Kino Lorber's God's Gun Blu-ray has finally arrived, representing the first time the film has been available in widescreen in North America. Previously the film has been available from MGM on DVD in a fairly decent transfer in the UK for the past 15 years or so.
Kino itself has an excellent track record for releasing Lee Van Cleef titles on blu-ray; including For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, Death Rides a Horse, Sabata, Barquero, Captain Apache, Bad Man's River, Return of Sabata, and even the complete series of The Master.
Kino itself has an excellent track record for releasing Lee Van Cleef titles on blu-ray; including For a Few Dollars More, The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly, Death Rides a Horse, Sabata, Barquero, Captain Apache, Bad Man's River, Return of Sabata, and even the complete series of The Master.
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The film itself is a well know LVC disaster. You would have thought with the talent involved (LVC, Jack Palance, and Sabata director "Frank Kramer") this movie would be a slam dunk. Unfortunately a film plagued with problems both behind the scenes and on the page was made. What we end up with is a film which LVC didn't even dub his own voice on!
Most copies you will find of God's Gun are of a scratchy full screen public domain print that has been floating around since the 1980's. It wasn't until 2007 that a quality studio released version of the film was put on DVD. Unfortunately, this DVD has only been available in Europe, and as such is region 2/PAL encoded (making it unplayable on most US DVD players). This Blu-ray marks the North America disc debut.
Most copies you will find of God's Gun are of a scratchy full screen public domain print that has been floating around since the 1980's. It wasn't until 2007 that a quality studio released version of the film was put on DVD. Unfortunately, this DVD has only been available in Europe, and as such is region 2/PAL encoded (making it unplayable on most US DVD players). This Blu-ray marks the North America disc debut.
VIDEO:
The transfer is an improvement over the DVD edition. Much of the improvement comes from the extra resolution that blu-ray provides, while the actual source material does not show any revolutionary improvement. Color timing is slightly different from the DVD. This is probably as good as this film will ever look.
Blu-ray
DVD
Screencaps below (click to enlarge!) -
AUDIO:
The audio is available in English only. English subtitles. Nothing remarkable here.
EXTRAS:
- Audio Commentary by Alex Cox
- LVC and western trailers selection (all also available from Kino)
- Reversible cover art
IN CONCLUSION:Recommended for the LVC completest only. Owning a better copy of this film, doesn't necessarily make it a better movie!
THE GOOD:
THE BAD:
Full stats and ordering info-
- Region: A
- Language: English
- Subtitles: English
- Number of discs: 1
- Studio: Kino Lorber
- Run Time: 97 minutes (1:36:45)
- Order at amazon.com
reversible cover art
Three things about this film. When I read in Variety that it was in production in Israel and Lee, Jack Palance and Richard Boone were starring with the Sabata director, I thought this would be Lee's best western since the Leone films. Or Big Gundown and Death Rides A Horse. Then some months later read interview with Richard Boone was reference the film as the worst western ever made with a Jewish producer and Italian director who didn't speak the same language but it didn't matter because the director was horrible and deaf in both ears. Boone went on to explain he had it with the entire mess and packed up and flew home. Walked out on it before they were finished shooting. Then I realized it would likely be a bad film. But I saw it. It debuted at a drive inn in my area. It wasn't as bad as I expected but not a good film. And something that I always wondered about was Lee Van Cleef was interviewed in 1970 for El Condor and he mentioned it and the film before had sound on the set and the Italian films he had been doing for the last five years did not. But Lee said he always made himself available for the English looping because he thought it important for English speaking viewers who were familiar with him to hear his voice as they would notice if it were a voice actor. But with God's Gun Lee did NOT make himself available and for me it's a huge distraction not to hear Lee's voice in his scenes. It's a similar voice but clearly not Lee. Richard Boone's voice over actor isn't close to how he sounded. It makes the film worse than it would be if they had done their own voices. I can only guess Lee wasn't happy with the film as the reason but who knows! Anybody?
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