The Naked Witch (Planet Texas, 1961 / 64)

Not to be confused with The Naked Witch (1967), a.k.a. The Naked Temptress, the lost and arguable feature-film directorial debut of the infamous Staten Island filmmaker Andy Milligan (12 Feb 1929 – 3 June 1991) — poster below.

Likewise, this Naked Witch has nothing to do with the paperback The Naked Witch by the self-proclaimed "love witch" Gay-Darlene Bidart, which was released a good decade after the movie we're discussing today first hit the drive-in screens of Planet Texas...

Gay-Darlene Bidart, the Love Witch:

No, The Naked Witch at hand here is, instead, an early directorial project of the infamous Texan schlockstmeister Larry Buchanan (31 Jan 1923 – 2 Dec 2004),* and, far from being lost, it is easily available online — at the Internet Archives, for example. Buchanan co-wrote and co-produced and co-directed The Naked Witch with the fellow Texan Claude Alexander,** an owner of a drive-in who was in desire of some exploitation product featuring a lot of nudity — so he hired Buchanan to help make a low-budget exploiter.

* Some sources list The Naked Witch as the directorial debut of Larry Buchanan, nee Marcus Larry Seale Jr., but according to his autobiography It Came from Hunger! (as well as to Psychotronic Video #24), prior feature-film projects include his lost directorial debut Grubstake (1952) and Venus in Furs (1956), the latter "a made-to-order adaptation of a Marquis de Sade story". If anything, then, The Naked Witch is Buchanan's earliest surviving feature-film directorial project. Prior to taking up direction, Buchanan briefly had a virtually non-existent career as an actor; indeed, the name by which he is known was given to him by 20th Century Fox. That career reached its apex when he played the lead, Homer, in the military "hillbilly musical comedy" short, Personal Hygiene.

** From a wasted life's Babes of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls entry on Erica Gaven: "While not much can be found about Claude Alexander online, Brian Albright's book Regional Horror Films, 1958-1990: A State-by-State Guide with Interviews does offer an interesting and tragic bit of trivia in its entry on The Naked Witch: 'Producer Claude Alexander was involved in a car accident in 2002 that killed his then girlfriend [84-year-old] Peggy Moran, an actress who had appeared in The Mummy's Hand (1940 / trailer) [...]' and Horror Island (1941 / trailer) and The Mummy's Tomb (1942 / trailer). Claude Alexander, a protégé of Kroger Babb, remains elusive and obscure, but he seems to have died around 2007."

Larry Buchanan in

Personal Hygiene:

Buchanan himself once claimed (see: Psychotronic Video #24 [1997]) that he based The Naked Witch on the tale of the "Luckenbach Witch", a supposed local legend of the very area in Texas where he shot the film, but the truth of the matter is that he simply swiped, tweaked, and simplified the narrative from an obscure Finnish horror movie, Roland af Hällström's The Witch / Noita palaa elämään (1952 / trailer below). That Finnish film, which displays greater artistic intention than Buchanan's and is one of that country's first sound horror movies, was rather a scandal in its day due to its copious nudity and overt sexuality.* It also features a much larger cast: Buchanan's virtually non-existent alleged budget of $8,000 demanded a small cast, and he managed to shrink it down to well under a dozen that are actually given names (excluding, of course, the probably non-existent Saengerbund Children's Choir, which help pad the film by warbling a tune and prancing around in lederhosen and little-girl dirndls).

* Needless to say, the oft-quoted film history importance bestowed upon Buchanan's The Naked Witch by Heather Greene in her book Bell, Book and Camera: A Critical History of Witches in American Film and Television (McFarland & Co., 2018) that Buchanan's film is "the first to use the resurrected witch narrative and the ghost horror witch" should actually be bestowed upon the earlier Finnish film — or at least be amended as "the first American-made film to use the resurrected witch narrative and the ghost horror witch".

Trailer to Roland af Hällström's

Noita palaa elämään:

Shot without sound, most of The Naked Witch forgoes dialogue in favor of narration, usually underscored by some extremely tacky Hammond organ music supplied by Raymond A. "Ray" Plagens (5 June 1924 – 23 May 1972), a regional talent. But before the movie ever even gets to it supposed tale, a good ten minutes are spent with a verbose and often factually incorrect lecture on the history of the witch, narrated by an uncredited and then-unknown Gary Owens (10 May 1934 – 12 Feb 2015) over a collage of pictorial details of paintings by Hieronymus Bosch (1450 – 9 Aug 1516) and, possibly, Pieter Brueghel the Elder.

