The production for “A Fistful of Fingers” is essentially a group of British kids goofing on American tropes while making a movie on a location that looks like a hiking trail. Its story involves a cigar-chomping, squinting Clint Eastwood-like character (played by Graham Low, who sounds more like Dirty Harry than The Man With No Name) hunting an outlaw named The Squint. Joining Walter along the way is a Native American named Running Sore (Martin Curtis, in cringing brown skin make-up and with a deep voice), as the story becomes a type of buddy journey as they run into various people along the way (including more outlaws) and stumble upon some treasure. Characters pretend their riding real horses a la “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and numerous cheap jokes abound for Native American and Mexican characters that Wright might have thought were ironic (which might be one reason the film is slow to wider public release). Start to finish, the movie is delightfully dorky, irreverent and scrappy, the exact kind of project a young filmmaker would make if they just wanted to make fellow nerds laugh and were pretty good at doing so. 

To be more fair to the script that Wright wrote for it, “A Fistful of Fingers” is more of an extensive list of gags that takes place in a western setting. And while his jokes display a zippy eye for a gag, his pacing as a story completely suffers from it. But it's all in the vein of Monty Python, the Zucker brothers, cartoons, and Mel Brooks, functioning like a micro budget take on “Blazing Saddles.” Wright’s movie is full of the same anachronistic, pun-filled, zippy humor you’d get when mixing them all together. I can’t do the jokes justice, but I can share a few premises that lead to big laughs: A revolver showdown that turned into finger guns and then a spitting contest; a play on the phrase “none shall pass” involving nuns, a sports commentator interjecting that the bang-bang-shoot-'em-up climax of the movie was “Peckinpah-tastic!” Wright himself appears in the film, as a villager who is shot. And never to lose a reference to a movie that inspired it, the characters break from the story to debate whether Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid died at the end of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.” 

Watching this movie, you can see how much of an improvement he made with his next feature, “Shaun of the Dead.” That movie continued his idea of tapping into a genre and telling a story with friends (in the case of collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost) but there’s much greater focus with jokes that tell the story, instead of using jokes to fill the run time (as Wright even admitted to doing with "A Fistful of Fingers" in his introduction). “Shaun of the Dead” is an incredibly funny movie but its many visual gags play in direct service to the propulsion of the narrative. And like "A Fistful of Fingers" or "Hot Fuzz" or anything Wright has made, dialogue is only one part of the comedy. 

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