The second of the great unfinished western sagas, The Revenge Epic pushes the early Dollars & Donuts mythos deeper into blood, sand, and vengeance.

Ray Revello stars as Roland Kawada, an escaped prisoner with murder on his mind and seawater still dripping from his clothes. The only completed scene opens on a deceptively peaceful stretch of Pacifica shoreline before Roland emerges from the ocean itself, stumbling ashore like something dredged up from the bottom of a bad dream. For the crew at the time, it was an unexpectedly ambitious opening image and one of their earliest attempts at something that felt genuinely cinematic in scope.

Roland crosses paths with a would-be Good Samaritan, played by Ray’s real-life cousin Michael Agustinelli, whose offer of help is repaid with a kitchen knife to the gut. After the attack, Roland calmly steals the man’s hat and disappears, leaving behind a scene that is equal parts western brutality and adolescent black comedy. The moment is punctuated by Michael’s scream, a sound effect so obviously looped and repeated that it somehow makes the whole scene even better. At the time, the crew barely knew what they were doing with sound, and the result has a wonderfully dumb, homemade charm that turns the violence into accidental comedy.

The production itself was no less memorable. After filming the Pacifica beach sequence, Ray was absolutely drenched in cold, foul-smelling ocean water, forcing the crew to hole up at the beachside Taco Bell while waiting for his father to come pick them up. The ride home became its own scene, with Ray’s dad understandably furious that his son was about to soak the entire car in stinking Pacifica seawater.

Though the larger story was never completed, Roland Kawada refused to die.

The character would go on to become one of the earliest recurring ghosts of the Dollars & Donuts universe, his name resurfacing for years in background jokes, news crawls, Easter eggs, and comic-book references. Like so many unfinished figures from the early era, Roland outlived the film that birthed him.