I found this in a second-hand shop that had a VCR and TV to preview the used tapes. From the bizarre opening shot of the oil field and the director's credit, I knew this was one worth the dollar.
Franco Nero does his best Terrence Hill impression as the character Onion who arrives in town to start an onion farm on a parcel of land he's bought real cheap from a farmer. What he doesn't know is that evil oil magnate Petrus Lamb has bought/stolen all the property around the town due to the vast oil reserves under the town. Lamb has a strange mechanical hand that's serviced by Adolf Hitler! Thru a plot device out of Once Upon A Time in the West, Onion's property is still owned by the orphans of the original farmer who's been killed by Lamb's henchmen. The rest of the movie revolves around the increasingly silly attempts to steal the lease out of Onion's possession.
First of all, the film is very well directed by Enzo Castellari so that already lifts it out of the typical spaghetti western doldrums. The script is very silly with frequent forays into total surrealism. Onion fights with a gun and the many onions that he has hidden in his pants. During a duel he always asks, "Gun or Onion?" The first fight scene with Onion is right out of the first Trinity movie except it mostly done with onions. I suppose it's a parody of sorts, but how do you parody a parody? Martin Balsam is game as the evil Lamb and he seems to be having fun with the mechanical hand he's wearing. I enjoyed the movie for the most part although the overuse of sped-up footage towards the end is a let-down. The English dubbing crew had some fun with this film as they gave Onion a Jimmy Stewart voice and one orphan sounds like Bugs Bunny imitating a gangster. For some reason it works! I wonder what the Italian original sounds like.
Not the greatest but with enough bright spots that I enjoyed the film.
