It's Tomas Milian times two in Umberto Lenzi's crime film BROTHERS TILL WE DIE, on Blu-ray from 88 Films.

Returning to Rome after two years in Corsica following a payroll robbery, the hunchbacked Vincenzo Marazzi (Milian) reconnects with his twin brother Sergio aka Pigpen (also Milian), a mechanic who wiles his day away in a garage daydreaming. Vincenzo is in town to meet up with some former partners – car dealer Perrone (Luciano Catenacci, KILL BABY KILL), Milo the Albanian (Sal Borgese, THE BLACK CORSAIR), and fishmonger Flatfish (Guido Leontini, THE VALACHI PAPERS) – to pitch an armored car robbery using his new favorite weapon: gas bombs. His partners do not trust him an plan to kill him during the robbery, but wounded Vincenzo makes it back to the apartment of his ex-prostitute girlfriend Maria (Isa Danieli, CINEMA PARADISO) who spies on Vincenzo's partners while he convalesces. News of the hunchback's return has also police commissioner Sarti (Pino Colizzi, BORN WINNER) who is still bitter about failing to capture him on the payroll heist. Sarti focuses his attentions on Sergio who has, as instructed by Vincenzo if the police come, swallowed a couple cigarettes, but the resulting illness is interpreted by a doctor as mental illness and Sarti loses Sergio to an extended institution stay from which he must bust the man out if he is to discover Vincenzo's whereabouts. When Vincenzo starts taking his revenge on his betrayers, however, the police start to make connections between the hunchback and the armored car robbery.

Although Umberto Lenzi is well-known to Eurocult fans as a director of horror (NIGHTMARE CITY, BLACK DEMONS) and cannibal films (EATEN ALIVE, CANNIBAL FEROX), he was a jobbing director who dabbled in several genres including the giallo (PARANOIA, ORGASMO). Although in his fallow periods, Lenzi had also written a number of giallo novels, the film genre in which he truly flourished was the poliziotteschi, a genre of crime film that emerged in the turbulent seventies amidst domestic terrorism and changing social mores with Ferndando Di Leo (MILANO CALIBRO 9), Stelvio Massi (MAGNUM COP), and Enzo G. Castellari (HIGH CRIME) among its better known practitioners. While Lenzi and Milan were capable to delivering the goods in gritty violence with entries like ALMOST HUMAN and SYNDICATE SADISTS, BROTHERS TILL WE DIE came up near the end of the decade, and like the Sergio Martino's giallo-poliziotteschi hybrid SUSPICIOUS DEATH OF A MINOR – produced like the Lenzi film by Martino's brother Luciano – and was lighter in tone to the point of almost being a comic parody of the genre with Milian chewing the scenery in two roles playing two characters (and taking credit for writing the dialogue of both) he had previously essayed in earlier unrelated Lenzi films as Vincenzo in THE TOUGH ONES and Pigpen in DESTRUCTION FORCE and TOUGH COP. Between the two characters, Milian ekes out some sympathy for both, with a surprisingly tender ending (although one wonders if the final ambiguity was intended to leave room open for another sequel for one of the characters). Typecase as prostitutes in her earlier days, Danieli also turns in a supporting performance so sweet and funny that one is relieved she is not treated like other women in Lenzi's grittier crime films. By this point, the genre was on its way out, with Milian appearing in a number of other comedy crime films by Bruno Corbucci as the Nico Giraldi character before moving back into the Italian art film and American mainstream circles while Lenzi's eighties career veered towards horror.

Unreleased in the United States and only available in poor quality boots and later fandubs of the Italian DVD. The film was popular enough in Germany that FilmArt put out a DVD in 2013 featuring an English track and English subtitles for the Italian and German tracks along with an interview with composer Franco Micalizzi (THE VISITOR), and subsequently in 2017 a Blu-ray from X-Rated featuring the English track and a German-language audio commentary. As 88 Films' specs claim this is just an "HD transfer," their 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 2.35:1 widescreen Blu-ray probably comes from the same master. The naturalistic color scheme does not particularly pop color-wise and detail is subject to the camerawork which is in keeping with the gritty nature of the production with not always crisp focus in the panning and zooming. English and Italian LPCM 2.0 mono tracks both sound fairly clean with no distracting age-related issues or distortion in the funky scoring while optional English subtitles translate both the Italian dialogue and some Albanian dialogue (which is also subtitled in Italian on the print). When the English track is selected, there is another subtitle track for the aforementioned Albanian exchange and some Italian newspaper headlines.