The Medusa Fora

Speaking of the movie Straight to Hell......right now I´m sitting in some internet cafe shop in a very small town west of Almeria, Spain......Apparently Alex Cox and company supposedly filmed the movie somewhere´s around these parts back in 86....
Anyway, today I was walking out in the middle of nowhere in some desert like mountain region, and I could have sworm that they filmed parts of the movie right around here....it all just looked so typically spaghetti western and familiar - very nice scenery.
For what its worth I started humming the beggining lines to Fiesta before retreating to the nearest bar for a quick one......

It was filmed on the old Sergio Leone western sets in that area. I'm sure if you ask around the locals will direct you to the set.

It's close to a highway. I know this 'cause you can see the cars and trucks in the background of a few shots.

Thanks for the tip DZM....if only I had checked this forum again before leaving.....I didn´t know that Sergio Leone also used this area for some of his westerns....had I had known that I would have definetly found out where it was!!.....
Although, yesterday I was talking with some locals who informed that their was in fact a "Mini-Hollywood" close to Almeria, where apparently parts of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (among others..) were actually filmed there....

For those that may have an interest in these sets for the future, here's some more information:

http://www.geocities.com/thalaric1/sites/leone/
http://www.suntimes.com/ebert/ebert_rev ... 40794.html
http://www.sergioleone.net/archeo/book.html
http://garringo.cool.ne.jp/
http://www.btinternet.com/%7Eramon/sw/
http://www.tucotours.co.uk/

Amusing background on Straight To Hell (from http://industrycentral.net/director_interviews/AC01.HTM):

HOW DID STRAIGHT TO HELL HAPPEN?
While we were editing SID & NANCY I organised a concert at the Fridge in Brixton, in support of the FSLN (Sandanista National Liberation Front) in Nicaragua. The Pogues, and Elvis Costello, and Joe Strummer all played to a full house and we made a couple of thousand quid for the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign.

Eric Fellner, the producer of SID & NANCY, came up with a grander scheme: since the public clearly loved the musicians and was sympathetic to the Nicaraguan cause, why not organize a rock'n'roll tour of Nicaragua, involving the same guys? Eric figured that a video deal would pay for it, and we persuaded the said musicians to sign up for a month-long accoustic Nicaragua Solidarity Tour in August 1996. The bands agreed; but we couldn't find a video company that would fund the tour.

Which put us in an embarrassing position, having persuaded at least a dozen musicians not to tour or record for the entire month of August. Eric's solution? Make a film instead: as he predicted, it was easier to raise $1m for a low-budget feature starring various musicians than to find $75,000 to film them playing in a revolutionary nation in the middle of a war.

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF STRAIGHT TO HELL?
I think it's very funny. I like that it has no swearing at all (the worst thing anybody says is "Go boil yer 'ead!"). I'm impressed by some of the performances - particularly Sy Richardson, Fox Harris, Biff Yeager, Miguel Sandoval, Jennifer Balgobin, and Courtney Love. The characters were written for the actors, and I thought Courtney's part was great: like Nancy Spungen if Nancy had been a tougher and more together individual. She'd played a small part in SID & NANCY: this was the second time we worked together, and her first leading role. And it was Sy Richardson's first lead role in a feature: he is a great, great actor - I'm honoured to have worked with him so many times.

A LOT OF CRITICS DIDN'T LIKE STRAIGHT TO HELL.
A lot of critics didn't like Jacobean tragedy, or Spaghetti Westerns, either, until many years passed and they became respectable. There are also people who don't like the desert - they think it looks like a dust-filled slag-heap. That is their point of view. For me the greatest pleasure of STRAIGHT TO HELL was filming in that fantastic, surreal Andalucia landscape -- the desert of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, THE GOOD, THE BAD & THE UGLY, and FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE - films with extraordinary locations: the weird, ancient clay and sandstone and volcanic badlands, the huge triangular mountain of El Faro on the horizon.

There is a certain beauty to being on location, to working in Spain, in Mexico, staying in white-walled towns, walking the streets at night, rising at dawn and working out in the desert till the last light of the sun is gone, which cannot be simply explained.