Apache Blood is a low-budget western exploitation flick aimed at the audience that appreciated some of the less realistic Native American-oriented films of the early 70s, such as Billy Jack.
What Apache Blood does effectively is to establish a life or death adversarial relationship between two sympathetic characters who are pitted against each other mainly because of prejudice and circumstance. However, once this is established, the film deteriorates into a badly directed, poorly filmed, seemingly unedited series of lengthy desert pans and weird apparently unplanned and unscripted scenes of Chief Yellow Shirt (Ray Danton) chasing down Sam Glass (Dewitt Lee), with orchestral music inappropriately wandering about in the background. Some of the scenes are actually laughable, not because of execution, but because of content.
The two big problems here are editing and directing. The story line is a cliché, but it is compelling enough to carry the film and the script because it is so minimal, works. What kills Apache Blood is the 40 or so minutes of unnecessary pans, zooms, and lengthy, uninteresting and unconvincing chase scenes. The story had about an hour's worth of interesting material, and this would have been a fine 1970s desert western had it been cut to about 45 minutes.
Thankfully, Danton and Lee dominate most of the film. The rest of the cast is pretty awful, and the poor editing does not enhance anybody's talent.
Two last remarks... If you enjoy surrealist 1970s westerns, you may want to see this... and if you make it half-way through the film, the end is definitely worth sticking around for.
What Apache Blood does effectively is to establish a life or death adversarial relationship between two sympathetic characters who are pitted against each other mainly because of prejudice and circumstance. However, once this is established, the film deteriorates into a badly directed, poorly filmed, seemingly unedited series of lengthy desert pans and weird apparently unplanned and unscripted scenes of Chief Yellow Shirt (Ray Danton) chasing down Sam Glass (Dewitt Lee), with orchestral music inappropriately wandering about in the background. Some of the scenes are actually laughable, not because of execution, but because of content.
The two big problems here are editing and directing. The story line is a cliché, but it is compelling enough to carry the film and the script because it is so minimal, works. What kills Apache Blood is the 40 or so minutes of unnecessary pans, zooms, and lengthy, uninteresting and unconvincing chase scenes. The story had about an hour's worth of interesting material, and this would have been a fine 1970s desert western had it been cut to about 45 minutes.
Thankfully, Danton and Lee dominate most of the film. The rest of the cast is pretty awful, and the poor editing does not enhance anybody's talent.
Two last remarks... If you enjoy surrealist 1970s westerns, you may want to see this... and if you make it half-way through the film, the end is definitely worth sticking around for.