Screenhead

Sometimes Hollywood likes to dish up a good kick in the (possibly metaphorical) cojones just to see if you’re paying attention.  For those of you who like Westerns, and depending on the title you can generally count me in, you may be happy to know that Retribution Road has only recently hit DVD, thanks to the folks at Lions Gate.

You may be happy.  But you won’t.  Why?  Simple–Retribution Road is easily one of the dumbest Westerns I’ve EVER SEEN.

Retribution Road involves Johnny Rios, bank robber, womanizer, and all around thug extraordinaire who finds himself locked up  in Wardlaw, a small burg in Texas.  Johnny’s family, the somewhat notorious Rios gang, decides to spring their significantly lesser brother from the town’s confinement,  and to that end offers Wardlaw a choice–let Johnny Rios go free, or face the Rios gang in a deadly shootout.

Frankly, this is easily one of the most laughable Westerns ever, and not because of any kind of great jokewriting.  This IS a joke, and a bad one.  More specifically, this is a miserable farce of a Western shot by people who have probably never even seen them.  Lines are delivered as warmed over and stale as a week-old bagel.  The plot itself is mindlessly padded as this Shootout at the P.U. Corral couldn’t possibly come close to the standard eighty minutes runtime by itself (and it doesn’t, either, weighing in at only seventy two) because the plot is so incredibly simplistic that it requires multiple other sidebars (a grasping mayor, a murderous hooker, the bizarre paternity of the sheriff’s daughter) that have little to no actual bearing on the main point.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, thusly, runs Retribution Road out of town on a rail and with tar and feathers in the shape of a two out of ten on its back.  This isn’t nearly as much Western as we should have received, and what we got wasn’t all that great to begin with.

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