Summer Love (Dead Man's Bounty) (2006)

38% of critics liked it
(13 reviews)
18% of users liked it
(335 ratings)

Val Kilmer stars as the corpse of a wanted man in this western exploring the greed and iniquity of the lawless frontier. When a stranger rides into a small town toting the lifeless body of a noted outlaw, his intentions are to collect the bounty and be on his way. But the situation becomes… More Val Kilmer stars as the corpse of a wanted man in this western exploring the greed and iniquity of the lawless frontier. When a stranger rides into a small town toting the lifeless body of a noted outlaw, his intentions are to collect the bounty and be on his way. But the situation becomes complicated when the stranger sits down for a high-stakes card game with the drunken sheriff. With nothing to wager but the body he arrived with, the stranger calls the sheriff's bluff and goes all in. Later, despite the fact that he lost the game, the stranger vows to keep the corpse at all costs. ~ Jason Buchanan, Rovi

Rating, Runtime: R, 1 hr. 34 min.
Directed By: Piotr Uklanski
Written By: Piotr Uklanski
Genres: Art House & International, Western

In Theaters: Oct 19, 2007 Wide
Studio: Barnholtz Entertainment

Critic Reviews

Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune
Summer Love is fraught with feverish moods, bold imagination and a devilishly complicated exploration of the genre's iconography. It is also maddeningly paced, often like watching paint dry, albeit paint that's the garish tones of buckets of blood.
, Los Angeles Times
Uklanski distances himself from the material at every turn, until it's difficult to distinguish the ironist's wit from the cynic's smirk.
Colin Covert, Minneapolis Star Tribune
This pierogi western disassembles the genre mechanics of the gunslinger movie and makes a Dada collage of its gears and springs.
Manohla Dargis, New York Times
Summer Love has been called the first Polish western and the first Polish spaghetti western, though the truer description might be the first deconstructed art western.
J. Hoberman, Village Voice
A mock spaghetti western that manages to be both parody and homage, albeit less western than spaghetti.
Leslie Felperin, Variety
'Whatever' is likely to be auds' response to this occasionally engaging but often ineptly made exercise in postmodern irony.
Brian Holcomb, PopMatters
In attempting to create a shock effect of the new within the old, the baby is tossed out with the bathwater. The core pleasures of genre still have to be respected.
Wade Major, Boxoffice Magazine
It's an odd, disjointed, but curiously appealing effort that could attain cult status if only for the fact that it's so incredibly strange.
Jeff Shannon, Seattle Times
Summer Love feels more like a haphazard assembly of loose-knit components, jumbled together with obvious affinity for all varieties of a distinctly American genre.
Sam Sweet, L.A. Weekly
By eschewing any attempt at storytelling or character development, a film with all of the Western's fecund imagery and putrid fumes still ends up feeling as flat and distant as a gallery wall.
Andy Klein, Los Angeles CityBeat
The debut feature of artist Piotr Uklanski alleges to be the first Polish western ... There's no doubt that Uklanski has an eye: the film is full of beautifully composed shots. But that's about the end of its virtues.
Boyd van Hoeij, european-films.net
Though unevenly paced, the film is a lot of fun to watch as it tries to skew and at the same time re-create the typical archetypes of the western genre.

Read all 12 critic reviews

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Cast

Boguslaw Linda
as The Sheriff
Karel Roden
as The Stranger
Katarzyna Figura
as The Woman

Val Kilmer
as The Wanted Man
Krzysztof Zaleski
as The Big Man