Die Satansbrut des Colonel Blake

The Civil War is over. But not for Col. Thomas Blake (Guy Madison). He leads a gang of marauders who terrorize the area around the Mexican border, looting and pillaging, all in the name of the Confederacy. Blake dispatches Chamaco Gonzalez to the town of Manassas to learn the location of a lost Confederate payroll, presumably buried after the surrender at Appomattox by Gen. Beauregard's soldiers. But Camacho gets himself captured and has a date with a firing squad.

Enter a stranger named Stuart (Edd Byrnes) who rescues Chamaco and thereby earning a meeting with Blake.

He claims to know where the payroll is buried. He wants Blake's help in retrieving it, with the end goal of helping Southerners suffering because of the war.

Blake, of course, has other ideas for the buried fortune. With a handpicked group of men back across the Rio Grande to fetch the payroll, which Stuart says is buried in a sacred cave of the Apaches, near the town of Durango.

Along the way, a pretty lady named Manuela shows up, offering her assistance.

First up, Francesco De Masi's score is awesome, livening up the proceedings even more. Payment in Blood is the third Ed Brynes' spaghetti western and it's the serious one of the two. Not much humour, just a straightforward action tale that moves at a clip and provides a fair amount of uneasy alliances, double crosses and lead flying, body count piling up. It's quite fun with Guy Madison stealing the scene as Blake, an untrusting leader of a gang. Ed Brynes does well as the clean cut hero who has an agenda to fulfil. The finale set in an Indian burial ground is really exciting.

Hmmm, now this sounds very familiar to me..... clean shaven poncho wearing bounty hunter goes undercover with a gang of "bad guys" in the pursuit of a cash box buried in a graveyard by soldiers during the Civil War.

And, yes, there are more than a few similarities between this film and Leone's "For a Few Dollars More" (in particular) and "Good, the Bad and the Ugly". And, yes, it has obviously a lower budget than both the aforementioned films. But when the "borrowed" stories are so good, there doesn't seem to be a problem in my eyes in recounting extended versions of such tales. So, I really enjoyed this film in its own right.

The leading role does owe more than a nod of the cowboy hat to Eastwood's Man with No Name, and in that respect Byrnes is not an ample substitute. To me, he is far too clean looking (although, like Eastwood's character, he will do whatever he needs to in order to get a job done). The show stealers are Blake (played by Guy Madison) and that rarest of things - a spaghetti western female role (Loiuse Barrett).

Whilst not as outstanding as some other Castellari films (say, Keoma and Jonathan and the Bears), it is still a highly enjoyable Spaghetti Western fare that I would recommend to fans of this genre.

The title "Payment in Blood" appears to be a marketing title as another title of the movie was "Renegade Riders" as seen in the opening credits in the 1993 VHS released by MNTEX Entertainment. The transfer was low quality as the beginning credits were cut off since it was in "pan and scan" mode and not the "letterbox" mode usually used in the beginning to capture the full screen credits with the saloon style border.

The movie has all the classic Spaghetti-Western style and sound effects and out-of-sync voice dubbing that people love. It would be nice to see a new DVD transfer from the original film stock but there are no DVDs available although there are wide screen versions on the internet floating around.

Enzo G. Castellari was a director who seemed to contribute films in a variety of genres, from sci-fi to giallo. I get the feeling that his best ones are his spaghetti westerns though. In Payment in Blood he delivers a pretty solid entry. Its story features a renegade Confederate colonel who refuses to accept the South's defeat in the American Civil War and so continues the fight with a band of outlaws. A stranger saves one of his gang from execution and is taken into their fold when he reveals that he knows the whereabouts of a casket of buried money.

It would only be fair to say that the plot-line has quite a few similarities with Sergio Leone's Dollars Trilogy. Its hero, however, looks a little different from the shady leads from other spaghettis. He looks more like a character from an American traditional western, although he still has the same amorality and essentially acts in a similar way. The villains are decent enough and there is a fair amount of violent action to keep us entertained. Things are wrapped up with an interesting enough climax in an Indian burial ground, located in a cave. Overall, this is an entertaining, if unremarkable, western and should definitely find approval with fans of the Italian strand.

Ticks all the right boxes with some whacky characters and several exciting action sequences. The musical score is half decent to. The story concerns a Confederate Major, who is caring on his own private campaign and after the official surrender. Sort of plays like an inferior 'Hellbenders' by the great Sergio Corbucci. The lower score of six, is just a comparison to the many other, better examples of this particular genre but the fans will still enjoy.