Title: Death Alley
Director: Nicholas Barton
Starring: Delno Ebie, Justin France, and Corey Cannon
Movie length: 1 hours 39 minutes
I’d like to start by saying I love Westerns, my dad and both of my grandfathers used to watch them all the time and I would tag along for the ride. This was an interesting film, first off, it’s hard to make a decent Western film to begin with today because there are such high expectations with Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, as well as the films that John Wayne and Clint Eastwood starred in, being some of the best. Not to say it can’t be done I mean Sam Raimi did it with The Quick and the Dead around 25 years ago.
But now lets talk about Death Alley. The film opens with a narration and a montage of pictures from the late 1800’s of the Dalton Gang, some of the pictures were normal, but there were a few brutal ones portraying members of the gang’s corpses being held up by lawmen.
I enjoyed a few parts of this film; however, I felt the narration was a lot and dragged out taking away from any of the story that I wanted to follow. In all honesty it could have been a much shorter film, most Westerns, historical or otherwise have a way of getting right to the point especially if it’s headed for a shootout. The acting was okay but nothing spectacular or to be remembered, the story opens with the last surviving member visiting Death Alley one last time in his old age, then it flashes back to when he was young and part of the gang. There was a lot of dialogue throughout and only one major robbery shown, personally I just expect more from a western in over all entertainment, once I got to the end of the movie (no Spoilers of course), I felt robbed of time. I give this film a 5 out of 10, mainly because it met me halfway with everything, story was great I just felt it was poorly told.
Death Alley is now streaming on various VOD services.
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