Trailer to

The Naked Witch:

The actual narrative of The Naked Witch concerns the rather loquacious and feckless un-named student, played by future Christian minister (and author of both The Gospel According the Peanuts [1965] and The Parables of Peanuts [1968]) Robert L. Short (3 Aug 1932 – 6 July 2009),* who, while pursuing his thesis on the German villages of contemporary central Texas, ends up in the town of Luckenbach when his sports car runs out of gas. (At one point he claims the area is reminiscent of the area around the Rhine River in Germany, which only proves that he's never been to anywhere in Rhineland.)

In search of a room for the night, he meets the pretty blonde Kirska Schoennig (Jo Maryman), who not only sets him up for a room at an inn run by her grandfather Hans (Charles West) but also both tells him of the local legend of the Luckenbach Witch (Libby Hall a.k.a. Libby Booth**) and gives him a book about the legend. As might be expected, that night the un-named student wanders out, finds the witch's grave, digs the grave up, and removes the stake from her heart — because, well, that is what Texas college students do. As he runs away, she slowly regenerates, her atrocious make-up and hair perfect but clothing long gone.

 

* Interesting to note that almost every online obituary or biography of Mr. Short found online pointedly overlooks both his stage career and this movie, his only "acting" cum film credit, though one does briefly mention that he "worked as an actor, and was a director of religious dramas".

** According to Buchanan, (see Psychotronic Video #24), Ms. Booth was a direct descendant of the assassin John Wilkes Booth (10 May 1838 – 26 Apr 1865) as well as the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth (10 Apr 1829 – 20 Aug 1912) — an amazing feat, seeing that the two men are not related. She ended up marrying The Naked Witch's soundman, S. F. Brownrigg (30 Sept 1937 – 20 Sept 1996), which would make her full name Elizabeth Ann Booth (imdb), a.k.a. Libby Hall Brownrigg (imdb). Brownrigg, of course, is [in]famous for his directorial debut drive-in hit Don't Look in the Basement (1973 / trailer) and his later Scum of the Earth a.k.a. Poor White Trash Part II (1974 / trailer). The short filmography of Ms. Booth/Hall, whom someone claims (in the trivia section of the film at imdb) was a nudist, also includes Buchanan's Common Law Wife (1961 / full film), the extremely obscure (and lost) cheapie Beauty and the Cave (1961 / trailer), and her son's cheapie sequel to her husband's first film, Don't Look in the Basement 2 (2015 / trailer).

At this point, The Naked Witch lives up to its title, even if, when the witch runs naked through the day-for-night landscape, some strategic black smudges pretty much cover up everything that might bounce and jiggle. She wanders around and does away with one or the other descendant of the man who had her put to death for witchcraft so long ago before, finally, she goes skinny-dipping (thus giving the patient viewer an oblique gander of her less than impressive pointies), does the dirty with the student and, ultimately, sets her sights of good-gal Kirska. Will the bad-gal brunette kill the good-gal blonde? Or will the enraptured student see the evil of carnal knowledge and save the day? Well, what do you think?

Buchanan's The Naked Witch is not exactly the most exciting film out there, and it seems almost impossible that it took two people to put together a snoozer as dull and terrible as this turkey, but as crappy as this lump of extremely low-budget flotsam is, the movie does have an oddly surreal appeal, providing you are of a forgiving nature. As skin flick, The Naked Witch fails miserably because the nudity is as discrete as it is gratuitous, and as a horror film it fails miserably in that it is anything but scary. As most of the film is in voiceover, the acting is very much on the level of that found in a bad silent film, but as bad as that is the movie manages to do even worse the few time there is any real, poorly dubbed dialogue. (We had a good laugh at the student's reading of the suave line "With your good looks and something simple and black, you would look like a cameo," which he says to Kriska at one point.) 

As a whole, The Naked Witch is amazingly boring despite its unintentional surrealism, with its extremely short running time of 59 minutes coming across as interminable. It does offer a decent bad-film giggle or two, all the more so if seen with a crowd — our favorite giggle scene is the witch's post-coital dance to bongo music — but it is difficult to argue that the movie is in any way worth viewing.

Again, however, those who are of a forgiving nature might find some mild enjoyment in the movie's oddly surreal and dreamlike atmosphere, something that is augmented both by the continual voiceover and the abnormally disjointed narrative and otherworldly logic and continuity. Unluckily, this occasionally noteworthy but obviously unintentional unearthliness is, as the accidental byproduct of a filmmaker whose talents leaned more towards Ed Wood than Luis Buñuel, too inconsistent to come even close to saving the movie.

