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One Man’s Love and Another Man’s Revenge Take on the Mothers of All EVIL! “Forgotten Pistolero” reviewed! (Carambola Media / Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Forgotten Pistolero” Now Available on Blu-ray!

Rafael is a hunted man as he travels from Mexico to Texas searching for his childhood friend Sebastian, a son of a Mexican general who years earlier was slain by an unfaithful wife and her lover shortly after returning from war with the French.  When Rafeal happens upon a man living in solitude on the land, he identifies him as his long-lost friend who has forgotten about his traumatic past and decides not to revictimize his friend of the past, but when Rafael is captured by bounty hunters, Sebastian saves his life that spurs Rafeal into unveiling to his friend his real childhood tragedy.  Sebastian and Rafael set upon a mission of revenge and to save Sebastian’s sister Isabella, who Rafael has fallen in love with and who has had an arranged marriage to a humble shopkeeper to rein in her opposition to her mother’s betrayal.  As the two men battle unscrupulous gun-toting henchmen and deal with their own personal issues in their own way, the gunfighters unravel the truth about their Sebastian and Isabella’s parents while shooting their way toward those directly responsible for unending their tranquil lives. 

“The Forgotten Pistolero,” aka “Gunman of Ave Maria,” aka “Il pistolero dell’Ave Maria” is the 1969 Italian spaghetti western based on the converging of Greek tragedies from Aeschylus, Euripides and Homer.  Notable Italian western director Ferdinando Baldi, director of “Texas, Adios” and “Django, Prepare a Coffin,” pulls forth the betrayal and revenge tale out of the fourth century and into the 19th century set in the semi-arid landscape between Mexico and Texas with spears traded out for six-shooters.  The script is penned by multiple writers with Vencenzo Cerami (“The Silent Stranger”), Pier Giovanni Anchisi (“Hate is My God”), Mario di Nardo (“Aphrodite, Goddess of Love”), Federico de Urrutia (“Hour of Death”), and even director Baldi to grasp the immense drama of tragedy and place it inside the context of a western gunslinger.  “The Forgotten Pistolero” came at the height of the spaghetti western subgenre produced out of Italy with “Django” producer Manolo Bolognini as feature showrunner with Izaro Films and B.R.C. Produzione as production companies filming primary in Spain doubling as the Central and North American west.  

Like many Italian films of the era, especially in the spaghetti western and horror subgenres, the cast is comprised of multinationals with New York-born Leonard Mann at the lead actor credit.  Mann, who began his career in Italy and continued acting in a number of Italian films (“The Unholy Four,” “Death Steps in the Dark”), plays the titular pistolero Sebastian inexplicably haunted by his past while living in solitude until childhood friend Rafeal, played by Italian-born Peter Martell (“God Made Them… I Kill Them”), discovers his friend and reveals he truth that’s subconsciously plagued Sebatian for far too long.  There’s a show of unspoken connection between the two characters that time faded and is rekindled by mutual respect in both – Rafael’s intentions to not hurt Sebastian with the truth by running away after finding him and Sebastian’s tracking him down and saving him from bounty bandidos.  No words needed to describe their bond and through Mann and Martell’s acting do we see that connection solidify to be indestructible.  Completing the childhood friendship is Isabella, played by Spanish actress Pilar Velázquez (“Naked Girl Murdered in the Park”), who is forced to marry a humble yet good man shopkeeper Ignacio (Luciano Rossi, “Salon Kitty”) to be out of illicit lover Tomas’s way as he tries to woo back Anna, both of whom staged a coup and killed Sebastian and Isabella’s father, General Juan Carrasco (José Suárez, “Texas, Adios”).  Isabella adds crucial love interest to Rafael’s state of mind as the hunted gunman finds solace at the bottom of the tequila bottle with his life on the run and his love married to another man.  Rafael’s only hope is Sebastian, thought dead or believed to have vanished by his treacherous mother Anna (Luciana Paluzzi, “99 Women”) and her scoundrel lover Tomas (Alberto de Mendoza, “Horror Express”) who have drifted apart and have their own complex dynamic to which in itself is failing falling out to have permanently taken a father away from his children and have it result all for naught.  Sebastian slowly reconnections with Rafael and himself as his subdued vengeance is ironically rooted by a fierce craving to see those responsible pay. 

