Bezenby Well, it all starts off like your average Spaghetti Western. A half-breed Mexican (Milian) is double crossed for his share in a gold heist and is left for dead, but that's about where things stopped being normal. You could shrug off the weirdo visuals of Milian's flashback to being double crossed, but once the bad guys enter the town known as 'The Unhappy Place', things get real weird.Think of Royston Vasey. I'm not going to spoil things for anyone, but the vision of a crippled hedgehog is just the tip of the iceberg here. These bad guys are in real trouble as the citizens of the town notice these guys are wanted, and also notice they have a huge amount of gold.Milian, meanwhile, has been brought back to health by two Indians who think he has been to the land of the dead. They hang around with him hoping to learn of the afterlife, giving him a load of gold bullets to kill his enemies with. He gets into town just in time to face off with the lead bad guy, the others having been slaughtered by the town's populace.We now have to decide who is most evil character here, as there are plenty. Two of the town's prominent citizens has seized the gold for themselves: Templar, local bar man with unmarried lover (who gets turned on by loads of gold) and his son Evan, who is a bit psycho with his stepmother, then there's Alderman, a minister (maybe), who keeps his wife caged up in her room (although she keeps signalling to Milian). There's also Sorrow, a gangster type who lives outside of town and has an army of gay cowboys at his command (I'm not making that up).That's a lot of characters, and Milian's Stranger sometimes acts just as an observer to everyone else, but by having a lot more augmented characters we do get a bit more scope to what's happening on screen, and it also gives director Questi a lot more to work with (including the alcoholic parrot! Nearly forgot about that). Questi also manages to work in a lot of what I would call 'Video Nasty' gore way ahead of its time (and tellingly this footage lapses into the Italian language, indicating the gore was cut for English speaking nations).This is a great film that shows you how easy it is to escape the clutches of a normal Spaghetti Western plot and mess around with all the formatting. It's also really violent too - you wouldn't wish the fates of some of these bad guys on anyone - some really weird deaths here.I should mention Tomas Milian here seeing he died just about a month ago - He's like an old school Tom Hardy - small, loud, manic, moody, and doesn't mind getting covered from head to toe in filth. He's a great actor who will appear often in the seventies lists here, but strangely not so much the eighties.I can't wait to watch Guilio Questi's take on the giallo - It's called Death Laid An Egg and is set on an experimental chicken farm!

lost-in-limbo The first time I watched this spirited spaghetti western, I was somewhat disappointed after a promising opening thirty minutes of a certain eerie quality. Watching it again the story soaked in a bit more, but I didn't find it all that captivating even with its oddly sprawling and grim nature that ends with poetic justice. It's rather an unconventional effort into Gothic territory, but I found it to go on for too long and completely drag and flounder about after the half-way mark. I was really into it until Tomas Milan's character 'the stranger' made himself at home with the town's occupants. There it seemed to stall, not knowing which way to go and being disorienting. Nothing against Milan's turn, as he was astounding (even if most of the time he feels like nothing more than a passenger), but I guess I expected way too much from this highly regarded genre film. It's weird and unbalanced, as the atmosphere is quite tripped out (wait for the hallucinatory torture scene involving bats) and the maniac violence is sadistically graphic (the restored scalping scene comes to mind) and underneath the surface is a homoerotic edge. It's a boundless and at times wicked mixture. The structure of the psychedelic story is solid (a melodrama leaning on greed, corruption, religion and retribution) and the script squeezes out a morbid sense of humour, while director Guilio Questi infuses some striking images (hanging corpses) and modestly staged shoot-outs. What it seemed to lack though, was a real kinetic edge to its violence. Ivan Vandor's saucy score and Franco Delli Colli's elastic photography shape up well.

