Django, Kill is not my favourite western, but it is easily the weirdest I have ever seen.
The plot is a collection of familiar western scenarios: Left for dead, a gunslinger (Thomas Milian) seeks vengeance on the members of the gang who betrayed him.
Before this same stranger can wreak and ruin, his ex-colleagues are ambushed by an isolated community who steal the loot and string the crooks up in the centre of town. Arriving post-massacre, our 'hero' finds himself in the middle of a war between a sadistic rancher named Zorro, and a creepy alderman with a pyromaniac locked in his house...
There is something out-of-kilter about this movie. Though ostensibly a western, it pulls from a variety of sources: horror movies, gothic melodrama and Questi's own past as a partisan fighting the fascists in World War 2.
So much of the movie feels like a reaction to the cliches of the genre - the good guy is the most talented fighter, and the most helpless character in the movie; the villains are the townspeople; Zorro may share a name with the famous hero, but he is instead a sadist who takes a great deal of pleasure in inflicting as much pain as possible.
The movie is filled with disturbing images: the leering townspeople, the hanged bodies of the bandits, the scalping of the gunman's indigenous guides, and a man covered in melted gold. The daylight setting and bright colour palette make it all the more disturbing.
The story-telling is pretty shaggy - it feels like a couple of different stories cobbled together. Every half hour or so, the stakes and antagonists change and our hero has to start from zero. It could almost work as a bizarro franchise, in which our hero goes on a series of different adventures.
The early part of the movie is a supernatural revenge tale in which our hero comes back from the dead to kill his murderers; this is followed by our hero being hired as the lackey of the local saloon keeper and having to deal with the in-fighting between the saloon keeper's new bride and his son; before long he has also become a hired hand for a local rancher named Zorro, who also has the town under his thumb. And then there is the alderman with the pyromaniacal wife he keeps jailed in her bedroom. It is a lot to take in.
As the nameless gunslinger, Thomas Milian is charismatic and empathetic as the lead. It is a testament to his powers, that he makes this character weirdly likeable. The movie never clears up whether the stranger is back from the dead, but never makes allowances for this origin - he ends up being a slave to the forces around him, and ends up wandering into the desert having affected no positive change.
Strange, haunting and occasionally disturbing, Django, Kill is one of a kind.
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