DUEL IN THE ECLIPSE (Spain/Italy, 1968; d. José Luis Merino), a.k.a. REQUIEM FOR THE GRINGO

I wanted this to be a weird Western movie soooo much, but it never quite makes it. It's done by
José Luis Merino and Eugenio Martin, the guys best known in these parts for stuff like HORROR EXPRESS, BLOOD CASTLE, CANDLE FOR THE DEVIL and THE RETURN OF THE ZOMBIES, so my hopes were high.

Our hero (either "Gringo" or "Ross Logan" depending upon which bootleg you end up with) returns (from where?) to his remote hacienda to find that a gang of bandits led by
Porfirio Carranza is terrorizing the territory. And Gringo's brother has been beaten and killed by the bandits, too. Of course, this being a spaghetti Western, Gringo needs to avenge the death of his brother and free the peasants from the sadistic abuse of the gang. But what's different here is that the gunfighter hero is an astrologer of sorts (he's got a rooftop observatory, star charts, and books on alchemy); he consults his notes and decides to bide his time--- he must wait until the stars are aligned before he can seek his revenge (the title here is not just a riff on Vidor's DUEL IN THE SUN). Then Gringo hunts down individual members of the gang one by one, using his (mildly) supernatural powers.

So there's all of that stuff... And then there's the setting: the Almeria landscapes where this one was shot are spare and bleak, adding to the stylish ambiance that there's something strange going on here, making me think a little bit of Lewton/Tourneur's THE LEOPARD MAN in places. And speaking of THE LEOPARD MAN, the astrologer-gunfighter in DUEL IN THE ECLIPSE wears a wacky leopard-spotted poncho; as some folks over at the Spaghetti Western Database board forums have argued, this suggests the powerful Jaguar God of Mayan mythology.

               

So there are all kinds of ingredients here that could've come together to make a weird Western, but it never jells that way, sadly... I really wanted to see the EL TOPO knob turned up a couple of notches to see what would happen. But there are multiple versions of this movie floating around, cut anywhere from 78 to 98 minutes, so perhaps there is a longer version out there that does more with all these highly-suggestive supernatural elements.