I coltelli del vendicatore (1966)

Director:

Mario Bava

Writers:

Mario Bava (writer)
Alberto Liberati (writer)

Release Date:

January 1968 (USA)

Genre:

Action | Adventure

Plot:

A mysterious knife-throwing viking warrior protects a young peasant woman and her young son from the clutches of a evil regent bent on claiming the title of king and the woman for himself.

Plot Keywords:

Viking | Knife Throwing | Mother Son Relationship | Queen | Violence

Cast

Cameron Mitchell	...	Rurik / Helmut
Fausto Tozzi	...	Hagen (as Frank Ross)
Giacomo Rossi-Stuart	...	King Arald (as Jack Stuart)
Luciano Pollentin	...	Moki (as Louis Polletin)
Amedeo Trilli	...	Viking King (as Michael Moore)
Renato Terra	...	Hagen's henchman
Sergio Cortona	...	Hagen's henchman
Elissa Pichelli	...	Karin (as Lisa Wagner)

Also Known As:

Viking Massacre (Canada: English title) (video title)
Bladestorm
Knives of the Avenger
Raffica di coltelli

Runtime:

85 min

Country:

Italy

Language:

Italian

Color:

Color (Technicolor)

Aspect Ratio:

2.35 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono

Certification:

Germany:12 | Canada:G (Quebec) | USA:Not Rated | West Germany:16

Filming Locations:

Titanus Studios, Rome, Lazio, Italy

Company:

Sider Film

Trivia:

Director Mario Bava was brought in to salvage the troubled production after the original director was fired. Bava wound up scrapping most of the footage that had already been shot, threw out the old script, and rewrote and reshot virtually the entire film in six days.

Movie Connections:

Referenced in Keoma (1976)

When Vikings rode the West...

A quickie salvage job shot in six days after the original director got fired, Mario Bava's Knives of the Avenger is a revenge Western in Viking garb, with Cameron Mitchell's inexhaustible supply of knives replacing that old B-Western standby, the revolver that never needs reloading. One standoff is even staged as a virtual gunfight in a saloon/tavern, while the Viking village looks more like a frontier trading post (and probably was just that in another movie, though it looks like it may also have seen service with Victor Mature in The Tartars). The budget is low – most of the first half hour takes place on a beach or in and around a log cabin, much of the film is shot in near-darkness and there's not a long ship in sight – but once the identity of Cameron's Avenger is established, along with the reason the heroine looks so familiar to him, it does briefly shift gear into darker and more emotionally interesting territory before getting back to the avenging. Along the way there are elements of Shane and the Man With No Name in there as well as Mitchell's wanderer finds himself protecting a mother and her child and briefly entertaining thoughts of them replacing his own lost family. Small in scale and relatively minor, it's not bad at all even if you're unlikely to ever revisit it. Mitchell is dubbed in both the Italian and English soundtracks offered on Anchor Bay's DVD, so it's best to stick with the Italian-language version for the more pulp-poetic dialogue.