Mannaja: A Man Called Blade - Region 1 DVD

Maurizio Merli (the iconic star of the 70s Italian cop movies) stars as a hatchet-wielding bounty hunter with a dark past and an even more desperate future. But when he disrupts the balance of power in a corrupt mining town, he unleashes a firestorm of brutality, betrayal and cold-blooded murder. Now, on man stalks a savage land where justice walks a razor and no bullets slice deeper than vengeance. He is A MAN CALLED BLADE.

John Steiner (SALON KITTY, CALIGULA) and Donal O'Brien (RUN MAN RUN, KEOMA) co-star in this muddy, bloody and extreme 'Spaghetti Western' that is truly a cut above the rest. Co-written and directed by the notorious Sergio Martino (TORSO, MOUNTAIN OF THE CANNIBAL GOD), MANNAJA: A MAN CALLED BLADE has been fully restored from original Italian vault materials including its infamous 'eyeball torture' scenes.


They call him Blade (Maurizio Merli) because mostly he lets his hatchet do his talking for him. He's searched 20 years to find the man responsible for his father's death. This is puzzling, since the guy is right where he always was and where Blade started from. The real villain of the piece is not this economic-ecological despoiler (Philippe Leroy), a shrunken husk in a wheelchair, but his lieutenant (John Steiner), a blond fascist who looks like a twit version of Rutger Hauer and sounds like a cross between John Glover and the police chief in Young Frankenstein. (Blade is also blond, with a hairdo reminiscent of Pippi Longstocking's.) Sergio Martino, whose action direction is ludicrous, was obliged to fill many scenes with fog because the last Western town set in Italy was falling down around him. This was, he claims, "the last, or maybe next-to-last" spaghetti Western. None too soon. --Richard T. Jameson