Diablo

The kind of movie your stepdad would mention having seen on Netflix a few days back but have trouble remembering the name of. (He'd probably think it was pretty good, though.)

"Diablo" boasts the skeleton of an interesting allegorical oater ... but Carlos de los Rios' screenplay never manages to provide flesh or a beating heart, leaving the whole endeavor feeling more like a rough draft.

A relatively ordinary oater ...

An early candidate for the 2016 worst movies list.

Roeck aims for an homage to Eastwood Sr.'s revisionist Westerns (think The Outlaw Josey Wales, Unforgiven, etc.), but the result is pretentious and pointless.

A western thriller with lots of plot holes and an obvious intention of fooling the viewer with "twists" you can see from a mile away. [Full review in Spanish]

Diablo is not a great film by any stretch but it is stylish.

Subverts the cultural contradictions saturating westerns historically, while probing the post-Civil War PTSD pathology beyond the officially mythologized dark side wild west frontier. And another corrective to the portrayal of Native Americans on screen.

It's impossible not to think of Clint Eastwood in his great Westerns when watching his youngest son, Scott, in this poor one, and the comparison isn't favorable. Both the movie and its star seem empty.

I'll give Lawrence Roeck credit, at least he didn't reveal the twist to his new film Diablo in its last few minutes.

As far as high concept western/horror flicks are concerned, "Diablo" is nowhere near the excellence of the recent VOD release "Bone Tomahawk," but it should be satisfying for audiences who are in store for a moody and intriguing genre exercise.

There's not much beneath the surface of this modest vigilante saga.