★★★
“From stage to stage.”
This spaghetti Western sees Lola (Falana) arrive in the town of Santa Ana with her troupe of dancing girls, after one of them falls ill. They need to stay there while she recuperates, under the care of the local not-quite-a-doctor-yet, Rod Strater (Martell). The town has bigger problems, being ruthlessly squeezed for every penny by El Diablo (Cobos). Lola lost her family to a not dissimilar band of outlaws, and is peeved that the menfolk are utterly cowed by El Diablo, even after Rod explains that the villains has taken hostages and is using them to compel the town’s good behaviour. But after a particularly tragic death, Lola has had enough, and rouses the town folk to action.
In many ways, this is a standard Western, with the lone good guy taking on the villains: hence its subtitle, “Face to face with the devil”. Except, of course, in this case, the guy is a gal. Oh, and Lola is black. I have just mentioned this fact more in the review, than the film ever does, being refreshingly colour-blind. It’s especially remarkable given the era, a good few years before Pam Grier would become a trailblazer back in Hollywood. It’s tempting to read race into Lola being greeted with, “We don’t need your kind around here,” when she steps off the coach. Subsequent events show it’s just the local morality police, who are severely unimpressed with her profession, rather than the shade of her skin.
In another twist, the villain’s real name is actually Larry Stern, which sounds more like an advertising executive. He’s a businessman who got peeved when his plans for a railroad fell through because the locals wouldn’t sell him their land, and decided to take revenge on them. Falana, though born in New Jersey, was already a star on Italian TV, and also performs a few musical numbers here. Though I did wonder where the music, a full-on jazzy production, was coming from in the town’s saloon, where there are no musicians at all. She certainly brings it with her moves, which are much more Vegas than Old West. And she would indeed go on to become the highest-paid performer in Sin City.
Until the final assault on El Diablo’s compound, where she demonstrates she does know her way around both ends of a firearm, Lola is more a figurehead to the town’s resistance, encouraging them to break free of their fears. The physical side of things is mostly left to Rod, who gets a couple of lengthy fist-fights, including one with El Diablo, when he’s not dealing with jealous girlfriend Rose (Schürer). It is this middle section where the film struggles a little, being particularly generic in its elements. But Falana is always compelling to watch, and it’s a shame she wasn’t given many further opportunities in our genre: 1975’s Lady Cocoa was perhaps the closest she came, although it doesn’t quite qualify for inclusion here.
Dir: Siro Marcellini
Star: Lola Falana, Peter Martell, Germán Cobos, Erna Schürer
a.k.a. Black Tigress
Judy Canova, known as ‘Queen of the Cowgirls’, was a popular star of radio and screen in the forties and fifties. She had a certain schtick: a homely but honest country gal, who stumbled into trouble – often with singing involved. I admit, the mere title of one such entity, Joan of Ozark, made me laugh. Here – despite the title – she plays a character called Judy, as she often did. The film’s name comes from Judy’s grandmother, who had been a much-feared sheriff. According to Judy, “The bad men in these parts were so scared of her, that they either plum reformed, or hung themselves by way of cooperating.” Judy now runs a trading post.
I’m inclined to look kindly on this, because I suspect it was a local production, filmed here in Arizona. While the end credits are silent on the topic, there are enough saguaro cacti about, to make it likely the faux Western town and other locations used, were somewhere near me. I recognize an actor or two as well. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly a film I would hold up as a shining example of quality Arizona cinema. While clearly set in the Old West, the movie is stuffed with anachronisms, from haircuts through a terrible British accent to glasses. It consequently never succeeds in establishing a convincing sense of period. This is a bit of a shame, since the Western horror action heroine isn’t one we see often. 
It’s clear what Snell is going for here. This is a throwback to the spaghetti Westerns of the seventies, along with Italian exploitation films from around the same time. I certainly admire the effort which went into this: for example, rather than shooting digitally and applying effects to imitate film, Snell actually shot on Kodak 16mm stock. I did not know that was still a thing, to be honest. Some of the other elements, like the music, also do a good job of reproducing the era – the movie poster is another one. I’ve seen enough of this kind of movie (mostly through 
This feels like a modern Western. I think it was shot up on the borders of Utah and Arizona, since I recognized scenes shot at the Buckskin Tavern, in that area. While contemporary, with relatively minor tweaks, it could easily take place a century or more ago, back when robber land barons were a thing in the Old West. Lupe (Covarrubias) is in desperate straits, with her mother Adamina (Miranda) in need of money to pay for medical treatment she can’t afford. There’s another shock: the father, Carl (Fitzgerald), who Lupe long believed dead, is actually alive, and might be the last chance of getting the necessary funds. So she decides to make the journey to see him.
This is the last (and at 120 pages, slightly the longest) book in the Sheriff Bride series, each installment written by a different author, which my wife Barb and I read together. (She appreciates these books much more than I do.) Here, our focus is on the youngest Hardin sister, Rob (Roberta); and three years have passed since the opening of the first book, so she’s now very close to 18, and probably is 18 by the end of this installment. (In western Texas in the late 1870s or early 80s, she would be viewed as of legitimately marriageable age –and the series title is a clue that this might be a relevant consideration.) While I don’t go so far as to recommend the series to most readers, if you do read it, I recommend doing so in order; you need the understanding of the situation and the characters as these have developed over time in the earlier books in order to properly experience this one.