As is apt to happen with exploitation films with great titles of any genre, in the seventies The Naked Witch got rereleased on the drive-in circuit as part of a double-bill with the 1969 cheapie The Witchmaker (1969), which got re-titled as The Legend of Witch Hollow.

 

Trailer to

The Legend of Witch Hollow:

To add confusion, The Witchmaker a.k.a. The Legend of Witch Hollow was itself eventually re-released as The Naked Witch...

Force of Nature (USA, 2020)

(Spoilers.) Towards the end of his life, Sir Laurence Olivier (22 May 1907 – 11 Jul 1989), said to have been one of Great Britain's great thespians, was known, during his final years of life and declining health, to take pretty much every half-way decently paying project that came his way — The Betsy (1978 / trailer), anyone? — ostentatiously because he had "devoted himself to making money for his children and grandchildren" [Harvard Crimson]. The thrice-married thespian was/is hardly a rarity in his desire to rake in the dough before going six feet under.

More recently, the twice-married Bruce Willis, prior to and during his decent into dementia, pretty much did the same thing, filling his probably already healthy bank account with bucks earned from headlining (but shot-in-two-days) appearances in a plethora of third- and fourth-rate "geezer teasers" — Assassin (2023 / trailer) or Wrong Place (2022 / trailer) or White Elephant (2022 / trailer) or A Day to Die (2022 / trailer) or Survive the Game (2021 / trailer) or Out of Death (2021 / trailer) or Cosmic Sin (2021 / trailer), anyone? — before, well, he got to the point that 2-million-dollar, 15-minute parts were no longer an option.

Trailer to

Force of Nature:

Over at imdb, if one is to believe the current (accessed: 12 June 23) entries found in the Trivia section for Force of Nature — and seeing that Force of Nature is a Randall Emmett production, the purported trivia is surely true — it would seem that this film was one of the movies that Bruce Willis was set, but ultimately became unable, to do a 15-minute, headlining appearance. And so the glorified (we would think) one-day-shoot part of Ray, a gruff and tuff terminally ill former cop, was scooped up by Mel "Fecund & Sober but Bipolar" Gibson (of the still watchable Mad Max [1979 / trailer] and poorly aged Road Warrior [1981 / trailer]), who can pretty much do gruff and tuff with his eyes closed.*

* Mel "Judge Ye Not Lest Yet Ye Be Judged" Gibson's career still hasn't fully recovered from his infamous DUI, anti-Jew tirade of 2006 and domestic "problems" with his ex-gal Oksana Grigorieva (of Beyond the Game [2016 / trailer]) of 2010, but ever since he had the balls to be willing to support of Jane Doe #3 in her testimony against Harvey Weinstein, we here at a wasted life have decided that, since he gives us such a noticeable case of beard-envy, we are willing to watch projects in which his character has a beard. (Movies with mullets, however, were and still are a no-go.)

Nine-time-father Gibson, in any event, does do his rather pointless character both well enough and with his eyes wide open, but neither his innate charisma nor the narrative of the film itself are able to hide the obvious: Ray is probably the most pointless character in this less-than-involving, disjointed, by-the-numbers, occasionally laughable and definitely pointless, bullet-heavy action thriller.

Oksana Grigorieva is Pissed

(but not talented):

Set in Puerto Rico (probably equally for the tax credits offered and the chance to get some rays in the sun between shoots), Force of Nature plays out mostly within a boarded-up apartment building during a major hurricane. The few residents that haven't evacuated — namely Ray (Gibson), his doctor-daughter Troy (Kate "Director's Wife" Bosworth*), Afro-stud-muffin Griffin (William Catlett), and aged "I Was Never A Nazi but Those War-Booty Paintings Are Mine" Bergkamp (Jorge Luis Ramos) — and the two cops sent to evacuate them (namely, "I Have A Tragic Story" Cardillo [Emile Hirsch**] and hot tamale Jess Pena [Stephanie Cayo, below not from the film]), have something worse than a hurricane to deal with when a gang of ruthless, heavily armed gangsters arrive on the scene, hot to get their hands on a catch of long-missing masterpieces (as in paintings). 

