The crimes of mass murderer Richard Speck are dramatized in the relentlessly grim international co-production BORN FOR HELL, out on Blu-ray from Severin Films.

Gone AWOL from Vietnam, American G.I. Cain Adamson (Mathieu Carrière, MALPERTUIS) gets off the boat in a the warzone that is Belfast, Ireland during The Troubles. Unable to find any work in order to afford passage home, Adamson wanders the streets, turning down an offer of male prostitution from a gay Asian immigrant, and fixating on a boarding house of nursing students under police escort due to the increased violence in the area. One night, he breaks in and takes the nurses hostage at knifepoint, tying them up and then systematically taking them away to terrorize, brutalize, and murder them one by one as the others can only listen in terror, their thoughts of escape hindered by their concern for their colleagues.

While BORN FOR HELL shifts the location of the 1966 murder spree of Richard Speck who murdered eight student nurses in a dormitory from Chicago to Ireland, the Canadian-French-Italian-West German co-production actually does little with the new setting apart from using it to underline a certain cynicism of the media and those grown numb to the violence around them ("a bombing here, a shooting there" muses one of the nurses of another's interest in watching the television news at the end of their day). The detached approach to storytelling hints at various aspects of Adamson's psychosis – more so his experiences in Vietnam and a hatred of women perhaps preceding the infidelity of his wife with a fellow soldier – while perhaps the lack of much characterization of the nurses apart from that which Adamson overhears and observes does not really objectify them so much as make even more senseless their targeting for brutality and death by a total stranger. Although the cast of nurses is made up of international beauties – including Leonora Fani (GIALLO IN VENICE), William Berger's daughter Debra Berger (THE INGLORIOUS BASTARDS), Christine Boisson (EMMANUELLE), Ely Galleani (A LIZARD IN A WOMAN'S SKIN), Carole Laure (SWEET MOVIE), Myriam Boyer (SERIE NOIRE), Eva Mattes (THE BITTER TEARS OF PETRA VAN KANT), and Andrée Pelletier (MARIE-ANN) – and there is a hint of lesbianism, the women are only really exploited by Adamson not the camera, and onscreen violence never attempts to entertain the viewer. The low key ending is actually quite faithful to the facts of the crime.

Released theatrically in 1976 stateside as BORN FOR HELL, the film was more widely seen when it was released on home video in a slightly different edit under the title NAKED MASSACRE. Severin Films includes high definition transfers of both versions with the original version (91:37) advertised as being sourced from "an uncut 35mm print discovered in The National Archives of Canada" and the 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen transfer looking generally clean and relatively crisp in bright scenes while darker scenes can look flatter in the shadow areas. Some scenes are just underlit but the lack of pop for much of the running time seems conceptual as much due to the processing as the blood reds range from dull to vivid depending on the shot and the lighting. The NAKED MASSACRE version (85:43) appears to be at least partially recreated from that master, but it reveals that the film was not just trimmed down – the opening is shortened and some scenes reordered while some later scenes involving a drunk are excised entirely – but music has also been added to underscore scenes where there was none before (the original version has no scoring whatsoever while the NAKED MASSACRE version includes some library music and some classical cues including the piece heard during the opening credits of HOUSE OF EXORCISM and THE PREY). The theatrical version has English and French DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono tracks but only SDH subtitles while the shorter cut include sonly English DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0. The film is entirely post-dubbed with only the Canadian actresses dubbing themselves, but bad "Irish" accents abound.

The disc is appreciably stacked with extras, although more pertain to Speck than the film itself. First up is "The Other Side of the Mirror" (14:14) in which Carrière recalls the reasons the film had to change some details of the case, and how his mother had misgivings about the role while his psychologist father thought it would be an interesting challenge. He also discusses working with the international cast of women as well as confirming that credited director Dennis Héroux (THE UNCANNY) only worked on the film in a supervisory aspect while the actual direction was the work of Géza von Radványi who later scripted the Austrian horror film PARAPSYCHO which also starred Carrière.

"Nightmare In Chicago: Remembering the Richard Speck Crime Spree" (12:52) is an interview with local filmmakers John McNaughton (HENRY: PORTRAIT OF A SERIAL KILLER) and Gary Sherman (DEAD AND BURIED) who discuss their Chicago childhoods and the effect of hearing about the case on both of them. McNaughton also reveals that he was offered a Speck project after HENRY while Sherman reveals that the case was one of the reasons he decided to get out of Chicago and work in England and that his lesser seen serial killer film 39: A FILM BY CARROLL MCKANE was inspired by the case. "A New Kind Of Crime: The Richard Speck Story" (38:20) is a comprehensive account of the Speck case by Once Upon A Crime podcaster Esther Ludlow who details Speck's childhood, his abusive stepfather, his juvenile record and teenage alcoholism, his marriage, and the interventions of his mother that might have both lead to resentment as well as his feeling of invulnerability.

"Bombing Here, Shooting There" (17:02) is a video essay by filmmaker Chris O’Neill who not only provides a context for The Troubles in Ireland but also makes the case that the inaccuracies and naiveté of film's depiction of the setting form a portrait of a popular outsider perception of a "religious war." He also notes that most films that used the setting during the period would film mostly in Dublin and only take a second unit camera to Belfast, but that BORN FOR HELL (which was otherwise shot in West Germany) actually not only took a crew to Belfast but also its lead actor (the British soldier who asks for his I.D. in the opening was not an actor).