live except any plausibility.What follows is the town's folk, like a well-oiled crime-fighting machine, coming out with rifles at the ready. There are armed men everywhere and traps to keep Taylor and his fellow bank robbers from fleeing. There's just one problem. Sheriff Harris doesn't want any of these guns fired. Huh?If you're a gun enthusiast this has you scratching your head as towns people (including those with guns) are simply picked off by the baddies and then allowed to escape after killing hostages.On the other hand, if you're anti-gun, you're also scratching your head as the pacifist/non-gun wearing sheriff then goes off to track the miscreants...alone!...and kill them using GUNS!Not long after killing the first bad guy, Harris runs into another inept/pacifist sheriff, this one from south of the border who is slovenly dressed for some reason. So, now we have a movie about not killing filled with killing. After hearing the music for the Wild Bunch, an actual violent western that had something to say and didn't bang you over the head saying it, tracked in for the action scenes, I gave up.A couple of creatives quit or disowned this pile of illogical horse dropping, so I joined them and turned it off 20 minutes in.

Rod Taylor is incredibly obnoxious as a murderous bank robber in one and only theatrical western that director Barry Shear of "Across 110th Street" helmed. In "The Deadly Trackers," Richard Harris portrays a pacifist lawman who pursues Taylor and his gang of ruffians into Mexico. This violent oater, about a sheriff who refuses to buckle on a six-gun but then changes his mind after the odious villain shoots our hero's wife in the face when he abducts his son, is a good western. Harris milks the role for everything that he can, and "Monte Walsh" scenarist Lukas Heller's screenplay, based on Sam Fuller's original story, treats the subject of revenge with insightful irony. The seasoned cast is definitely worth watching, especially the scenery chewing Taylor, who has never been better as a bad guy. Taylor gives new meaning to the word detestable. He is a dastard through and through. The story that he relishes telling about his ornery father and how his dad died of hoof and mouth disease is macabre but amusing. Neville Brand and William Smith, who co-starred on the short-lived NBC-TV series "Laredo," are reunited as two of Frank Brand's outlaw accomplices. Brand plays an absurd villain who has a chunk of railroad rail attached one hand. Although it looks interesting, how would a man handle such an unwieldy encumbrance. Good things aside, the only thing more annoying than the slide-show at the outset is the use of recycled music cues from Jerry Fielding's "Wild Bunch" score. "The Trackers" boasts plenty of tenacious action, and Taylor challenges Harris effectively from start to finish. Several veteran western character actors flesh out the cast, like William Bryant cast as Harris' deputy."The Deadly Trackers" opens with an irritating slide show sequence that introduces us to both the good guys and the bad guys. Shear must have thought that it would look cool, but it did nothing for me and it just slows things down. Frank Brand (Rod Taylor of "The Train Robbers") and his gang, consisting of Cho0-Choo (Neville Brand of "Riot in Cell Block 3"), School Boy (William Smith of "Darker Than Amber"), and Jacob (Paul Benjamin of "Hoodlum"), ride into Santa Rosa to hold up the bank. They get the loot, and Brand shoots the teller in the face. Schoolboy shoves a knife into a customer's belly and takes his bowler hat. Before these desperadoes can clear out of town, Sheriff Sean Kilpatrick (Richard Harris of "Camelot") and his townspeople cut down and round them up. All escape Brand who storms into a school and takes a young boy hostage who happens to be Kilpatrick's son. Brand makes several demands, more prominently, that the lawman shed their firearms, collect their horses, and give them the loot that they stole. Brand promises to deposit the boy at the edge of town. Predictably, everything goes awry. Katharine Kilpatrick chases Brand and tries to dislodge her son from his clutches. Brand blasts her with his six-gun. A visibly shocked Kilpatrick straps on a six-gun and crosses the border in pursuit of the gang.Once he crosses into Mexico, Kilpatrick kills Schoolboy, but he is arrested by a forthright Mexican policeman, Gutierrez (Al Lettieri of "The Godfather"), who struggles to reason with him about the role of a policeman. Gutierrez locks up our hero in jail after a mob mistakes him for the felons who killed an old man and an old woman. Eventually, Kilpatrick manages to escape and go after the gang. During the finale, things come full circle, as Brand visits an orphanage where his young daughter lives, and Kilpatrick takes her hostage to flush out the villain.

Sadistic trash. Barry Shear's supremely vulgar revenge western, THE DEADLY TRACKERS, is at best a replacement for Ipecac--both are guaranteed to induce vomiting. Shear has hatched (who would accuse him of direction?) a nearly unwatchable and sickeningly gory story of a pacifist sheriff (Richard Harris) whose family is murdered by four thugs (lead by a sociopathic Rod Taylor), and he rides into Mexico in hot pursuit.As the body count builds and the desecration of elderly farmers and prostitutes builds to a crescendo, one might wonder if it's okay to miss Peckinpah's repulsive but artistic THE WILD BUNCH.I choose to miss Richard Harris as Dumbledore.

Pacifist sheriff Richard Harris rethinks his civilizes ways, when his wife and son are murdered by ex-Confederate lowlife Rod Taylor and his nasty band of cutthroats. Abandoned by his posse at the border of Mexico, he goes it alone, butting heads with Al Lettieri (who's great in this), his idealistic Mexican counterpart, who wants to bring Taylor in alive for a local murder.A fast pace, plentiful action, good photography of beautiful Mexican locations, and a colorful cast of villains, that include William Smith as a disfigured brute, Neville Brand as an unpleasant cretin with a block of railroad track for a hand (!), and Paul Benjamin as a cultured, black dandy, make this worth watching for fans of hard-boiled, macho film-making.The film's message is a bit murky though. It seems as if the movie is demonstrating the dehumanizing effect of Harris' obsessive search for vengeance, which turns him into a man to be pitied.However, despite Mexican lawman Lettieri's great strength, dignity, and honor, his sense of true justice makes him look like less of a man too, when in the end he's forced by his rigid ideology to attempt to release the truly vile, smug killer and ends up shooting Harris in the name of the law.The film is either trying to have it both ways or telling us to choose our own morality!Like most of his western films (A Man Called Horse, Man In The Wilderness, Unforgiven), Harris takes an inhuman amount of physical punishment in this grim, sometimes mean-spirited, and excessively violent action/adventure, that somehow managed to sneak by with a PG rating!