Álex de la Iglesia hooks up indirectly with David Lynch in the occult Mexican pseudo-western/noir hybrid PERDITA DURANGO, on 4K UltraHD and Blu-ray from Severin Films.

Traveling to Mexico to spread the ashes of her sister who was murdered along with her two nieces by their father, prostitute and grafter Perdita Durango (Rosie Perez, DO THE RIGHT THING) experiences an instant attraction to Romeo Dolorosa (Javier Barden, GOLDEN BALLS), a Santero priest who divides his time between fleecing rich tourists and believers South of the Border and dealing drugs. On the run after robbing a Los Angeles bank to pay back gangster Catalina (Demián Bichir, THE HATEFUL EIGHT) and has double-crossed partner Shorty Dee (DAY OF THE BEAST's Santiago Segura), Romeo demonstrates his seemingly magical abilities of mesmerism to get Perdita (and a corpse he has dug up for a ritual) across the border without questions. After a whirlwind romance of a couple hours of sex and drugs, it's a match made in hell and Perdita suggests that they spice up his next Santero performance with a real sacrifice. Cruising through Tijuana, they kidnap virginal, white bread, spring breakers Estelle (JACKIE BROWN's Aimee Graham, younger sister of Heather Graham) and her boyfriend Duane (Harley Cross, COHEN AND TATE). Unbeknownst to them, they are being tailed by DEA agent Dumas (THE SOPRANO's James Gandolfini) who may get his chance to bust Romeo when his cousin Reggie (Barden's elder brother Carlos, ASSASSIN'S CREED) arranges for him to drive a truck full of human foetus to Las Vegas to sell to a cosmetics company on behalf of gangster Santos (Don Stroud, GAMES). When Romeo's sacrifice is raided by Catalina's men and a vengeful Shorty, Perdita and Romeo are forced to take Estelle and Duane with them on the road to Vegas as hostages and terrified playthings.

Based on the novel "59° and Raining: The Story of Perdita Durango" by Barry Gifford whose earlier novel "Wild at Heart" featured Perdita as a minor character – played by Isabella Rosselini in David Lynch's film adaptation – PERDITA DURANGO was director de la Iglesia's big-budget follow-up to his juvenile ACCIONE MUTANTE and his mainstream by still wild DAY OF THE BEAST. Boasting a sprawling cast of characters on both sides of the border – among them, musician Screamin' Jay Hawkins as Romeo's Santero medium, filmmaker Alex Cox (REPO MAN) as Dumas' nagging fed partner, and Roger Cudney (THE EVIL THAT MEN DO) as Estelle's uber-patriotic father – the film has faint structural parallels with films like PULP FICTION and THE SARAGOSSA MANUSCRIPT with Romeo's digressions to his childhood with his grandmother, a South American war in which his buddy Doug lost an arm, and his fantasy about dying like Burt Lancaster shot by Gary Cooper in VERA CRUZ. If Bardem's Romeo is a noir antihero – who believes his fate changes when the protective medallions he wears are ripped off by a dying Shorty – Perez's Perdita Durango is a damaged, ruthless femme fatale who ultimately recovers her humanity by falling in love with a monster, fear underlying her ridiculing of Romeo's notions of honor and manhood that have him walking into an ambush. De la Iglesia and cinematographer Flavio Martínez Labiano (TIMECRIMES) make wide use of the Mexican and American desert locations, and Simon Boswell gives the film a similar South of the Border flavor as he did on Alejandro Jodorowsky's SANTA SANGRE, also feeling almost like WILD AT HEART in a different key. Former child actor Cross had previously gotten mixed up with black magic in THE BELIEVERS, a film which figures into the backstory of both PERDITA DURANGO and Gifford's source novel (see below).

Although picked up for theatrical release by Trimark, who had previously released DAY OF THE BEAST on VHS, PERDITA DURANGO sat on the shelf until 1999 when A-Pix releases the film direct to VHS under the title DANCE WITH THE DEVIL, shorn of ten minutes including the VERA CRUZ ending possibly due to rights clearances. At the dawn of DVD A-Pix put out this version on non-anamorphic, letterboxed DVD and most of the overseas alternatives were either cropped or non-anamorphic (including the uncut, special edition Spanish DVD) apart from the German DVD/CD combo edition which included English subtitles for the entire feature (although not an option for the Spanish-only portions of the English soundtrack). An uncut HD master made the streaming rounds a couple years ago and was released on Blu-ray in 2017 in Germany virtually barebones. Severin's UltraHD 2160p24 HEVC 2.35:1 widescreen and disc and 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray come from a new 4K restoration with HDR10 grading on the UltraHD disc. The film's palette is skewed towards warm colors and skintones, deep blacks, and sometimes bright sunny highlights, and a casual comparison between the Blu-ray and the UltraHD disc reveals more shadow detail in the latter – best appreciated during the night scenes including Romeo's ritual performance – and more highlight detail which helps to better delineate the almost bleached skin and hair of Estelle and Duane from the bright sun, particularly in some available light interiors. The original English/Spanish 5.1 track is included in DTS-HD Master Audio with full English SDH subtitles and subtitles for the Spanish dialogue only while a full Spanish DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track is also included but will be of less interest because it is entirely dubbed and there is no English subtitle track for it (unlike some of Severin's Eurohorror titles).

Like DAY OF THE BEAST, Severin has not carried over any of the Spanish special edition DVD extras; instead, they have produced a number of new supplements. First up is "On The Border" (28:12), an interview with director Iglesia who reveals that producer Andrés Vicente Gómez had originally purchased the rights to Gifford's novel for an adaptation by Bigas Luna (JAMON JAMON), but they fell out over Luna's desire to depict Romeo as a revolutionary, and the changes he made to the script, shooting in America and Mexico, and the casting (also revealing that both Bardem brothers were really injured in an explosion during the war flashback shoot, explaining the bandage Romeo wears on his arm throughout the film). In "Writing PERDITA DURANGO" (16:43), novelist Gifford discusses the origins of the Perdta Durango character – as well as the other Sailor and Lula books – and reveals that Gómez purchased the rights outright not intending to involve him only to bring him on later after the initial drafts when Luna was still involved. He recalls when de la Iglesia came onto the project and recalls that he had written song lyrics for the film but they were replaced by a theme by Hawkins whose participation as an actor was contingent upon him being allowed to write a song for the film.

In "Dancing With The Devil" (12:57), film scholar Dr. Rebekah McKendry discusses de la Iglesia's career and her reaction to the film upon its belated stateside release as well as briefly discussing the true crime backstory to the film which is covered in more detail in "Narcosatanicos: PERDITA DURANGO and the Matamoros Cult" (18:14), an interview with Mexican Morbido festival programmer Abraham Castillo Flores and Jim Schutze, author of "Cauldron of Blood: The Matamoros Cult Killings" who discusses pre-cartel drug dealings in Mexico, gay male model-turned-cult leader Adolfo Constanzo and his business partner Sara Aldrete, a Texas college honors student, whose cult included the Hernandez brothers, a fledging cartel whose enemies were used in sacrificial rituals with the belief that they gained power from the kills – the aforementioned film THE BELIEVERS was used as an initiation aide.