DJANGO KILL...IF YOU LIVE SHOOT ! (1967)

DIRECTED by Giulio Questi

SCREENPLAY by Giulio Questi, Franco Arcalli & Benedetto Benedetti from a story by Maria Del Carmen, Martinez Roman, Giulio Questi & Franco Arcalli

STARRING  - Tomas Milian as The Stranger (Django),  Marilu Tolo as Flory,  Roberto Carmardiel as Sorrow,  Paco Sanz as Alderman,  Milo Quesada as Bill Templer, Piero Lulli as Oakes,  Ray Lovelock as Evan Templer,  Patrizia Valturri as Elizabeth Alderman,  Miguel Serrano as Indian,  Angel Silva as Indian, Felix Sancho Grazia as Willy.

PLOT - Django - a Mexican outlaw and his gang team up with an outlaw by the name of Oakes (who has a gang of his own) to rob a Wells-Fargo stagecoach that is carrying a quantity of gold. The robbery is successful but Oakes and his men betray Django and his gang - they refuse to give them thier half of the gold and then execute them in the desert. Shooting them and leaving them for dead.

Only Django miraculously manages to survive. He is befriended by two native Americans who believe that Django has returned from the land of the dead. Together they track down Oakes and his men to a nearby town that seems to have fallen into decline.

Oakes' men are lynched by the townsfolk, Oakes himself is bought to justice by Django. When the outlaws' cache of gold is discovered a strange madness and obsession begins to overtake the townsfolk. Soon they are at each others throats in thier desire to own the gold - all blinded by thier own greed. To make matters worse a wealthy local rancher - Sorrow - also lays claim to the gold, the problem being that Sorrow has his own private army. Caught between all sides is Django - can he survive this tangled web of greed and intrigue ?...

DIALOUGE  - Sorrow - "Pancho - you idiot !! You didn't have to kill him did ya ?" Pancho - "I'm sorry sir, but all my life I've searched for gold...and this man is full of it !"

PERFORMANCES  - Lets get one thing straight first - the character of Django played by Tomas Milian is NOT the same character as the Django character played by Franco Nero who appears in the original 1966 Django movie. Nor is he the same character who was played by Jamie Foxx in Tarantino's 2012 "franchise reboot" (hate that term) Django Unchained. Indeed, Milian's character is never referred to onscreen as even being called Django (he's just referred to as "Stranger") but for easiness we'll refer to him as "Django" for this review. The origin of this confusion arises from the fact that the Django name was added by the film's producers for marquee value (the same thing happened with most of the other Django "sequals" as well).

So what facts can we glean about the character of this incarnation of "Django" ? Firstly, he's a Mexican bandit who (initially) seems to be a man of very few morals. He has no reservations whatsoever about killing and stealing to survive, indeed he seems to have made quite a name for himself by doing just that. Its only when he's betrayed by the slimy, conniving Oakes (Pierro Lulli) and survives his near death experience that things start to change.

It's unclear just how Django survives being shot by a firing squad at point-blank range (it's one of many weird mysteries this bizarre movie throws at the audience), maybe he really did die and come back from the dead, he certainly seems to be restlessly seeking some kind of redemption as the story progresses. Indeed, he pretty much becomes tangential to the events that unfold as the greed driven madness takes over the small town in which he finds himself. 

For some reason theres a lot of Christ-like imagery attached to the character - not only does he "resurect" from the dead but he's also "crucified" by Sorrow at one point (although his ressurection comes BEFORE his crucifixion). To my mind this imagery further reinforces the idea that Django really did die at Oakes' hands and has become some kind of revenant soul walking a confused path to redemption - let's face it, its no more of a bizzare idea than any of the other deeply weird events that take place in this film. Milian has a great deal of screen presence in this movie and I think he's second only to Franco Nero in the "best Django" stakes.

