Django il bastardo (The Strangers Gundown)
A guy I met this summer and I started talking about Spaghetti Westerns. Although my favorite film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, is a Spaghetti Western, I realized after talking to this guy I knew precious little about the genre. He handed me a couple DVDs to try out.
All he told me about this film was that it features a shot near the beginning of the protagonist as he is walking with a shot directly above him. So all we basically see is the top of a hat with legs coming out of it back and forth. He said he found this and some other shots striking but other than that it wasn't that great of a movie. After watching it, I would argue that it's actually pretty good. I enjoyed it at least.
The original title was originally translated to "Django the Bastard", but like a lot of Spaghetti Westerns that tried to piggyback on some of the more successful films of the genre by using similar names, this film has nothing to do with the original Django movie.
There are a lot of typical characters, setting, and shots in this film, but many scenes and plot turns that I found rather original. One thing that I didn't really realize until reading reviews of the film later is that the protagonist is actually apparently supposed to be a ghost. Telling you this doesn't really ruin the movie, at least it wouldn't have for me, since it adds and element to the film that apparently I was supposed to have picked up while watching it but never quite gathered. The movie almost goes into the realm of horror, another genre the Italians were cranking out around this time. Many of the ways the protagonist does away with his foes are quite original and amusing too.
Maybe I have yet to see enough Spaghetti Westerns to make a real judgment on how well this is within the whole genre, but I've seen a handful, and I enjoyed this one quite a bit.
Rating: 8/10