Loaded with unashamedly sophomoric humor, but fired with a kind of early Richard Lester-esque elan that doesn’t run out of gas, “A Fistful of Fingers” shows more wit and invention than most of its no-budget Brit saddlemates. Theatrical outlook for this kind of campus exercise — billing itself “the greatest Western ever made … (in Somerset)”– is slim at best, but purely as a technical accomplishment, pic announces a precocious talent in 20-year-old Edgar Wright.
As signaled by the title, this is a spoof spaghetti Western, with much of the joke being the fact it’s entirely acted by Brits, made for nickels and dimes, and lensed in a verdant area of southwestern England that looks as much like New Mexico as does Norway.
Back-of-a-coaster plot has laconic gunman No-Name and his ultra non-PC Red Indian pal Running Sore hunting mustachioed baddie the Squint over hill and dale.
Running gags such as the protagonists riding sponge horses, plus flagrant anachronisms, keep the humor bubbling, but what saves the movie from its own silliness is the smart-looking result Wright achieves on a budget of about $ 15, 000.
