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From Hell to the Wild West blends Rene’s two main passions. One is crafting Westerns, or at least Westerns that are genre hybrids, and the other is making films about slasher-style hulking maniacs in masks, here a burlap bag with thick stitches, like in the Playing With Dolls films and Cabal. There is also Perez’s find, Robert Kovacs, who looks exactly like a younger version of Charles Bronson and who, after featuring in Death Kiss, was cast here as a gunman attempting to connect to Bronson’s work in a variety of 1960s spaghetti westerns.
The plot twist that Perez brings in From Hell to the Wild West is that he claims the masked maniac was Francis Tumblety, therefore transforming the killer into Jack the Ripper. Francis Tumblety who lived from (1833-1903) was an Irish immigrant in the United States. After being criminally charged for impersonating a doctor and forcing fake remedies onto people, he escaped to England in the 1870s. Tumblety was living in a boarding house in Whitechapter during the time of the Ripper killings and was considered a possible suspect. He was said to possess extreme loathing towards prostitutes, allegedly because he was previously married to one. Major things that go against Tumblety, are that he is much taller than the Ripper description, and he would have been in his late fifties during the time of the murders. There is still no direct evidence that Tumblety ever murdered any women.
Rene Perez seems to have done some digging into Tumblety should you wonder about his supposedly prostitution wife’s marriage, but he is taking it too far when he says the film is Based on True Events. Alongside the Tumblety mention, From Hell to the Wild West is a creative work on all other aspects. There is absolutely no proof that the Ripper had a preference for wearing a mask while murdering women. Also, Perez has Tumbelty portrayed by an actor who is over 6 feet tall (Tumblety was 5′ 10″) and approximately 40 years of age when Tumblety would have been in his 60s during the 1890s. One of the most curiously funny changes Perez makes is having the Ripper move to California where he seems to have construction buildings making him look like he single-handedly created a whole town (in fact, it’s the Western-themed movie set Bandit Town USA in California, which is about 40 miles from Fresno). This town where he captures women by promising them jobs as ‘hostesses,’ only to stalk and murder them afterward.
The main issue with From Hell to the Wild West is that even though Rene Perez has a fantastic idea, he just leaves and makes one of his regular movies. It doesn’t feel like it is a movie based on expanding out its concept but rather one that alternates between scenes of different girls arriving at a town where they are chased by Charlie Glackin interspersed with those of Robert Kovacs in the wilderness being stalked by some other lawmen who regard him as the suspected killer. These latter passages also do not utilize Kovacs and his resemblance to Bronson and near flawless mimicry of Bronson’s tight-lipped acting to almost as if Bronson is perfect.
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