Ferdinando Baldi’s surface-layer retribution theme has a subaqueous depth of leagues-upon-leagues of combative and raw emotion, seeded by a singular event of betrayal, separation, and loss all in the life-altering blink of an eye.  Though crucial to thought processes and motivations of the character on either side of the moral coin, the story bypasses the long years between the assassination when Sebastian, Isabella, and Rafael are children and much later when the obligation of adulthood comes knocking.  What’s not depicted from those omitted years are the trials of Rafael’s passion for Isabella and his arduous ordeal to evade capture by Thomas’s goons nor the privy of Sebastian’s life since the death of his father other than it’s made known Rafael’s mother took Sebastian under her wing and died recently.  What’s also missing, and has becomes quite a negative plot hole in the story, is how Rafael and Sebastian learned to gun fight and do it extremely well that becomes key to their reckoning success.  Isabella too suffers living in close proximity to her mother and her illicit lover with a seething hate, especially for her mother, and her relationship with a timid but kind shopkeeper who aims to please her happiness without demanding much from her already shattered childhood.  Triggering trauma, down the bottle depression, suffering in silence, and a searing hatred coupled with perfected embattled showdowns and gunslinging escapades lead up to an unraveled, truth-be-told twist ending of scorching inferno on where it all started.  Baldi knew how to frame a shot that paired people with steady tension or to find their true North when it came to exposition and his gunfights, and though not inundated with rabid rapid-fire riddling with bullet holes, “Forgotten Pistolero” does stand firm in the turbulent ocean of western films, especially with flawed, hero-errant protagonists.

Catalogued title 001 for the IFD Films offshoot label, Carambola Media, distributed through Diabolik DVD, “Forgotten Pistolero” quick draws a new 2-disc, high-definition Blu-ray, encoded with AVC on a BD25 for the English ADR and a BD50 for the Italian ADR language version because it’s accompanied with extras.  The different languages are encoded on individual discs.  The extra pixels offer an extremely high level of detail that reproduces a competent saturation of a warmer graded film, complete with saddle brown and burnt sienna tones, brightly lit in exterior definition and really absorbed with the interiors from it’s 2K saturation of the 35mm print presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio.  No obvious print damage to the 1969 film, emulsified and preserved properly for later restoration efforts of today.  Often skin tones appear orangish, as seen in many DVD updates, but the color correcting process works wonders with “Forgotten Pistolero’s” verisimilar viewing.  As noted, each language track has its own disc that offer two audio options on each disc.  The English and Italian language discs come with a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono mix and an uncompressed LPCM 2.0 Mono, both rendering ideal fidelity through the power of early Italian cinema ADR with only insubstantial studio inference and no hissing or crackling pops to note.  Either track will work with a seemingly natural flow, even the English track since some actors are mouth articulating English works, as any kind of desynch between the action of talking and the post-production audio has egregious control.  Gunfire has that distinctly rich ricochets effect, and the punches pack a nice wallop when struck, both typical in spaghetti western greats.  The interview with Leonard Mann and the original trailer is exclusively on the Italian language disc whereas the English track focuses just on the feature.  The standard Blu-ray comes in a standard Amaray with an extra lock-in flap for the second disc.  The sleeve art is of the film’s original poster art with a shirtless Leonard Mann, who’s never shirtless in the film, looking cowboy rugged with his gun holstered on his hip.  The hard A region encoded disc is not rated and has a runtime of 83-minutes.

Last Rites: Don’t mistake “Forgotten Pistolero” as an ordinary spaghetti western and don’t ever compare to it to The Man With No Name trilogy as a totally separate type of Italian western but the Carambola Media release is something special, pulled from the depths of Greek mythology, and spun to be a tale of tragedy, twist, and a torrent of gunfights and emotions.

“Forgotten Pistolero” Now Available on Blu-ray!

EVIL Sentences You to the Torture Dungeon and his Bedroom! “Night of the Blood Monster” reviewed! (Blue Underground / 4K UHD + Blu-ray)

Posted by Steven Lewis on

“Night of the Blood Monster” on 4K + Blu-ray is Here and On Sale!