Along the way our hero encounters a cast of bizzare characters (honestly, this crazed bunch of old West prairie folk make the inhabitants of Twin Peaks look positively sane by comparison). You've got Bill Templer (Milo Quesada) - the greedy Innkeeper who also seems to double as the town's sherrif, his mistress - Flory (Marilu Tolo) who gets turned on by watching men argue over gold, and his emotionally unstable son Evan (Ray Lovelock) who may or may not be gay and seems to harbour a deep hatred for Flory, at one point he hacks her clothing up with a knife for no apparent reason whatsoever.

On the other side of the fence we get Alderman (Paco Sanz) - the town's pastor who keeps his half-insane wife Elizabeth (Patrizia Valturri) locked away in his attic. At one point Django sleeps with Elizabeth, rather than getting angry or morally outraged by this action (as you would expect from a) a husband and b) a man of the cloth) Alderman instead seems to encourage this infidelity (by this point he's been blinded by his own gold-lust anyway).

Perhaps the most bizarre character of all is Sorrow (Roberto Carmardiel) - a wealthy and eccentric ranch boss. Sorrow is openly gay, drinks copious amounts of alcohol, plays a Barrell Organ, has arguments with his pet parrot (which argues back) and has his own personal army of "muchachos" (gay cowboys who dress like Mariachis). He also likes to torture his victims by tying them up in cruciform poses and letting vampire bats feed from them. Its safe to say that he's not the type of person you meet everyday. He's a great villain - camp, ridiculous and menacing in equal measure.

SFX - Not a lot in the way of sfx (it is a western afterall, regardless of how strange it is) - a few examples of bright red emulsion paint style blood and gore but little else.

VIOLENCE  - Django kill is widely regarded as one of the most violent Speghetti Westerns ever, whilst I wouldn't go quite as far as to agree with that (the Franco Nero Django movie has a much higher bodycount) it does have it's moments. More than anything theres a doom laden unsettling atmosphere that seems to hang over the entire movie.

Memorable moments - the stagecoach robbery and the "afterparty" where Django and Oakes and thier gang celebrate whilst the camera lingers on a corpse floating face down in the bloody water. Then we get the execution style killing of Django and his comrades by Oakes and his men.

Oakes and company get lynched by the townsfolk. One man screams as he is led to the gallows, another gets his brains blown out as he cowers next to a large wooden wheel as he attempts in vain to hide.

Perhaps most graphic of all is when the mortaly wounded Oakes is found to have been shot by golden bullets - the townsfolk descend upon him like a pack of vultures as they literally tear the bullets out of his body with knives and scalpels whilst he screams his last.  Oakes was a horrible, horrible bastard but even he didn't deserve to go out like this.

We are "treated" to lots of close-up lingering shots of Oakes' dead lynched gang. 

In a harrowing scene Evan shoots himself to death (its implied that he was gang raped by Sorrow's muchachos the night before), Evan seems to be genuinely mourned by Django - a sign that Django himself is now fully on the path of redemption perhaps...

One of Django's red indian companions is scalped by a blood (and gold) frenzied mob of townsfolk.

Templer, Flory and Sorrow all meet thier deaths by being shot. A fire breaks out at Alderman's home. Elizabeth burns to death at the window of the room she's trapped in, Alderman goes back to save his precious gold - the gold has been melted by the intense heat and molten gold pours all over his face - killing him in the process. 

Unable to save anyone, Django leaves town, a sadder but wiser man...

RATING - Django Kill, as you've probably gathered by reading this, is an utterly strange and bizarre viewing experience. 

If someone where to ask you what you would get if you combined a Speghetti Western with a horror film and added a dash of art house surrealism then this movie would be the one to show them. Its violent, its massively atmospheric and in parts slightly incomprehensible. 

It's gloomy, doomy atmosphere draws you in and hypnotises you with it's grim tale of how greed can corrupt even the most righteous of people. It can be slightly slow in places and the story does lose it's focus somewhat at around the halfway point but it remains a fascinating piece of cinema all the same. 4 and a half gold bullets out of 5. A western for people who don't normally like westerns.

ART - 

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