Watch The Moment to Kill For Free

Fantastic!

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

This is a gorgeous movie made by a gorgeous spirit.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

George Hilton and Walter Barnes make a heroic pair known as Lord and Bull in "Guns for Dollars" director Giuliano Carnimeo's superior shoot'em up "The Moment to Kill," with Horst Frank as an incredibly Draconian villain who craves to wield a riding crop. Hilton plays his typical gunslinger, but he doesn't wear anything black. In fact, he wears a white hat, and he carries one six-gun on his hip. Barnes wears a Confederate jacket, a brown derby, and totes a double-barrel shotgun. When he reloads, all he need do is open his jacket, and it is lined with loops galore for his shotgun shells. Together, Hilton and Barnes are as good as Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, except they don't argue with each other. Judge Thomas Warren has summoned them to find a cache of Confederate money hidden in town. Literally, there is never a dull moment as this pair fends off advances from the villains, and the body count slowly mounts into double digits as they do their best to kill our heroes. It doesn't hurt matters that one of Garnimeo's frequent collaborators--the prolific but gifted Tito Carpi wrote this memorable Spaghetti western with another genre stalwart Enzo G. Castellari who wrote the masterly "Any Gun Can Play" and the Franco Nero classic "Keoma." Helmed with skill by Garnimeo, written exceptionally well by Carpi and Castellari, "The Moment to Kill" benefits immeasurably with "Return of Halleluja" lenser Stelvio Massi who always seems to set up his cameras in the best place for each scene. Mind you, Massi would come into his own as a director of actioneers about the police. The beauty of "The Moment to Kill" is its numerous gunfights at either day or night, and the way that Carnimeo stages them so that Massi's cinematography and Renato Cinquini & Ornella Micheli's editing compliment each other. The best Spaghetti westerns never ran out of varmints for the heroes to plug, and somebody is already ready to spin around and throw up their hands "The Moment to Kill" when the bullets riddle them. Alberto Boccianti's production design and Stefano Bulgarelli's art department contribute to the success of this western. There is a chilling scene where several hooligans terrorize a crippled woman in a wheel chair, and the camera set-ups vary to give the action multiple perspectives. Although it isn't a major Spaghetti, the town and the sets don't look like a ramshackle sagebrusher. "The Moment to Kill" qualifies as one of the better low-budget westerns. Now, if only somebody could find a letterboxed copy!

This one doesn't seem too well rated on the IMDb, but it has cinematography by Stelvio Massi, has George Hilton in it, has a scene set in a creepy mansion just like the old Italian Gothic horror films, also has a couple of Giallo like twists at the end, and features Horst Frank as a sadistic homosexual sharp shooter. And the ending takes place in a slaughterhouse! That's real meat in there - don't tell Morrisey! Hilton is Lord, his mate is Bull. Them are two tough guys who travel to a town to track down their mate, Judge Warren. However, the judge is missing, his daughter has been kidnapped, and no one is talking. The town is ruled by some douche called Forester and his campy son Horst Frank, and they might have kidnapped the girl because there's half a million dollars in gold missing and they want. It.Isn't that always the case though? You just want a pint and a decent place to sleep and all of a sudden folks are surrounding you and laughing and spitting in your water and getting annoyed when you gun them down. It must have been a hard life, being a gunslinger.Then the usual happens - double crosses, beatings, attempted rape, shootings, big gunfight in the end. What makes this one stand out a bit more than the usual is Stelvio Massi's endlessly inventive cinematography (people looking at others through the barrels of a shotgun, multiple Hiltons looking at a corpse via shattered mirror fragments - He's very good, Massi). Then you've Horst's character as a sadistic, but frustrated, sharpshooter. And a hidden bad guy we don't see until near the end. Plus, the lead bad guy gets dispatched in a manner I don't think I've seen in a Western before.The film becomes rather violent in the last half hour too, and that's when Carnimeo throws in the Giallo twists. Good on you sir. Carnimeo would go on to make on of my favourite Giallo films ever - the Edwige-Fenech-With-Her-Clothes-Just-Painted-On film The Case Of The Bloody Iris.

I sure like the pedigree of this one, as director Carnimeo (a/k/a Anthony Ascott) is behind several fine Sartana films as well as FIND A PLACE TO DIE; and George Hilton is one of the Spaghetti Western genre's most laconic and charismatic stars. But despite very capable and creative direction, a hooky theme song and score, and the presence of Hilton's winning smirk, the film is a dud.Hilton plays a notorious bounty hunter (Lord) who, with his burly, sloppy sidekick Bull (Walter Barnes in a Jack Black-style role) aims to discover the location of a missing fortune in gold. Horst Frank is the hot-headed young man that stands against them.If you were to make a list of the pic's assets, you'd think, wow, must be great: There is an intriguing mystery to the story, as the heroes must decipher various arcane clues and enlist the help of a long-missing crippled girl. The title song, "Walk By My Side" by Francesco DeMasi, is supremely infectious, and repeats throughout in a variety of forms, notably plucked on an electric bass guitar. Carnimeo's varied camera set-ups feature numerous unusually-composed and visually-arresting shots and interesting points-of-view. Hilton is sarcastic and charming. Barnes is goofy and funny, in a Bud Spencer sort of way. Still, the picture bored me to tears in each of two separate attempted viewings. (I was made so catatonic the first time around, I stopped halfway through and tried again from the beginning on another day. No Luck.) If I had to put my finger on it, I guess I'd say there is a distinct lack of dramatic tension and/or action on hand. We seem to follow Lord leisurely from from one scenario to the next, never sensing any danger, import or panic to what's happening. The very few action sequences are of that most boring variety: The Shootout. Is there anything less exciting than two teams of gunmen firing at each other from darkened buildings? In several such scenes here, various pistoleros crouch behind their hiding spots, peek out and fire, crouch back down again, maybe somebody does an overly dramatic fall ... you get the idea. Furthermore, these scenes are usually edited such that there's no perspective on who's shooting whom, from where, adding to the viewer's dissonance. Let's have some some action, guys! A chase on horseback, a fistfight, a daring escape, a dramatic leap from a building, a tense river crossing ... stuff that makes the runtime fly by, not just fill the time.By no means a failure, you may like this film if you are specifically locked in to Hilton's particular charm, or can forgive its clock-stopping dullness. I wouldn't recommend it otherwise. 5 out 10 stars, C-.

The main reason I prefer Spaghetti Westerns to American ones is because the Spaghetti ones are generally far more entertaining. That's not the case here. The Moment to Kill is undoubtedly one of the most dull westerns I've ever had the misfortune to watch, and the film is made all the more disappointing by the fact that it could have been good! The story is certainly derivative, but similar ones have lead to great westerns before and after this film. Basically, we focus on a pair of gunslingers; Lord and Bull, that go after some treasure with only a book and a young crippled girl to go on. The film is very dark; but I don't mean in terms of the plot, I mean in terms of the picture; a lot of it takes place at night and I often found myself wondering exactly what was going on. The story gets boring very fast and this is mostly due to the tepid relationship between the central characters. George Hilton takes the role of Lord, but mostly looks bored; and he is joined by Walter Barnes as his partner. The two look odd on screen together and it doesn't work very well. There are not many noteworthy scenes, and even the many shootouts get boring before long. All in all, I wouldn't recommend this film to even the biggest Western fans.