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Guest Reviewer Lee Broughton is back, with another Italo Western double bill DVD review. Wild East’s ongoing Spaghetti Western Collection continues to grow and this double bill release is particularly welcome since it features two obscure and wholly idiosyncratic genre entries from 1969. Italian Western directors had found it relatively easy to appropriate key plot points and ideas from Sergio Leone’s Dollars films during the genre’s early years but when Leone’s sprawling, mega-budgeted, meta-Western Once Upon a Time in the West was released in 1968 it was clear that this was one genre entry that local filmmakers would not be able to easily emulate.

With scriptwriters and directors now essentially being forced to come up with their own ideas and generic trends, a new wave of Spaghetti Westerns were produced that effectively took the genre in a multitude of new directions. The two films featured here were part of that wave.

Yesterday’s list of overlooked slasher flicks got me thinking about their European cousin, the giallo. Sure, most gialli were cranked out before the slasher craze was under way, but it’s hard to ignore the similarities: knife-wielding, black-gloved lunatics, tragic prologues often used establish our killer’s motivations and, of course, excessive female exploitation. In short: total bliss!

I’ve limited this list to one film per director so to prevent my own personal bias from creeping into it. But, really, there’s so many of these damn things I didn’t think it’d be fair to turn this into a showcase for just two or three directors. Next to the slasher, the giallo is my favorite subgenre. Outlandish plot twists, a staggering amount of degenerate red herrings, sinister animals and lots and lots of J & B Scotch, if you’ve got just a few of these elements...