Despite the fact that all of the books of this series are written by different authors, they exhibit a lot of similarity in style, and also in literary quality. Since the quality tends to be wanting, that’s not a good thing. (My wife Barb really likes these books, which is why we read them together; and even I find the premise novel and intriguing. But it suffers from mediocre and even amateurish execution.) However, Williford has a bit smoother, less pronoun-averse and a trifle more textured prose style than her colleagues, and also a more realistic and less “vegetarian” approach to the realities of lethal force in law enforcement than the first two books displayed. There are situations that can arise where killing a determined aggressor is the only way to protect innocent lives; and she recognizes both the fact that a decent person doesn’t want to do that and may be severely torn up by the pain of doing it, and that neither the reluctance nor the pain change the moral necessity of doing it at times. In fairness to the author of the first book, Teresa Ives Lilly, her heroine realized this as well, but was able to make a decision to disable rather than kill in the particular case she had to confront. But circumstances may not always provide that option…
There can’t be many Westerns of the fifties where the Yankees are the 
My rating for the first book was two and ½ stars. Several aspects of this second one, though, don’t work as well for me in terms of realism, and I wasn’t able to give it more than two stars. First, while (for at least some Native American peoples) tribal law may have allowed the fathers of young women to sell or gamble them away as slaves, by the late 1870s U.S. law didn’t countenance that. So the community’s project of buying Morning Glory’s freedom was unnecessary. Given the long warfare between Texans and the Comanches, and the ill-feeling of many whites in that era towards Indians, as well as Texas’ secession in the previous decade with defense of slavery as one of its officially-avowed reasons, the community’s unanimous sympathy with Morning Glory also seems a bit of a stretch. Though it’s true that slavery was much less entrenched in arid west Texas than in the east Texas cotton country; and Jo’s mother was apparently Northern-born, since her two brothers died fighting for the Union.
Second, it’s a standard romance-genre trope that at least one party to the romance has hang-ups to overcome, but Tom’s here seem sort of contrived. Yes, his previous fiancee broke their engagement because she didn’t want to live in a place like Waterhole; but it’s patently obvious that Jo doesn’t have that problem, and by now the community is becoming more female-friendly than it was then. His fear for her safety in a potentially violent job is more credible (if she has a problem shooting a deer, might she not also have a fatal hesitancy in shooting a human, even with her life on the line?), but the denouement here doesn’t actually discredit that fear. That brings me to some issues with the denouement.
In the first book, I had no trouble believing that a sober woman with quick reflexes, who’s trained and experienced with a pistol, could outdraw a partly-drunk male, even if he and a bunch of cowed townsfolk thought he was pretty hot stuff with his gun. It was said in the Old West that, “God created men and women, but Col. Colt made them equal.” But here, I did have trouble believing that a woman could tackle and physically overpower a presumably bigger and stronger armed male; and not much respect for her intelligence in trying it, when she could easily have covered him with her own gun from behind and demanded his surrender. Her two armed sisters didn’t display much smarts there, either.
If I were Tom, that incident would have exacerbated my concern for her, not laid it to rest. The outcome of the tale here also depends on believing (which I’m not certain that I do) that it can automatically be assumed that every cave in west Texas is inhabited by a swarm of bats which will emerge at sunset; and we’re also asked to believe that Jo’s love for animals makes her the only Hardin sister who would know this, when all of them are wilderness-wise. I also had a problem with our heroines letting an arrested petty thief just walk out of jail, even on the condition that he leave the area, in exchange for a tip leading to the arrest of bigger prey. Finally, although I give Cox credit for treating inter-racial romance positively, the secondary romance here came across to me as implausible and unconvincing.
All of this said, I did finish the book (my wife and I read it together – and she liked it much better than I did, her taste in Westerns not being nearly as critical), and it held my interest. Cox’s characterizations aren’t deep, but most of the characters are likable. Like the author, the main characters are evangelical Christians, and there’s a positive portrayal of the role of faith in their lives. We also see the effects of Christian conversion in a couple of cases, though we’re not privy to the scenes/conversations where those conversions take place (so there’s no lengthy evangelistic exposition). The series can appeal to fans of Westerns, Western romance and “Christian fiction” who don’t expect much depth and just want some harmless, time-passing entertainment.
A brief word about the cover art is in order. It’s a nice bit of action-heroine iconography, and does depict an actual scene from the book (a rifle-shooting contest). But while the young lady here has lovely brown eyes, we’re told in the books that Jo and all of her sisters are green-eyed; and the kind of colored nail polish this markswoman is wearing didn’t come into vogue until the 1920s. So, no awards for accuracy here!
Author: Brooksie Cox
Publisher: Lovely Christian Romance Press, available 
While this is an excellent and very original premise for a novella series, though, the execution of it here has to be called somewhat lackluster. Lilly’s prose style tends to be repetitive, both in language (and in using character’s names over again where a pronoun would serve her better) and in ideas, with points often being restated or reemphasized in the same paragraph when it’s not needed; she also has a tendency to tell when there would be more effective ways of showing. Some attempt was made at editing, but the proofreading was poor (there are only a few typos as such, but I finally deduced that the three or four bracketed repetitions of a sentence in different words were vestiges of textual corrections that weren’t edited out in the final draft!).