* Remember her? She played Lois Lane in the Superman film everyone prefers to forget, Superman Returns (2006 / trailer), and is one of the many faces in the hilariously tasteless Movie 43 (2013 / trailer), an unjustly vilified comedy that everyone we have forced to watch has loved — indeed, our DVD remains in perpetual rotational loan.

** Remember him? Probably not, but he's as miscast here as he was in Speed Racer (2008 / trailer) and once again proves that his forte is character roles (see: the well-made but dreadfully overrated Once Upon a Time in Hollywood [2019 / trailer]) and not headlining parts... though he has pretty good in Freaks (2019 / trailer). 

Bravvo ft. Stephanie Cayo & Sebastian Llosa — Let Me Go:

In what appears to be his first filmscript for a feature-length movie, scriptwriter Cory Miller seems to have been in way over his head, as the narrative of Force of Nature is more than lacking. In an attempt to add an a redemption angle to the events of the movie (and to pad the running time), he saddles Emile Hirsch's character Cardillo with a tragic past, the events of which (without the money shot of a dead body) transpire in NYC at the opening of the film. Basically, as one already expects when Cardillo tells his hot rookie partner and fiancée Jasmin (Jasper "Director's Daughter" Polish of Some Kind of Hate [2015 / trailer]) to stay in the car and call for backup while he looks for the person with a gun, he shoots himself single by the time-padding interlude's fade-out.

And thus it transpires that he, a broken man, ends up working as a desk-reception cop in Puerto Rico, where all broken cops go to work. There, one stormy day, when all cops are put on the streets, he has an unexpected chance at redemption and a new, somewhat more mature blonde (Bosworth). In between, the bad guys blow-up doors, shoot people dead, and even die themselves over the course of the extremely unevenly paced flick with some oddly drawn-out scenes...

Oh, yeah, before we forget: scriptwriter Miller even throws a man-eating tiger into the unexciting mix. It ends up being a visual punchline towards the end of this well-shot but snoozer of a movie. Unluckily, a joke as forced as this one is never funny — unlike the absolutely hilarious (but intended as serious) escape that doctor-daughter Troy and Afro-stud-muffin Griffin do off-screen around the same time in the movie.

Force of Nature may be director Michael Polish's 11th film, but despite his experience and occasionally music-video flashiness, the movie never gets close to living up to the promise of its title. Most of the time, it plays out and feels like an overlong episode of some relatively generic TV cop show. Anyone expecting that the title might be an oblique reference to Gibson's character is likewise due to be disappointed. Indeed, as diligent and preserving as the diverse characters are, none come close to being a force of nature — and even the hurricane itself gets downgraded over the course of the movie. About the only force of nature that the viewer has to contend with when watching this film is the overwhelming desire to fall asleep, as for all the bullets and occasional flashiness and oddly unthrilling action scenes and whatever else, the movie remains spectacularly yawn-inducing.

Decades ago, in the fun days of grindhouse, a movie like this would have had the redeeming features of stuff like spurting blood and flying body parts and a lot of gratuitous nudity. Force of Nature, however, made, as it was, totally in line with today's prudery and overwhelming desire not to offend, has none of those cheaply gratifying aspects. And thus it remains little more than a dull and unmemorable waste of time. You really don't need to bother with this wheezing geezer of a flick.

The Price of Death / Il venditore di morte (Italy, 1971)

An obscure and unknown oddity among spaghetti westerns in that The Price of Death a.k.a. Il venditore di morte is, in its heart, a detective film dressed up as a mildly dirty spaghetti western — and by "mildly dirty" we mean that most characters, with the possible exception of the eternally brawling miners of a waterfront mine, are pretty well-groomed and cleanly clothed. Including Klaus Kinski (18 Oct 1926 – 23 Nov 1991), the headlining star, who plays a typically narcissistic asshole named Chester Conway and spends roughly 90% of his on-screen time in a jail cell: though he might look lightly rough and tumble and mildly grimy with his slightly long hair and earth-colored clothing, his character never indicates any true need of a shave or shower. Visually and personality-wise, however, he is the opposite of the film's true lead and hero, the genre stalwart Gianni Garko* as Silver — or, as he likes to be called, "Mr. Silver" — a clean, suave and perfectly groomed and handsome manly man who, though a perfect shot, comes across as less a gun for hire than as a poor man's Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade in spiffy western clothing.

