Seven from Texas - Dorado Films

Hello all!

You guys might remember Dorado Films, although we haven’t done anything for several years for the SW community… but we are “back”!

Current SW project:
Antes llega la muerte (1964) / Hour of Death (our English print is titled “Seven from Texas” on the opening credits, so that is what we must label our disc)
While perhaps not considered a Spaghetti Western by some, this film has historical and cultural significance. The Marchent family had a major impact on European cinema, especially in their home country of Spain. This film is considered to be one of the best films directed by Joaquín Luis Romero Marchent. It has depth and is definitely worthy of a solid Blu-ray release.

Want to support the release? Best way: buy the pre-sale! Link: https://doradofilms.video/index.php?upc=828637050102
Blu-ray will be region free, costs $25.00 plus shipping and handling (which internationally can be up to about 15 dollars as it is calculated by weight)… but the pre-sale will ship earlier (at least a month earlier), have a unique cover that is individually numbered, and have an exclusive booklet.

Some notes about the project:
Our English print is the Italian edited version of 90 minutes dubbed into English (original English dubbed audio from Europe, not a new dub). The deleted scenes from the Spanish version that add up to 8 minutes of additional content will be included on the disc somehow, either in HD if we can find it or SD (which we have currently).

We are trying to get Italian and Spanish audio into sync within the deadline as well. These are our top priorities remaining on the project, but we don’t want to commit without the tracks being in sync to the 4K scan of the English print. (Blu-ray will be Full HD / 1080p… not 4K, just so you know… the video was mastered in 4K though)

One final note, we really appreciate all the support over the years. We know that it is always possible to find something wrong with every release a company makes… but the fans of Spaghetti Westerns are some of the most appreciative, supportive, and encouraging group of fans that we have found. It can be deflating to be required to make some sacrifices and miss the mark of perfection because you have to survive as a company and have the end result be a lack of appreciation or maybe even support for the end product. But, we have loved the support over the years from this fanbase and felt it was time to give something back… so we are going to give $1.00 of each pre-sale to the operator of spaghetti-western.net so he can keep this specific tool for the Spaghetti Western fans up and running. (We do get advertising from this as well though, which is also greatly appreciated and we don’t mean to minimize the value that we are getting from that) Thank you all again, you guys really are the best and we have been and continue to be grateful!

edited before posting: I removed a super long description of the transition and challenges faced as a production company who is moving from DVDs to Blu-rays and why we utilize pre-sales… if you are interested I’ll write another posting in the forum with the info. This post was LONG enough even in shortened form end edit

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Thought I should also mention, unless we get a distributor to pick this up, this will be replicated as a short-run.

Meaning… the only “sure” way of ever owning this will be buying a pre-sale. We will have the replication done after the pre-sale concludes, so for sure, all who purchase the pre-sale will be able to get one… after that quantities will be limited. We have had extras of each release but some of them have sold out rather rapidly.

Also, thought I should share a few frame grabs… last reply until someone asks me a question… I promise. You can see we get the MOST out of this print from the 4K. When it gets resized down to Full HD and is playing at 24fps, the quality is very pleasant to watch.

Sometimes you offer combined postage when you have more than one upcoming release in the pipeline. Is there any possibilities for that this time around?

Great project, maybe also post the link to the production blog?

Most important news is of course that for each item sold during pre-sale $1 goes toward the SWDb :slight_smile:

Very nice project and the film really is worth to be released in HD.

We have a German 35mm print in our archive with a runtime of about 93 minutes.
So more or less between the italian and spanish cut.
Coincidentally I found a scan on my pc that shows the same Claudio Undari scene/image as posted above.

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I thought this a very good early Spanish western - and certainly a worthy candidate for this restoration project. Good luck with your efforts … and hopefully ‘$100,000 for Lassiter’ will get similar treatment, someday ? :slight_smile:

As suggested, here is the production blog posts about this project:

@aldo We will have to make a more recent visual inspection of our print before making any commitments, but that does sound like a promising title for a future release.

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I knew I had one more person to reply to… oops.

We completely understand the large investment in shipping for international orders and the idea of combining orders is a natural idea (when over a third of your total purchase goes to shipping that is frustrating, and by weight you can get 2 products shipped for the price of 1, sometimes 3 products can fit in the same weight class). Long term we have a solution in play that we hope will help solve this, but for now if you would like to do this let us know. EuroWestern@DoradoFilms.Video -or- store@doradofilms.com would be who you would email to work that out.

Quick solution (for us at least): order the product so you have your number locked in and you are in the system, then email us at one of the above email addresses and let us know to “hold” the shipment until you add another purchase or until you decide to have it shipped. Then if you order another pre-sale and want to add it to the existing package we can combine the orders and refund whatever extra moneys are overcharged between the two shipping costs. This is a relatively simple task for us to do and we don’t lose track of orders this way as you are locked in our system!

All of that said, we are trying to take a more cautious approach with the next few projects. So, we currently have nothing to announce considering what are the future project(s). On a project we are trying to finish, we had agreements with people lined up for specific features, advertised those features, and then they tried to re-negotiate for a higher payment… we felt this was not ok. So, we were left scrambling to get other professionals to fill in for the advertised features, as we were not comfortable paying the original “professionals” the higher fees they were now demanding. Not fun!

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Or we start a European subsidiary :slight_smile:

Interesting trailer

Disgusting behaviour. If I was in your position, I’d be sorely tempted to name and shame those so-called “professionals”.

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There can’t be many cast and crew still alive from this production - So I too am curious who was approached to contribute.

No, it wasn’t for this project, just an unrelated prior project that put us behind schedule for several projects… we are thankfully catching up now though. I’m sure anyone we would have been able to find from this production would have been great to work with. It actually wasn’t any cast or crew from the other project either actually. Every producer, director, and actor we have ever dealt with are all very cool people and even the ones who asked for something in return for their time have been honorable about the whole arrangement and pleasant.

I must have written it confusingly, I was mentioning two people working on giving us extra features tried to up the rates before delivery of material. And as tempting as it may be to “name and shame,” no good would come of it. There are always two sides of the story and what we felt was an agreement apparently was something they didn’t feel was an agreement (trying to give them the benefit of the doubt here…) That said, we were soured and likely won’t be attempting to work with them for the foreseeable future.

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Product mockup! Got the poster in and was able to get the front cover done… This might be tweaked of course to make it better, but this will be pretty close to what you see after purchase.

One week left on the pre-sale guys! Make sure you get your orders in asap, you don’t want to miss the pre-sale and the extras

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that look pretty cool already.

So who hasn’t pre-ordered it yet? 5 more days, ladies and gentlemen! Make sure you’re part of the pre-sale so you get the booklet, and you support both Dorado’s excellent effort as well as the SWDb

Just preordered a copy in the last moment. Preordering ends in 7 hours. Am waiting for a couple of other releases from Dorado so just got it sent with those to save on postage. Else it would have been tough :slight_smile:

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I’m happy that Dorado is back doing spaghettis. I haven’t seen this movie but the print looks gorgeous :slight_smile: thanks for your work.

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Just got a mail from Dorado Films saying that 80 copies of the release was sold in presale. That is a damned small number and they are going to re-open the presale.

If we want companies to keep releasing this stuff we probably have to buy some of it :slight_smile:

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