After the death of King Stewart, 17th century England went into asunder chaos with the ruthless, usurping King James and the rightful, exiled King William of Orange who sought to return and topple King James’s authoritarian rule of a false claim to monarchy.  During the beginning and at the height of the revolution, Chief Justice George Jefferies presides over witchcraft cases with extreme and unethical prejudice, subjecting them to the torture chamber for what is labeled a ‘thorough examination” of their heretic ways, and eventually sentencing to public execution.  When the sister of one of the condemned women attempts to flee the country with a nobleman’s son, Jefferies learns of their dissidence and sends his henchmen to fetch the lovely woman to exploit her within the context of his own licentious litigiousness but closer and closer do the rebels and William of Orange’s men come to men like Chief Justice Jefferies who believe their power, influence, and proximity to God will save them from the noose.

A 17th century Eurotrash period piece forged out of mostly flesh and wolfish self-importance, “The Night of the Blood Monster” is yet another reteaming of Jesús (Jess) Franco and Sir Christopher Lee based loosely on historical context despite Lee’s best efforts for the contrary.  Also wildly and otherwise known as “The Bloody Judge,” and not to neglect mention the exorbitant unofficial titles from around the globe like “Witch Killer of Broadmoor,” “Throne of the Blood Monster,” and “Trial of the Witches” to name a few, the Spanish-German-British coproduction, cowritten between Jess Franco and Enrico Columbo (“Hell Commandos”) is a biographical interpretation of the Chief Justice George Jefferies and the brief span of his cruel litigator’s life set against an epic regime kerfuffle and grimy, exploitation barbarity.  The storyline concept was imagined by longtime Jess Franco producer and overall B-movie votarist Harry Alan Towers (“99 Women,” “The Blood of Fu Manchu”) alongside Columbo and Arturo Marcos (“She Killed in Ecstasy”) under production firms of Fenix Cooperative Cinematografica, Prodimex Film, and Towers of London Productions.

In yet another instance similar to Jess Franco’s “Eugenie” of a prior year or two where Christopher Lee channels the spiritual embodiment of a pain-and-pleasure pundit connected to the Marquis de Sade yet is unaware of the actual skin-and-sleaze that’s happening all around him while he crafts his melodramatic character, “The Night of the Blood Monster” has Lee conduct a stern symphony for Chief Justice George Jefferies’ conceited righteous carnage, living true to the factual George Jefferies designation of a hanging judge.  Lee is ruthless and cold while proper in public as he peeps beautiful bosoms and skirts from afar.  His costar, the gorgeous blonde with soul pierce eyes in fellow “Eugenie” thespian, Maria Rohm, who was also Harry Alan Towers wife at the time, definitely wasn’t clueless about the more undressed scenes, going full frontal in a couple of occasions with one of the supposedly with Lee as the exploiter of her beauty and circumstances.  However, Lee is never shown and only Jefferies’ hands are seen caressing Rohm’s character’s, Mary Gray, bare skin with post-event moments alluding to the implied affect.  Yet, there’s plenty of well-scripted dynamic play for Lee to bounce off against, which Franco is good at in his work as long as his at least 75% of the work makes it to the screen and not too terribly chopped up and spliced for the sex appeal and gratuitous blood.  Milo Quesada (“The 10th Victim”) swings a mean bastard sword as one of Jefferies head knights of dirty work, Hans Hess (“X312 – Flight to Hell”) is more vanilla than complex as the rebellious nobleman son and Mary Gray paramour Harry Selton, and Leo Genn, who initially wasn’t supposed to play the Lord Wessex, really cements Lee’s genuine performance with his own as the aristocratical, oppositional counterpart to Jefferies sadism.  “Night of the Blood Monster” rounds out with Peter Martell (“The French Sex Murders”), Margaret Lee (“Asylum Erotica”), Howard Vernon (“Angel of Death”), and Maria Schell (“99 Women”) as the clairvoyant old woman Mother Rosa living in the hills. 

Like “Eugenie,” “The Night of the Blood Monster,” and most of Franco’s scripts and films, the historical accuracy you must take with a grain of salt.  Though the underline basis of historical figures and perhaps time periods are more-or-less on point, there’s a greater number of misrepresentation of events or an imprecise use of period appropriate props and costuming that is deemed close enough by a fast-and-loose industry standard. Yet, with any Jess Franco film, the modern-day consumer is not expecting award-winning and emotionally moving cinema but rather fleapit flicks of the fleshy kind with handfuls of equally perversive cruelty.  “The Night of the Blood Monster” fits the bill perfectly with a dressing that, to the untrained eye, would pass historical surroundings, give tribute to sordid bygone figures, and revel in its own unabashed filth outside the interpretations of its own core group of filmmakers.  On one hand I feel bad for Christopher Lee who didn’t know, maybe, that the edification of the character was being twisted into something more carnal but on the other hand, the man has been in quite a few Franco and Towers productions to have learned by then.  However, Franco does depict a remarkable presence of a low-level epic with fabricated Classicism set dresses and interior architecture while keeping the budget down by having multiple scenes of men on horses gallop through an unrecognizable, middle-of-world forest.  With that said, the story doesn’t have perfect fluidity with a choppy sense of tempo that fails to coordinate our specific concepts of time.  Seasons don’t change yet months pass between the wrongful execution of Alicia Gray and the impending arrival of William of Orange’s invasion. In all, there’s a brilliance in the behind the face value and a heart to make Chief Justice George Jefferies the worst person possible yet the timing feels off and the story suffers for it.

