Django's Cut Price Corpses (1971)

Touches You

Best movie ever!

Absolutely the worst movie.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

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.

Rugged fast-on-the-draw bounty hunter Django (smoothly played by Jeff Cameron) hunts down notorious bank-robbing outlaws the Cortez brothers. He's assisted by shrewd card sharp Fulton (an engaging performance by Gengher Gatti) and hale'n'hearty hombre Pickwick (robustly essayed with amiable scruffy charm by John Desmont), who just wants to get his saddle back (and beats people up with said saddle!). Meanwhile, several other folks plot to get their greedy hands on the stolen loot. Director Luigi Batzella, who also co-wrote the straightforward script with Mari De Rosa and Gaetano Dell 'Era, relates the fun story at a snappy pace, stages the shoot-outs and fisticuffs with considerable aplomb, and further spruces things up with a few amusing touches of goofy humor. Cameron and Desmont display a winning chemistry in the leads, Edilio Kim makes for a perfectly hissable villain as ruthless bandito gang leader Ramon, gorgeous brunette knockout Angela Portaluri supplies lots of sizzle as sexy'n'scheming saloon gal Donna Dolores, and the fetching Esmeralda Barros likewise provides extra spark as the spunky Pillar. Giorgio Montagnani's crisp and lively cinematography injects an additional rip-snorting energy. Vasili Kojucharov's twangy score hits the rousing spot. Best of all, there are a few neat surprise twists at the very end. An enjoyable oater.

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.