Customer Reviews

Ringo the Lone Rider & Cobra

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I bought this after buying an almost unplayable VHS of "The Cobra' under the title 'Cobra Connection'.Peter Martell (Pietro Martellanza) plays the violent, sexist anti-hero, supposedly a disaffected former US agent, with good support from veteran Dana Andrews and an under-used Anita Ekberg.The wise-cracking dialogue often falls flat and the plot doesn't always make sense (at least one scene has definitely been cut) but the film is visually strong, the action taking place supposedly in Istanbul and Beirut. 'Ringo the Lone Rider' is a standard Leone-type spaghetti western, no better and no worse than a hundred others.

Here is a rather bizarre double feature from Wild East Productions, one of my all time favorite independent DVD companies. Most of their double feature releases fall into specific categories, meaning each film in the double feature are of the same genre. Not here as they combine a Spaghetti Western in the form of "Ringo the Lone Rider" and a Euro Spy film in the form of "The Cobra". The only connection between the two films are that they both star Peter Martell but I would have much rather Wild East combined "Ringo" with another Spaghetti Western and and vice versa. A Euro Spy double feature would have been most excellent!

I own nearly all of Wild East's DVD releases from all genre's but I'm sad to say there is a major defect on this release. Fans of the company may remember that there was an encoding error on their releases of "If You Meet Sartana... Pray for Your Death" and "Gentleman Killer" which has the picture show up scrunched on your television screen making all the character and objects looking short and fat. Sadly this same error is present on the film "Ringo the Lone Rider". Some widescreen televisions can get around this error with fidgeting with the settings but if you have a standard television you are stuck with watching the film in an extremely annoying squished picture. I was so annoyed by this defective disc that I returned the item which is a shame as I really wanted to own it.

I love Wild East but they really need to address issues with their defective discs. They were unwilling to repress and give fans corrected discs of "Sartana" and "Gentleman Killer" and sadly the same is with this release. If your dying to see "The Cobra" then don't worry as that film is defective free but this is just a friendly word of warning about the defective picture ratio of "Ringo the Lone Rider".