Spaghetti Western Double Feature – The Last
Gun & 4 Dollars Of Revenge (1964/65//Mill
Creek Blu-ray Double Feature)
Picture:
C- Sound: C Extras: D
Films: C-/C+
Mill
Creek has been putting out a variety of Blu-ray double features recently, and
among them were to have been two sets featuring spaghetti westerns. The
Spaghetti Western Double Feature covered here was to have been the second
of the two, but with the first indefinitely on hold due to issues concerning
distribution rights, its unclear if any more volumes are to follow. Both films in this set were released as part
of an earlier collection called 10,000
Ways To Die, which crammed twelve lesser known westerns onto 3 DVDs.
The Last Gun was made pre-Leone, and it shows.
It lacks most of the traits that the
genre is known for and instead plays like a low class rip-off of American-made
westerns from a decade prior. 4 Dollars of Revenge is the movie that
I suspect most people to buy this set for, and more than makes up for the
shortcomings of the prior title. Its
main credential is the fact that it was written by Bruno Corbucci, who's
responsible for penning such classic westerns as Django and The Great Silence
– both directed by his brother Sergio Corbucci. It fulfilled my expectations and is good
enough if you're itching for a fix, but still falls short of being some kind of
lost classic.
While the
films do benefit from the high definition presentation, the prints used are not
without problems – there are plenty of scratches, color dropouts and audio
issues for viewers to contend with. These
problems are more noticeable on The Last
Gun, but 4 Dollars of Revenge
suffers many of them as well. The movies
are both presented in 1080p and are anamorphically enhanced, with The Last Gun shown with an aspect ratio
of 1.96:1 and 4 Dollars of Revenge
in 2.46:1. Audio is presented in an
English dub, with available formats being a 2.0 DTS-HD track, 2.0 Dolby Digital
and PCM mono.
Special
features are completely absent from this disc, with not so much as a trailer to
be seen.
Overall,
I did find the quality of these releases to be acceptable when considering the
low price of the Blu-ray, but I don't believe that everyone is going to share
that sentiment. This disc is still worth
picking up for fans of the spaghetti western genre, but anyone expecting films
on the level of A Fistful of Dollars
or even Django will be setting
themselves up for disappointment.
- David Milchick