* Of Lamberto Bava's Body Puzzle (1992 / trailer) & Devil Fish (1984 / trailer), Luigi Cozzi's Hercules (1983 / trailer), Alfonso Brescia's Star Odyssey (1979 / trailer), the psychotronic nudie-cutie Dracula Blows His Cool (1979 / trailer), Lucio Fulci's The Psychic (1977 / trailer), Enzo G. Castellari's Cold Eyes of Fear (1971 / trailer), Night of the Devils (1972 / trailer), the psychotronic sword-and-sandal film Mole Men Against the Son of Hercules (1961 / full movie), and countless spaghetti westerns, including the first non-official Sartana film, Blood at Sundown (1966 / trailer); the first official Sartana film, If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death (1968 / trailer); diverse Sartana sequels and imitations; the unofficial Django flick $10,000 Blood Money (1967 / trailer) and a lot more fun stuff.

The Price of Death opens, pre-credits, with a rather uncomfortable murder of a young Mexican woman named Carmen (Franca De Stratis [23 Apr 1939 – 9 Mar 2021]). Alone at home and preparing dinner for her parents, she inadvertently lets in her murderer and we, the viewer, in good old-fashioned horror- and porn-film fashion, witness the event from a point-of-view perspective as we (i.e., the murderer) kill her for no apparent reason — as she isn't even raped, it would seem the kicks were gotten in the act itself. It is an uncomfortable scene that makes one expect a violent revenge film typical of the Italo genre, but The Price of Death is anything but. Indeed, though Carmen's elderly and impoverished parents are later shown attempting to hire Mr. Silver (Garko) to find and kill her murderer, they are unable to meet his $1000 minimum: he turns them down, amidst the luxury of his sumptuous villa adorned with a duet of sexy senoritas, with the flippant observation that revenge won't bring their daughter back. Leaving in tears, they accidentally leave behind the only clue to the killer's identity, a distinctive medallion apparently ripped from a belt or gun holster...

  

After the murder and the rather out-of-place, almost played for laughs scenes at Mr. Silver's villa, the movie moves onward to an apparently botched robbery of a bordello saloon at a nearby town run by the sovereign and attractive Polly (Mimma Biscardi, credited as "Gely Genka", of The Return of the Exorcist [1975 / trailer] and Seven Men and One Brain [1968 / full movie]). The shootout results in the deaths of two of the robbers as well as some innocents, and the townspeople use the event as an expeditious manner to get rid of the local troublemaker, Chester (Kinski): they convict him to die by hanging for the crimes during what is basically a laughable and fixed trial.

Almost everyone in the town seems to have a hidden agenda, and Polly is no different: although she deeply hates Chester, her ex-boyfriend, she pays his lawyer Jeff Plummer (Franco Abbina) to prove Chester innocent — which lays the groundwork for Mr. Silver's arrival in town. And as he pursues his investigation, he brings a virtual red harvest with him: in their desperation to keep the investigation from being successful, the real killer, obviously too stupid to realize that the best way to stop the investigation would be to kill Mr. Silver, instead starts killing people to left and right of him, including a few one might not expect to die...

The Price of Death is an obviously low budget and uneven ride that never truly finds its proper rhythm. It also suffers from an often truly miserable soundtrack by Mario Migliardi (31 May 1919 – 2000): the music, when noticeable, is always out of place and does little to assist the narrative or enhance the mood of the film, and whatever snatches that manage to stick out always tend to sound as if they come from several different films.* Likewise, director and screenwriter Vincenzo Gicca Palli — the director of the mildly enjoyable Spencer & Hill vehicle Blackie the Pirate (1971 / trailer) and the Naziploitation flick Liebes Lager (1976 / scene), as well as the scriptwriter of films as diverse as Hercules the Avenger (1965 / scene), the agent flick Silenzio: Si uccide a.k.a. Handle with Care (1967 / full film), and the faux mondo Nude Odeon (1978 / easy to find online) — has a rather generic eye for visuals and a notable lack of control of his narrative, which moves rather ungracefully between violence, gunplay, humor and social commentary — which, naturally, results in the extremely irregular tempo.

* That said, fans of "incredibly strange music" or odd easy listening tunes should like the music. It just doesn't work with the film itself...

