Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #140074 in DVD
• Released on: 2005-01-06
• Formats: Color, Dubbed, Widescreen, NTSC
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 114 minutes

Customer Reviews

A must own spaghetti...if you can find it
Out of all the spaghetti westerns that Wild East has released, this is one of their best films. This is top tier spaghetti western entertainment.

Perhaps better known as "Requiescant" (the title card on the film itself even has this title) the film starts off with a boy being a sole survivor of a massacre that kills his family and people. The boy is taken in by a preacher and his family and is raised himself to be a preacher. Except this preacher has an agenda and turns to violence when he comes in contact with the man who slaughtered his family.

This is not one of those cheapo spaghetti westerns with poor directing and cinematography. The direction, acting, and cinematography by Sandro Mancori (Sabata Trilogy) is top and gives the film a very nice look. You don't have to be a spaghetti western die hard fan to enjoy and own this one. This film easily belongs on dvd shelves for people who only want to own the best spaghetti westerns.

There are only two bad things about this release; #1 is that is not anamorphic. It's an older Wild East disc one can't harp too much. #2 It's harder than hell to come by. For some reason Wild East always presses their discs in limited editions (sometimes as few as 1000 copies of a DVD are printed up). I'm not sure how many they limited this release to but it was not enough. I bought mine here on amazon for $20 a few years ago but it quickly went out-of-print. A few months before I write this I saw a copy of this very DVD sell for $149. WOW. It's a great film but ouch! Finding a used copy is almost impossible. Wild East just needs to learn not to release their films in limited editions. I don't see the point.

Requiescant
As with many spaghetti and paella westerns, Kill and Pray (aka Requiescant/Let Them Rest) takes its time getting going and has some ropey construction in the first half hour. The plot here is the revenge one: a Mexican child, the sole survivor of a massacre is adopted by a preacher and, as a young man when trying to track down his adopted sister and return her to the fold after she becomes a prostitute, finds out about his past and seeks revenge.

Lou Castel makes a bland lead and the director is not able to do much with him despite his intriguing eccentricities - he spurs his horse on with a frying pan and prays over those he kills. He is unable to develop the character, detracting somewhat from the ending since he appears as much of a resolutely uncorrupted blank there as at the beginning.

Thankfully, he is surrounded by enough colourful characters and surprising elements to compensate for his blandness. Drug taking, hints of sado-masochism and a reputedly cash-strapped Pier Paolo Pasolini lending considerable screen presence as a militant revolutionary priest all help lift the film out of the ordinary, but the real star of the film is Mark Damon, and it owes much of its interest to him.

His honour-obssessed Southern aristocrat is a truly intriguing creation. Pale as death and dressed like a figure from Poe, he reinforces the impression both by his dissolute sadism and by keeping his wife (whose father he killed) in a padded cell. He regards women as inferior beings suitable only for reproduction, has unfulfilled latent homosexual leanings ("I'm not as good looking as I used to be" he tells his chief sidekick) that are surprisingly delicately handled, and is allowed his own philosophy to counteract the religious morality of those pitted against him - even putting up what he regards as a humanitarian defence of slavery.

The action is reasonably well handled, with a menacing drunken shooting contest and a hanging game the most notable of the setpieces. Watch out for the crudely Anglicized front and end titles that see Riz Ortolani disguised as Roger Higgins among some very unconvincing 'American' names.

One of the top Spaghetti Westerns
I think very highly of this film, but I am not a great film reviewer. So I would like to include here an excerpt from Alex Cox's book "10,000 Ways To Die," one of the definitive books on the genre. What follows is Mr. Cox's review of 'REQUIESCANT' aka 'KILL AND PRAY (USA TITLE)':

'When a clergyman's daughter runs away from home, her adopted brother follows - and finds her a plaything of the vicious Light, Ferguson's right hand man. Discovering that Ferguson massacred his family years before, young "Requiescant" leads the Mexicans to destroy Light and Ferguson and their works.

Morbid, fatalistic precursor of "DJANGO KILLl": teeming with religious symbols and characters on the verge of madness, REQUIESCANT is picaresque, intense and tightly-constructed. A comedy of the blackest kind - if one had to choose one film to prove that the Italian Western was not solely Leone's, REQUIESCANT would serve very well.'