A few months after the Civil War, a megalomaniac Rebel captain pushes his remaining troops to keep up the fight...without telling them the war is over. He plans to hijack a Union wagon with 300K in gold. With the war over and the payroll decreased, however, the haul comes out to 3k. The captain steadfastly believes there must be more gold and pursues a campaign of rape and torture to find out where the rest of it is.
Belief and frustration dominate this movie. In many ways, it makes some truly profound statements about the tension between them. There is no more gold and will never be any more gold. And even though the Union captain explains it all logically and concisely to the Confederate captain, the Confederate captain simply refuses to believe it. It's an existential stalemate brought vividly to life at the end of movie with the Confederate captain trapped under his horse and left to die.
John Bliss' performance creeps you out. He carries the entire movie with grace and malice. So much so that it brings out how amateurish the other actors are. Even so, the low budget tends to work in favor of the film, bringing a grittiness that more money would have taken away from it.
Where the low budget didn't work, though, is in the editing. At several points in the film, most noticeably in the rape of the maid, they copy/paste comments made just seconds earlier. It might be an interesting technique but it's too clumsy to have not been sloppy.
My other main complaint is the "slave as cannibals" speech given by the captain. My eyes literally rolled into the back of my head. A simple, brutal massacre of his family would have been much more effective.
I really enjoyed this film, despite it's glaring flaws. I'm not a big proponent of remakes, but I'd love to see this remade.