Title track to

The Price of Death:

The performances, in turn, are mostly serviceable, but at least none are truly embarrassing: Kinski, as always, is simply Kinski, while Gianni Garko, whose initial scenes of training with a karate expert are jarringly out of place, grows into his role over the course of the movie and often even achieves a level of credibility. Abbina, as the lawyer, is an obvious laughing-stock character, but he manages — like Luciano Catenacci ([15 Apr 1933 – 4 Oct 1990] of In the Folds of the Flesh [1970 / trailer], Short Night of Glass Dolls [1971 / trailer], Umberto Lenzi's Almost Human [1974 / trailer] and Mario Bava's classic Kill, Baby... Kill! [1966 / trailer]), who plays the town's sheriff, Tom Stanton — to occasionally accomplish conveying a sense of sincerity and moral rectitude. Mimma Biscardi offers perhaps the best performance of the film, often segueing nicely between controlled indifference and the expression of sudden indignity or anger at obvious hypocrisy — but in a movie like The Price of Death, "best" is of course highly relative.

Once The Price of Death becomes an amalgamation of detective film and western, it also becomes far more intriguing and fun, but it nevertheless remains sorely hampered by the excessively long and repetitious courtroom scenes; here, as with most scenes involving the town's middle class and community leaders, Palli is definitely out to caricaturize and criticize the moral and general hypocrisy of society and its moral crusaders. Equally trying are the interminable and repetitive chase scenes (which sometimes look like the same shots are simply re-used) in which Mr. Silver is continually hampered by a deputy that is either incompetent or more interested in saving the town's desires than real justice, or both. Had all such scenes been trimmed or more tightly executed, the movie would have been notably better.

As in most detective films, nearly all the featured citizens of the town in The Price of Death have ulterior motives and secrets they would prefer to keep hidden. And if the lower-class denizens are mostly characterized by low intellect or base desires, none are as conniving or calculating as their "betters" — even the killer of Carmen, as repulsive as he is, is less of a hypocrite than he is simply a sexual psychopath. The two final twists of the movie — who the killer in town is, and who killed Carmen — are relatively easy to see coming in advance, one more so than the other. The first, possibly the more unusual unmasking, allows for a further underscoring of Vincenzo Gicca Palli's criticism of social and moral hypocrisy, while the latter definitely feeds into the viewers' desire for punishment and revenge (or, as some like to call it, "justice").

Without doubt, The Price of Death is a flawed (possibly even fumbled) movie, but it does stand out as an interesting anomaly: detective western flicks are even rarer than western horrors. As such, it remains, despite its unevenness and flaws, mildly intriguing and enjoyable. While hardly imperative viewing, fans of the genre could do far worse...

And it does also make one interested to see The Price of Death's unknown predecessor, Alfonso Brescia's 32 Caliber Killer [1967 / trailer below], if only to see how much more or less successful that film might be. That spaghetti western, as equally obscure as The Price of Death, is the first movie to feature the character of Mr. Silver, and was likewise written by the director and screenwriter of The Price of Death, Vincenzo Gicca Palli (1929 – 1997). Unlike The Price of Death, however, it features the handsome Peter Lee Lawrence (21 Feb 1944 – 20 Apr 1974) as the coolly suave and sharp-shooting Mr. Silver.

Trailer to

32 Caliber Killer:

Addendum: According to the Spaghetti Western Database, between 32 Caliber Killer and The Price of Death, Peter Lee Lawrence more or less played a version of Mr Silver in Primo Zeglio's Killer Adios a.k.a. Killer Goodbye (1968 / trailer below) — or at least a similar quick-shot character doing detective work, this time around called Jess Bryan. Whether or not the three movies can truly be called a trilogy, as some do, is open to argument. Seeing that the "creator" of Mr Silver, director/scriptwriter Vincenzo Gicca Palli was in no involved in Zegio's movie, we tend towards seeing an imitation and/or homage, not a trilogy...

Trailer to

Killer Adios a.k.a. Killer Goodbye:

More interesting, however, is the additional information the SWD offers, gleaned from the book Wild West Gals (by Stefano Piselli, Antonio Bruschini & Frederico De Zigno).

According to that book, alternative versions of The Price of Death seem to float around. One supposedly features a softcore sex scene between Polly (Mimma Biscardi) and one of her prostitutes (an uncredited Dominique Badou, also seen in the background of Camille 2000 [1969 / trailer] and Blindman [1971 / trailer]), while another version supposedly features a hardcore sex scene between a townsman played by the uncredited Italian bodybuilder Pietro Torrisi (below, not from the movie) "and an unknown blonde". Torrisi, a man with over 100 movies under his belt, is known to have made at least one porn movie — he performs stiffly in 1975's Come Again Doctor a.k.a. Check-up erotique (easily found online) — so it could be he later shot an unauthorized scene, something was cut in from another movie, or some creative editing with inserts was done.