Roy Colt e Winchester Jack

The latest DVD release in Image Entertainment's "Mario Bava Collection," Roy Colt and Winchester Jack (1970), is not what you'd expect from the stylish fantasy/horror director of such influential films as Black Sabbath (1963) and Blood and Black Lace (1964). On the surface, it's a spaghetti Western, but it's too quirky and unconventional to serve as a representative example of the genre. True, Bava had dabbled in frontier archetypes before - he directed Road to Fort Alamo and Savage Gringo in 1966 - but Roy Colt and Winchester Jack is even more tongue-in-cheek than those semi-serious efforts. The story of two outlaw pals, Roy Colt (Brett Halsey) and Winchester Jack (Charles Southwood), who go their separate ways after a knockdown-drag-out fight and wind up on opposite sides of the law is certainly not an original storyline but Bava has fun with the premise. Oddball characters pop up (the chief villain, The Reverend, suffers from a chronic case of diarrhea and has a penchant for humiliating his victims before he kills them), relationships are constantly in a state of flux, moving back and forth from allegiance to betrayal and back again, and the sole woman (Marilu Tolo) in the tale - a Native American prostitute - is depicted as a budding capitalist who gets the last laugh. In terms of pure visual style, you might be hard pressed to recognize Bava's signature on Roy Colt and Winchester Jack but it's there in the details if you look for it; a close-up of an empty eye socket in a skull, an atmospheric shot of some gnarled trees, the menacing, skeletal-like presence of Blondie, the villain's chief henchman. While it might not be essential viewing for the uninitiated, it's definitely worth a look for anyone interested in Bava's work and the excellent DVD liner notes by Bava biographer Tim Lucas enhance one's viewing pleasure. For example, Lucas points out that "Bava's primary target here is director Sergio Leone, with whom he had worked on Mario Bonnard's comedy, Hanno Rubato un Tram (1954), starring Aldo Fabrizi. Leone is caricatured as the crippled Sam Lewis (note the shared initials), whose crutches are shot out from under him by a sharpshooter with Tourette's Syndrome, whose violent behavior is punctuated by involuntary bird-calls - a jokey reference to Ennio Morricone's famous music for The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly [1966]." Other than the aforementioned liner notes by Lucas, the DVD edition of Roy Colt and Winchester Jack doesn't offer any additional extras besides the same Bava trailers that accompany the other DVDs in Image's "Mario Bava Collection." The film, however, is featured in Italian with English subtitles and in its original theatrical aspect ratio of 1.85:1. Another plus is the catchy, pop influenced music score by Piero Umiliani that will play on in your head for days. For more information about Roy Colt and Winchester Jack, visit Image Entertainment. To order Roy Colt and Winchester Jack, go to TCM Shopping. by Jeff Stafford