Tuesday's Overlooked Movies: Hooded Angels

Here's one that I'll bet most of you have never even heard of, let alone seen.  HOODED ANGELS is a low-budget, independent Western filmed about ten years ago in South Africa with an international cast, most of whom I'd never heard of.  It's about a group of women who are brutalized in an attack on their town by Union soldiers during the Civil War and how after the war they become outlaws and drift across the West robbing banks.  The son of one of the men they kill during a robbery goes after them, along with some of his friends.

This isn't the easiest movie to follow, and we never really find out as much about the characters as I would have liked.  But at least the filmmakers tried to make a decent Western, and I'll give them credit for that.  HOODED ANGELS has some problems, including sloppy editing (a revolver is cocked, then uncocked, then cocked again, things like that) and that murky script I alluded to when I said the story is hard to follow.  And some of the costumes are just, well, weird.

But there are plenty of action scenes that are fairly well-staged, and there's a long scene with plenty of gratuitous nudity.  Paul Johannson, who I really like, makes a fine hero and I wish he would have made more Westerns.  Amanda Donohoe is good as one of the outlaws, and Gary Busey shows up in a small part as a sheriff, although he doesn't have a lot to do.  I don't know that I'd say HOODED ANGELS is a good movie, but it's certainly not terrible and if you're a Western fan you might well enjoy it.  I did.