A narrative with thematic beats unique to not just the spaghetti western but the western genre as a whole and Sergio Martino’s well conceived vision in his directorial debut make Arizona Colt Returns a surprising success, with the small audience and unimpressive average rating I wasn’t expecting too much out of this sequel to one of my favorite westerns and while it certainly wasn’t as good as the original it was still so much fun. One part of this I didn’t mention there was Bruno Nicolai’s score, just like 90% of the other spaghetti westerns I’ve seen it was fantastic and it did a lot with the great production design to set up a nice atmosphere. Where this really shocked me was with the story and the feeling it created, where the tone of the typical spaghetti western is upbeat with the comedic elements and our hero man always being unbeatable this was the complete opposite in that regard, through the first hour of this <90 minute runtime (and outside of the first 10 ish) Arizona spends the whole movie getting his ass kicked which was refreshing awesome, the only knock I’d have on the story is the romance between Arizona and the bartender. The technical work was also really good, there are some really nice looking shots in here and the editing all throughout and especially during the action sequences was great for the time, also like I mentioned the set design was nice (i liked that a vast majority of the movie took place outside to show off that town set) and Martino’s direction only elevated each of those elements. In the end I’m left feeling very positively on it, I’ve had this on my radar ever since watching the first but put it off because it didn’t look all that great which makes this result of positivity feel so much better. It seems like this IP is similar to Django in its public access to filmmakers and even though this is lesser known and the genre is a bit dead today (soon to be revived by Park Chan-wook and Steven Spielberg) I’d really love to see another Arizona Colt movie.

A narrative with thematic beats unique to not just the spaghetti western but the western genre as a whole and Sergio Martino’s well conceived vision in his directorial debut make Arizona Colt Returns a surprising success, with the small audience and unimpressive average rating I wasn’t expecting too much out of this sequel to one of my favorite westerns and while it certainly wasn’t as good as the original it was still so much fun. One part of this I didn’t mention there was Bruno Nicolai’s score, just like 90% of the other spaghetti westerns I’ve seen it was fantastic and it did a lot with the great production design to set up a nice atmosphere. Where this really shocked me was with the story and the feeling it created, where the tone of the typical spaghetti western is upbeat with the comedic elements and our hero man always being unbeatable this was the complete opposite in that regard, through the first hour of this <90 minute runtime (and outside of the first 10 ish) Arizona spends the whole movie getting his ass kicked which was refreshing awesome, the only knock I’d have on the story is the romance between Arizona and the bartender. The technical work was also really good, there are some really nice looking shots in here and the editing all throughout and especially during the action sequences was great for the time, also like I mentioned the set design was nice (i liked that a vast majority of the movie took place outside to show off that town set) and Martino’s direction only elevated each of those elements. In the end I’m left feeling very positively on it, I’ve had this on my radar ever since watching the first but put it off because it didn’t look all that great which makes this result of positivity feel so much better. It seems like this IP is similar to Django in its public access to filmmakers and even though this is lesser known and the genre is a bit dead today (soon to be revived by Park Chan-wook and Steven Spielberg) I’d really love to see another Arizona Colt movie.