MARIO GAUCI This one certainly lives up to its reputation as the most peculiar Spaghetti Western there is, a quality which makes it unique but not exactly entertaining (the pace is slow and the film somewhat protracted, if never less than fascinating)! It features an atypical performance from lead Tomas Milian: usually the brash man of action with a humorous streak, here he's the cynical and mostly passive observer who even arrives late for the climax! Apart from the star, Marilu' Tolo and Ray Lovelock, the international cast - including several non-professionals - is unfamiliar but, as director Questi said in the exclusive Audio Commentary, their indelible faces were just what he needed for the film! By the way, in spite of the film's English title, it's not related to the 1966 DJANGO - and, in fact, Milian's character remains unnamed throughout - that spawned innumerable variations but only one direct sequel (made more than 20 years after the original)! Here, we also find several elements of Gothic horror (Milian 'rising' from the dead, the 'mad woman' character borrowed from "Jane Eyre", the weird prison torture scene involving vampire bats and iguanas, the fiery climax in which the villain's face is covered with melted gold, etc.); besides, Tolo is made-up to look like Barbara Steele and the greedy townsfolk's gory groping into the body of a dying bandit riddled with golden bullets curiously anticipates the zombie films of George Romero! Actually, the film's graphic depiction of violence gave it a certain notoriety which further fueled its cult status; in fact, the bullet sequence and the scalping of an Indian were censored at the time but, curiously, got reinstated for the shortened 1975 re-issue under the name of ORO HONDO (which had been the film's working title)! There's even a scene in which a horse is saddled with a charge of dynamite and let loose among the villains (whereupon we see shots of its intestines and the body parts of the various victims strewn about!) - though, in all fairness, in A PROFESSIONAL GUN (1968) a man was also nonchalantly killed by a grenade in the mouth!! Other unexpected elements in the film are its religious overtones (apart from Milian's crucifixion, the Indians who help him are mystics while the villainous Hagerman also serves pretty much as a bible-thumping preacher to the community) and the presence of black-clad gay cowboys as prototype Fascists (thankfully, we're spared their gang-rape of Lovelock - here in his film debut! - whose immediate reaction, naturally, is to shoot himself) led by a Spaniard (all dressed in white!) that goes by the name of Mr. Zorro(?!), and who shares a love-hate relationship throughout with a spirited parrot!! The film also features a good score by Ivan Vandor and Techniscope photography by Franco Delli Colli (though the outdoor night scenes are way too dark!), and the locations - Questi was especially proud of his uncharacteristic white desert - are notable too. Franco Arcalli, an unusual combination of screenwriter and film editor, devises some 'trippy' montages throughout - which, therefore, adds psychedelia to an already eclectic mix of cinematic styles that distinguish this Spaghetti Western! I opted to purchase the Italian DVD over Blue Underground's R1 edition due to the inclusion here of the afore-mentioned highly informative, full-length Audio Commentary featuring director Questi (who is very modest and actually attributes many of the film's bizarre touches to logical progressions of the narrative - which, needless to say, doesn't entirely convince the trio of moderators who accompany him throughout this engaging discussion!). However, with respect to the otherwise commendable Alan Young Pictures disc, one has to contend with a distracting layer change (in mid-sentence!), at least one other instance of audio drop-out and a baffling reversal, for one line of dialogue, to the English soundtrack (for the record, I watched the Italian-language version with the audio set in its original mono rendition; I tend to scoff at re-mixes of classic films)!!

fertilecelluloid The problem with "Django, Kill..." is it doesn't know when to quit. It is too loose to be compelling. Though it follows the fortunes of "The Stranger" (Tomas Milan) after he is left for dead by ruthless bandits, it is plotted all over the place and loses its way investigating every possible subplot on offer. It ignores the Milan story while doing so, but maybe that's because Milan's character is not very compelling. What Milan finally does could have been covered in a half hour short. Despite these gripes, the film is still an entertaining and bizarre one, and there's a vein of very black humor running through. The scene in which greedy human varmints tear open a body to search for gold bullets is very funny, as are director Giulio Questi's introductory shots of the film's featured town. It's like the writers are saying "No town could be this vile, except this one." There is a fairly bloody but not realistic scalping, the surgery scene, and some decent hanging shots. The shoot-outs are standard, not stylish, not dull. The score by Ivan Vandor is catchy and eccentric enough to sound like Morricone at times. Certainly worth seeing, but, script-wise, the very opposite of taut.