We open with a group of bored, horny cowboys getting drunk in a bar and then raping a woman while her younger brother Carlo, who works on the same ranch that the cowboys do, watches helplessly. It’s later revealed in flashback that this isn’t even the first time that Carlo has witnessed his sister being raped. Driven mad by the horrific events he was forced to watch, Carlo kidnaps the wife of the ranch owner (played very convincingly by Virginia Gordon from The Muthers) and then proceeds to subject her to the same vile acts he had witnessed happen to his sister. All this leads to a climactic showdown between the ranch hands and Carlo where no one will emerge unscathed.

Producer Bob Cresse and director Lee Frost was coming off the relative success of grindhouse roughies (for those not in the know, the roughie is a type of sexploitation prevalent in the ’60s before hardcore sex was acceptable on-screen that featured more overt violence and misogyny than the more benign nudie cuties from around the same time) like The Defilers and The Animal, so it was natural for them to pump out another one. Plus with the more lax standards of the late ’60s, they could push the limits of depravity on screen. The mid-to-late ’60s were also at the height of the popularity of spaghetti westerns and TV shows like Bonanza and Gunsmoke, so the idea to combine the roughie with the western seemed like a pretty sound one from a commercial standpoint. The result is a brazenly nihilistic and sadistic film that flaunts its rampant misogyny and racism against Mexicans while giving us a protagonist that becomes as violent and hate-fueled as those he seeks revenge against. Hot Spur lacks the relative polish of Frost’s and Cresse’s follow-up roughie western The Scavengers and as such feels that much more grimy and unpleasant as a result. It’s a hard film to watch and and an even harder film to judge without attempting to lapse into moral objections as to its content. The acting in the film is uneven at best and the script basically exists as an excuse to overwhelm the audience with a cavalcade of rape, sadism and violence. But you can’t blame the film for giving the people what they want. The grindhouses of Times Square craved this seedy material, allowing its denizens to wallow in the filth on the screen only matched by the stained chairs and sticky floors of the theaters themselves. Interestingly, Hot Spur wasn’t only well-received by exploitation fans at the time. In fact, it would find itself making the Top Ten Films of 1969 list compiled by the right-wing magazine the National Review (a rather revealing look beyond the pale into conservative politics to come perhaps). But we are talking about the late ’60s, a time where the depressing, X-rated film Midnight Cowboy won Best Picture at the Oscars. So it may be that Hot Spur was as much a reflection of the churning unrest of the time as it was a natural evolution of Frost and Cresse as exploitation provocateurs.

Severin has done a great job with the image quality here. Taken from a 4K transfer of the original camera negative, the picture looks very clear with nice color balance and a healthy amount of grain. Frankly, I’m shocked at how good this low budget sexploitation flick from the ’60s looks. The English mono audio track on the other hand is fine but reflects the film’s low budget origins a little more than the visual transfer. For extras, we have some really nice ones. For starters, we’ve got a great commentary track with Vinegar Syndrome’s Joe Rubin, Severin’s Andrew Furtado and former General Manager of Something Weird Tim Lewis, who happened to also be a good friend of Bob Cresse. As you would expect, the commentary is full of information about the film, the time period in which it was made and some interesting reminiscences of what it was like working with Cresse. Really good track in general. We also have an audio-only discussion between exploitation pioneer David F. Friedman and Something Weird founder Mike Vraney talking about Frost and Cresse. It’s a pretty neat artifact to exist even if it is just audio. Another cool bonus is the full-length sexploitation mondo feature Hollywood’s World of Flesh and is pretty much what you would expect with Frost and Cresse leveraging the mondo documentary format they would take advantage of later on films like Mondo Bizarro and Mondo Freudo but in service of showcasing sexy foxes and seedy porno stores of southern California. Plus we also get a pretty goofy short called The Casting Director starring Bob Cresse that was directed by David F. Friedman as well as the usual trailers.

Hot Spur is an uncompromisingly bleak film with a near constant barrage of flesh and depravity on display. It won’t be to everyone’s taste but for long-time Something Weird fans, Severin’s presentation of this notorious roughie “classic” will be a revelation.