********SPOILER************<br /><br />Fred Williamson's Joshua is your basic Vengeance themed Spaghetti Western. This one is about a black civil war veteran who returns home to find his mother has been murdered by a gang of white thugs. He sets out to track them and extract his vengeance. Although it is well-mounted and beautifully photographed, the film is lacking in about every other respect. It is basically without plot with no twists or turns other than the obligatory hero gets shot and recovers scene. There is little character developed, almost no dialog, a couple scenes that make absolutely no sense and that do not advance the story in any way. There is no intimacy in this film with any of the characters. Isela Vega plays a farmer's wife whom the gang kidnaps and repeatedly rapes. By the end of the movie she has developed an unexplained and unexamined relationship with the head of the Gang. The fetching beauty is totally wasted in this movie in a thankless role.<br /><br />This is a cynically scripted film that asks very little of the viewer other than to watch Mr. Williamson awkwardly ride a horse across the countryside. Ken Maynard, he is not.<br /><br />One feels that had Williamson developed his characters and plot more he might have had something here, although the vengeance themed Western has been done ad infinitum with two much better examples being Nevada Smith with Steve McQueen, and Last Train from Gun Hill with Kirk Douglas. By the end of this contemptuous movie, the viewer doesn't really care about any of it.