Fantastic!

everything you have heard about this movie is true.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

I've 200 Spaghetti Westerns, so I watch a lot that most people would consider of borderline merit, so I'm very capable of overlooking production shortcuts for the sake of the bigger picture. I couldn't with this one. It wasn't so much awful as it was really incompetent.Fred Williamson does well in the lead role...but he should stay away from script writing!!! Or at least hire a consultant that knows something about the period? Get a continuity editor? Learn some basic physics? Technically the history, physical possibility of a thing happening, etc., was actually as bad as Quentin Tarantino. Which is interesting because this is obviously the basis for Django Unchained, and it really shows what an idiot Tarantino is that he couldn't improve on this cow pat.The errors are legion. Makes me rate Spaghetti Westerns higher. Ever the worst of the worst never make any of the glaring mistakes this one does. The worst has to be the attitude change in the female lead. When? Why? How? No. Just happens. 13 shots from two six shooters. People 200 yards behind a person they're chasing firing six shooters, some pointing up into the air, in what would simply have been a waste of ammunition. No one reloads even once in the movie. Dynamite 2 years before it was commercially available. Joshua looses hardware constantly...and then it's magically back in the next scene. And some stuff that is just so non-sensical and pointless that even Tarantino would cringe. Well, I guess not, because he remade it. The scene where the old outlaw dies. Besides what he did would take hours, it's just POINTLESS! Not to mention it spawns yet another continuity error in the following scene. You could write five pages on the continuity errors section of this page.I gave it a 2 instead of a 1 because the scenery was nice, it was a western and Fred was OK. It is the first SW in my collection of 200 that I will not be archiving. Yep. First ever, watch and dump. Given my elastic tastes in the genre, that's really saying something.

Joshua starring Fred Williamson in the title role tells the story of a returning black civil war veteran who finds his mother murdered and some other woman abducted by this gang of some really loathsome cretins. Of course Williamson's duty is clear.The film was shot in the sacred John Ford country of Monument Valley, Arizona which as a tourist spot boasts of its fame as a location for some of the best westerns ever done. This however was not one of them.The story of Patty Hearst was fresh in people's minds and the woman abducted decides she likes it with the gang. Let's say she becomes less and less inhibited in her sexual relations with the gang and she's more like an outlaw groupie by the time the film ends.Unless you're a fan of Fred Williamson, pass this one by.

The previous poster commented that this movie was not available in Widescreen.There's at least 2 ways to get this in Widescreen. I've got one on the 'Quality' label - it's a 2 movie set on one disc. The other movie is some William Shatner film. I was pretty shocked to see it in widescreen considering the package was only $5.00.The 2nd way is on the 'Legends of the West' 8 Movie Collection. I'm pretty sure that's widescreen as well.Slow movie that drags on. The theme song repeats all the way throughout the movie. Don't remember if there was more than one actual song played throughout it's entirety.This movie is really only for Blaxploitation/Fred Williamson completests.

Someone, even if the star of the film Williamson himself, should have never allowed this film to reach the public with the simplistic kindergarten theme song played in the opening credits as well as various times through the film. No one would be expecting the music editor to make a monumental catchy theme along the lines of the Bonanza theme or Issac Hayes' Shaft. With such a humble production, the task of the music department would be to merely stay out of the way and not detract from the overall end product. Unfortunately, the music in this film fails miserably and detracts from any momentum that the average acting gains. Williams is pretty good in the lead role and his stoic approach is in tune with the Western gunslinger theme. A prologue showing Abraham Lincoln's picture is mumbled and difficult to hear so seeing as it doesn't add to the film it should have been left out all together. Williamson appears to struggle at times on the horse, having to kick it too many times then winding up with his hat falling around his neck and sending him bobbing too harshly. The real sin here remains the theme song. With three seconds of effort my "Anty Up, Black horse, black hat, black rider...cowboy...Whew Whew" "Move along Black hat, black horse, black rider, go go " would be annoying, but less so than the instrumental that was settled for. Also it is not as if 1975 did not have a dearth of talent to make a worthy theme at a low budget price. While Quincy Jones and Stevie Wonder would be unaffordable, an even exchange of exposure for talent could have been worked out with someone like Billy Preston, Bob Grusin or Randy Crawford churning out a passable theme track.