I’m curious to understand why Blue Underground used the title “Night of the Blood Monster” on their new 2-Disc 4K UHD and Blu-ray set instead of their previous DVD that had the less-generic-more-fitting title “The Bloody Judge.” No judge-ment here really other than “Night of the Blood Monster” isn’t as catchy. The 4K UHD is HVEC encoded, 2160p high-definition, on a double layered BD-66 presents a new 2023 Dolby Vision HDR 4K scan that is gorgeously sharp in detail of interior structures, brighter exteriors, and even the dungeon scenes invoke the dewy coldness and bloodletting squirms. The skin tones can get a little funky at times with an overly warm, and orange-ish, glow not conducive to elements around the ambiance. Other than a few instances of the skin tones, the grading is overall rich in saturation where we get some really nice and thick contrasting reds and yellows with no artefact inference that cause distraction in darker spots or around the edge of objects. The Blu-ray format offers a lesser immersive picture with a lower pixel count but the compression decoding around 35-38Mbps and the compilation of transfer as well as the high-definition pixels is worth the combo set alone. The English language DTS-HD Master Audio Mono track has lossless compression that renders a clean and unfiltered fidelity in dialogue and in the other audio composited audio layers. Granted, some actors are dubbed due to the international co-production with German and Spanish natives not speaking their native tongues but the dub itself, especially in Lee’s own dubbed track, is one of the better inlaid and integrated tracks compared to most with not a load of static feedback. Blue Underground was able to obtain a cut that is the complete and uncensored version of “Night of the Blood Monster” by combining multiple transfers but in adding additional scenes of nudity and blood from a German transfer, the English dialogue track does briefly switch over to German with burned in English subtitles for two segments. English, French and Spanish optional subtitles are available. The 4K UHD carries with it three historian audio commentaries: 1) Troy Howarth and Nathaniel Thompson, 2) Kim Newman and Barry Forshaw, and 3) David Flint and Adrian Smith. The Blu-ray carries a bit more. Including the aforementioned commentaries, there is also deleted scenes and alternate scenes that rework scenarios or add stylistic choices, an archival interview Bloody Jess with Jess Franco and Christopher Lee, an interview with Stephen Thrower, author of “Murderous Passions: The Delirious Cinema of Jesus Franco, in Judgement Day, an interview with Alan Birkinshaw and Author Stephen Thrower as they discuss producer Harry Alan Towers in In the Shadows, and rounds off with trailers, TV spots, and still galleries. What I love about this new Blue Underground UHD+Blu-ray combo release is not only the picture but also the cardboard slipcover, a remarkable blend of film factuality and gratuitous sleaze of half-naked and scared women chained up in the dungeon with the embossed tactile title “Night of the Blood Monster” in bold gothic lettering. The same image graces the front cover of the black 4K UHD Amary case but if you do want “The Bloody Judge” title, you can reverse the cover art and there it is but with a different, less fun front cover art that’s more in tune with the narrative. Each disc, punch locked into its own side of the interior case, is pressed with a different illustrated image, 4K being the same as the slipcover while the Blu-ray is more Lee and Executioner focused. No inserts or books included. The not rated, 103-minute release comes region free on both formats.

Last Rites: The verdict is in! “The Night of the Blood Monster” now has the best-looking, most-complete version possible with a new, uncensored cut from Blue Underground. Christopher Lee heralds in hopelessness in squalid measure while holding his nose up high as one of England’s most notorious magistrates to ever rule and the brazen Jess Franco brandishes brilliance that glints through the cracks of an overrun production.

“Night of the Blood Monster” on 4K + Blu-ray is Here and On Sale!