Joshua

1976

Action / Drama / Western

3
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 8% · 1 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 8%
IMDb Rating 4.6/10 10 498 498

tough girl

Director

Larry G. Spangler Photo
Larry G. Spangler

Top cast

Isela Vega Photo
Isela Vega as Maria
Neil Summers Photo
Neil Summers as Sheriff
Cal Bartlett Photo
Cal Bartlett as Jed
Fred Williamson Photo
Fred Williamson as Joshua
720p.WEB
750.8 MB
1280*544
English 2.0
NR
us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 21 min
Seeds 6

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by Uriah43 4 / 10

Should Have Been a Pretty Good Blaxploitation Western

With the Civil War just ended a Union soldier by the name of "Joshua" (Fred Williamson) is looking forward to starting a new life and is on his way to meet his mother who had been staying with a young couple who are about to be married. Unfortunately, upon arriving there he learns that 5 men have killed his mother and abducted the young woman (played by Brenda Venus). Since the trail is still relatively fresh and the posse has abandoned the search Joshua decides to hunt down the murderers on his own. And none of these outlaws have ever faced anything so deadly. Now rather than reveal any more of this movie I will just say that it had a fairly interesting plot. However, the music played during several of the action scenes was rather annoying, the character development needed improvement and some of the scenarios lacked any sense of realism. To top it off, I didn't especially care for the ending either. In essence then, what should have been a pretty good Blaxploitation Western turned out to be slightly below average and I recommend it only to those who might be interested in a film of this sub-genre.
Reviewed by hokeybutt 6 / 10

Almost Perfect In Its Simplicity

JOSHUA: THE BLACK RIDER (3 outta 5 stars) I am almost tempted to give this movie 5 out of 5 stars because it is almost perfect in its simplicity... a western movie can't get much more straight-forward than this: a man's mother is killed... and he spends the rest of the movie tracking and killing the men who did it. But, really, the acting is kind of poor and the direction is uninspired. There isn't really much dialogue so you can't say the script was well-done. Also, the movie is kind of slow... but personally I don't usually count that as a flaw... I *like* movies that take their time. Fred Williamson plays the title character... the bounty hunter bent on revenge for his mama's demise. The bad guys kidnap a woman along the way and rape her a few times but by the movie's end she has inexplicably allied herself with one of her assailants. Practically the entire soundtrack of this movie is a 90 second piece of faux-spaghetti-western music that gets repeated again and again and again... towards the end of the movie it almost becomes comical when that same old theme is repeated yet again. I think you need to *really* be a fan of westerns to like this one.. otherwise you are probably going to be bored beyond belief.
Reviewed by Robiep 6 / 10

Not Horrible! Just standard.

This really isn't as bad as the other review makes it sound. It does have a simple plot, and actually moves along fairly quick. Not much time is spend on any sort of character development, but we've all seen these types of characters in every other western anyhow. It's true that there is not a lot of dialog from Fred Williamson, but his character (Joshua) is a lone cowboy sneaking along quietly through the desert. What would he say? And to who? The film has a real nice gritty Italian look to it and its starkness works fairly well with the story. It's not going to be the greatest movie you've ever seen but it's interesting enough to watch once. I saw this on DVD which was made for a letter boxed version. They didn't shrink the image or pan and scan etc. So sometimes the picture is cut off a little. It was slightly annoying to watch.
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