This has to be one of the worst movies I ever hired. It's not about the money I spent on hiring it, I can always make more money ... but I will never get my time back!
Lets get down to the nitty gritty. Costumes and sets, as well as make-up and some of the effects are quite good ... and that's about as far as it goes.
The lighting is very bad, it does not enhance the moods in various scenes but instead works really hard at destroying it. The clothes are too clean, as are various furnishings. I've never seen a Western Saloon so squeaky clean you could almost eat off the floor!
The acting is less than second rate, the actors (if you can call them actors) sound very wooden and almost like they're struggling to remember the script with such intensity that they forget all about actually acting. The lines of the script itself are very lame and often cliché, which in many instances could make the movie funny ... but it's not a comedy. Some of the extras in the background just stand there like wax dummies (in fact in one scene I actually thought they were wax dummies until they moved slightly). There are movies in which the actors will draw you into their story and make it believable, this isn't one of them, I didn't feel or care about any of the characters at all.
The background music is also very cliché. If they had elevators with music back in those days, they would play some of the music from this movie.
All in all The Showdown has a very home brewed quality about it, which is fine if it was made as a home movie for the family to watch or for the re-enactment society to screen on a slow Saturday afternoon. I just wish that such a waste of time hadn't been unleashed on the general movie-watching public.
I cannot recommend this movie ... and I want my time back!
