International Blu Ray playback issues?

Not sure where to put this but figured I would ask here since its a general question. A few months ago I picked up a rare copy of an Italian film called Tiburon 3 also known as The Last Shark on eBay. It is such a rare film because the creators of Jaws found the film to be very similar and won the court case. Since I am a shark movie fan I have to check it out but it's not easily distributed. The film arrived from Italy and I was surprised it's BD-R but I have seen this before. The film is supposedly region free (or at least A, B and C) but one of my blu ray players would not even attempt to play it. I tried it on another player and it plays but the menu only shows for a few seconds. I can scroll the menu in those few seconds but I can't seem to actually access anything in those menu's. If I am fast I can select play and the movie starts playing. However I only get audio and no video. However if I pause the movie I will get a still taken from within the movie at that point. The data is there but its not letting me see it. I can only hear it. Is this a region issue or a disc authoring issue? For the record I don't currently have a region free blu ray player. Its on my list but have not got around to it yet. Not sure if it would fix this issue? The player it plays partially on is an old Panasonic BD35 blu ray player. It's old but plays everything solidly despite being like 17 years old. Actually works better than many newer players. It plays BD-R's fine!