Django's Cut Price Corpses (1971)

For all the hype it got I was expecting a lot more!

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

It really made me laugh, but for some moments I was tearing up because I could relate so much.

Django hunts down a gang of evil bandits who have abducted his girlfriend.I have recently ploughed through a lot of routine bog-standard spaghetti westerns and have increasingly discovered that the genre sure had a lot of unremarkable and tedious features on offer. This one is another of dozens that went out under the Django name and it is unfortunately yet another example of the plethora of forgettable Italian westerns. The story-line is deeply uninteresting and the action is, at best, routine. There is not a whole lot memorable about this one at all. Its director is Luigi Batzella, going under the moniker Paolo Solvay, who was best known to me as the director of the later notorious nazisploitation The Beast in Heat (1977) which made the UK video nasty list. As uneven as that grim sleaze-fest was, I would certainly recommend watching it over this thoroughly uninspired western.

DJANGO'S CUT PRICE CORPSES has the advantage of being a genuine DJANGO sequel but that doesn't make it much good. Instead this is one of the cheapest spaghetti westerns that I can remember seeing; it doesn't have that over-bright, sun-scorched feel to it, instead simply filmed in the lush green Italian countryside with various farm buildings visible in the background.The plot is some hackneyed piece of writing about Django's girlfriend being taken by a gang of bandits which leads him on a rescue mission. He's aided in his progress by two characters who are far more interesting than he is: Fulton, a cadaverous card shark played with sinister relish by Gengher Gatti, and Pickwick, a brawling, larger-than-life character played by the bear-like John Desmont. By comparison, Jeff Cameron is wooden as the protagonist, and his character has no depth at all.There are some routine shoot-outs that take place in this picture, and a stagecoach chase that feels very slow and stately. Some of the actresses give better performances than their male counterparts. In the end, the general humdrum feel comes down to director Luigi Batzella, whose heart simply doesn't seem to be in it.

If you think the title "Django's Cut Price Corpses" sounds goofy and unprofessional, wait until you see the actual movie for yourself. The movie goes wrong in a number of ways. It's a pretty cheap enterprise for one thing - though supposedly taking place near the U.S./Mexico border, it's pretty clear the movie was inexpensively shot on the green landscape of Italy. There's also at least one shot where you see the shadow of the cameraman! There is also not much action, the little there is being anything but exciting, and the comic touches were desperately unfunny. But the main way the movie soon lost me was the extremely confusing (and boring) storyline. There are too many characters with too many motivations, and it was hard to keep everything straight. Even die hard fans of spaghetti westerns (like me) will find it tough to sit through this.

This is really not a bad little western. It may make you scratch your head a little in a couple of parts, but even some of the great spaghetti westerns do that sometimes. The overall story is easy to follow if you just sit back and enjoy it for what it is- mindless escapist fun.The music is generically suitable for a spaghetti western. The acting is bad, but after a while it just seems like part of the personality of the characters. The main bad guy has a couple of unintentionally funny lines that made me chuckle. There's also an oddball character who laughs at things that aren't funny and likes to bludgeon people with his saddle when he gets into fights.Being a fan of spaghetti westerns, I thoroughly enjoyed this movie. If you aren't a spaghetti western lover, you might not like it so much.