Haunted, 1977

You know the movie Monty Python's Meaning of Life? As I recall, one scene shows a man running through the streets being chased by topless young women. The narrator explains that he has been sentenced to death, that he was allowed to choose his own form of execution, and this was it.

The movie Haunted starts with an Indian woman in Arizona during the Civil War being executed for stealing a horse. They execute her by tying her to a horse and forcing her to ride topless through the desert until she dies. I assume it would kill the horse, too, so it's a pretty stupid penalty for stealing one.

Haunted was made in 1977 by Michael A. DeGaetano. I already watched his first movie, UFO Target Earth. IMDb shows he made three movies and I've now seen two of them.

It's a reincarnation story. The murdered woman comes back to kill the descendants of the people who executed her.

I couldn't find Haunted on Roku. There were DVD's of it for sale on Amazon---they sold for $35 and there was a used copy for over a hundred dollars. It apparently has a following, but the commenters on IMDb each had some clever put-down for it.

This should be troubling to future filmmakers. You can make a couple of reasonably good movies and get no respect whatsoever. You're Martin Scorsese or you're nobody. It looks like DeGaetano's directing career lasted five years.

I finally found it on YouTube and watched it there.

With Aldo Ray and Virginia Mayo. They live on an old movie set turned tourist attraction with Virginia Mayo's athletic sons who are in their twenties. They haven't had any tourists come around in years. Virginia Mayo's character is blind and losing her mind.

An actress shows up in an enormous Pontiac convertible. The two young fellows have an AMC AMX. They all sit down and eat dinner together, each with their own TV dinner.

It was more of a soap opera or a melodrama than a horror movie. Here. Judge for yourself:

https://youtu.be/6C1rnL5puYM