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Just what I expected

It's an amazing and heartbreaking story.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The Jackals is an enjoyable Western film and I saw it without seeing beforehand Yellow Sky which I did not know before that The Jackals was a remake of. Vincent Price headlines The Jackals although much of the action belongs to Robert Gunner. The only principal female cast member is Diana Ivarson as Willie Decker the granddaughter of the Price character. Diana Ivarson is pretty feisty as Willie and she is not bad to look at. In fact unlike Price, who has numerous credits to his name, Gunner and Ivarson only have a handful of credits to their name in their respective brief acting careers. Not a bad Western and having not seen Yellow Sky beforehand, The Jackals is good enough story to follow on.

Remake of Yellow Sky set in South Africa. Vincent Price gets top billing as the only star in the movie, but his role is not the biggest. The plot is about seven bank robbers who happen upon a ghost town. The only people in the town are gold prospector Price and his daughter (Diana Ivarson). Vincent Price is generally worth recommending any movie for and he's the best thing about this one. Robert Gunner plays the Gregory Peck role from the original as the bandit who falls in love with the daughter. Gunner is OK but no Peck, to put it politely. Blonde beauty Ivarson makes for an unconvincing tomboy. Moving the setting to South Africa is the film's only original feature. I fail to see why they even bothered to do this as it adds nothing to an otherwise typical western. Dull movie.

Wholesome South African western, inspired by "Yellow Sky" stars Robert Gunner as Stretch Hawkins, an essentially decent bandit who leads his gang into an all but abandoned mining town where they discover the inhabitants are the peroxide blonde sharp-shooter Ivarson and her elderly grandpa Price. The two have been mining the veins for gold dust and when Hawkins' gang get the scent, they go after the lot, despite Hawkins' making a deal with Price to take only half. Tensions run hot and predictably, the gang implodes on greed.Aside from mega-star Price, playing a gangly old-timer looking to revive a town on his lucky strike, Gunner stars as the gang's moral compass and equilibrium with his work cut out trying to prevent his men from interfering with Ivarson and fighting amongst themselves. Gunner is something of an enigma in the annals of film history, his brief career resulted in just a handful of movies (notably as stricken astronaut Landon in "The Planet of the Apes") before it abruptly ended. Ivarson looks at times like she's attempting to play a primitive form of woman, raised on gold fever without a maternal role model; to some extent, she achieves the brief. Interestingly like Gunner, Ivarson also failed to nail a film career though she did marry cult-favourite, brawny chrome-domed tough guy Bob Tessier.Some pleasant scenery of African savanna and the occasional action punctuates what is otherwise a bit of a romantic melodrama. Pretty tame, but not bad all things considered.

Almost a word for word re-make of "Yellow Sky", with a setting on another continent. No better than the original, but still worth seeing. A pleasure seeing Vincent Price in something not dealing with the walking dead or some ghostly mansion: he shone as the grizzled old prospector, Oupa.