‘Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!’ or — Golden Showers?
So last night I was twenty minutes or so into ‘Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!’ (1967) when I thought to myself — “Hmm, this is genuinely pretty bonkers.” And then I remembered it was directed by Giulio Questi who made ‘Death Laid An Egg’ (1968), possibly the craziest movie to emerge out of the Italian peninsula during the 1960s, so that explained a lot.
The film starts with a man known only as The Stranger (Tomas Milian) clawing his way out of a mass grave following a massacre after a brutal gold robbery. Is this man still alive or has he returned from the great hunting grounds of the Beyond? Either way, he has been left for dead by his double-crossing partner, Oaks, and is told by two Indians who nurse him better that Oaks and the gang have ridden with the gold to a town known simply as The Unhappy Place. Not only that but the two Indians have melted down The Stranger’s share of the gold into a set of golden bullets. Ooh!
On reaching The Unhappy Place, The Stranger discovers Oaks and his gang brutally lynched by the townsfolk and hung up for all to see and also that the gold is missing. Who in this weird town seemingly infected by evil has taken the loot? What are the dark secrets that almost everyone seems to be hiding? And what, exactly, is it like to party with and then be crucified by a gang of gay cowboys?
It becomes very apparent in ‘Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot!’ that we are watching something very different from Sergio Leone when the references slapping you in the face, like a sadistic bandito, are Alfred Hitckcock’s ‘Vertigo’ (1958) and ‘Psycho’ (1960) rather than the canon of Hollywood Western classics seen through Italian eyes. This is as well as pre-empting the ‘Acid Western’ style of Jodorowsky’s ‘El Topo’ (1970) with some hallucinatory moments of weirdness and religious symbolism. So as you can see, it is a film located on a particularly niche corner of the Spaghetti Western map.
Though, ironically, this is also what links it more closely with Leone films as opposed to some of the other Spaghetti Westerns of the time. For example, the Sartana and Ringo movies stripped away the artistic pretense, slightly excessive length and high-minded indulgence of Leone’s movies and kept only the reasons for a brisk story, fast action and groovy stunt-work. Yet Questi bolts all the artistic aspiration and “pretensions” (just different types) back on in ‘Django Kill’. So it aims for psychological depth, symbolic imagery (Sartana wouldn’t be caught dead with anything so highfalutin in his films) as well as social criticism and religious iconography. Whether any of it actually makes sense is another matter entirely.
Though what really makes ‘Django Kill’ stand out is the excess and violence. There is a REALLY disturbing moment near the start when a character, riddled by some of the Stranger’s bullets, lies injured on a saloon table. The town’s “surgeon” removes one of the bullets and gasps with surprise that it is pure gold… at which point all the men gathered round immediately plunge their fingers and hands into the dying man’s body and kill him by tearing the bullets out of him. It’s not just what we see but that it is such a gross idea in the first place.
Then there’s the exploding horse, the half-mad wife, the fruitbats and the gang of gay cowboys whom I can’t figure out if they are either subversively homoerotic or jaw-droppingly homophobic (I think it might be the latter). The movie also contains a death that’s as inventive and gruesome as one that Game of Thrones used to similarly icky effect (think molten gold and someone’s head).
If you like your films “interesting” or want to see a Western with a genuinely unique take on the genre then ‘Django Kill’ is worth checking out. The directing is strong and Tomas Milian is great as ever as The Stranger providing him with more of a counter-culture Dennis Hopper or Jack Nicholson intensity as opposed to Eastwood’s more laconic James Dean style approach.
