Django Il Bastardo (aka Django the Bastard, Stranger’s Gundown, Django the Avenger) (1969) – Allegedly the inspiration for Clint Eastwood’s moody High Plain Drifter, this offbeat film is almost more of a Gothic horror movie set in the Old West than a proper spaghetti western. Frankly, if the point of view was switched to the people being murdered, this would be a horror movie. Django il Bastardo turns the title character into an avenging angel – literally.
The story follows the mysterious black-clad Django (Anthony Steffen) as he terrorizes, stalks, and kills a series of men who he holds responsible for the massacre of his former Confederate Army regiment. His preferred method is to present his intended victim with a cross bearing the villain’s name and the date of his death: that very same day. The soon-to-be-dead man than blusters about angrily or fearfully before Django guns him down, along with anyone who tries to help him. One by one, Django works his way through his Death List, leaving a trail of fear and paranoia in his wake.
The most interesting thing about the flick is that it pretty much presents Django as a ghost. He appears and disappears at will, seemingly materializing into locked rooms at will. Dressed entirely in black, with a long black poncho that makes him look like a vision of Dracula in silhouette, Django is as determined to scare his enemies as he is to kill them, seemingly. His supernatural abilities soon have all of the bad guys completely spooked – they would rather flee the town than continue trying and failing to hunt him down. Much of the film is shot like a horror movie, filled with dark, looming shadows and flickering candlelight.
The film presents plenty of clues that Django has come back to life to avenge not just his friends’ deaths but his own. At one point, the lone female character tells Django that she’s not afraid of him, even though everyone else in town thinks he’s a ghost. He replies, “What if they are right?” Another scene has her husband (a semi-manic, cut-rate Klaus Kinski type) gathering a chest full of cash to try and bribe Django. He comments, “There ain’t no man living could resist that much money.” Django, of course, does resist that money and continues on with his slaughter.
At its heart, this is basically a slasher flick, albeit one where we are asked to identify with the killer and not those he’s murdering. The subjects of Django’s wrath are justifiably terrified through most of the film, never sure when Django might appear and gun them down. The main villain is Django’s former commanding officer, Major Murdock, now a corrupt bigwig in his frontier town. Murdock tries everything to protect himself from Django, but there’s not really much you can do about a being who seems to be a spectral embodiment of vengeance. In the end, Murdock realizes that it’s really the ugly deeds of his past that have come back to haunt him, and there’s not anything he can do to stop it.
Steffan’s performance as Django is suitably wordless and creepy, ensuring that the audience never quite knows whether his character is a flesh-and-blood human or a murderous spectre. Director Sergio Garrone does some nice work, too, establishing this all-but-deserted frontier town as a place of real horror. There’s a lot of Corbucci-style shooting through wagon wheels, window frames, and fences, and some memorable shots of torch-bearing riders searching for Django in the fog. The film ends with Django simply disappearing into the ether, his thirst for revenge slaked. While not the greatest spaghetti western you’ll ever see, Django il Bastardo has enough style and weirdness going for it to make it well worth checking out for fans of the genre.
Django il Bastardo can be streamed for free at Tubitv.com or YouTube here, here, or here.
Other flicks I’ve seen recently:
Inglourious Basterds (2009) – With the release of Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, there have been a string of online articles recently delving into Quentin Tarantino’s filmography. A lot of people seem to consider this flick his best, but I had managed to avoid seeing it until this week. When it popped up on Netflix, I finally sat down and caught it. Could it really be better than Jackie Brown or Django Unchained, my two favorite Tarantino flicks? No, no it could not. While peppered with memorable scenes and lots of strong performances, ultimately the film fell kind of flat for me. (Spoiler Alert ahead for anyone who still hasn’t seen this ten-year-old flick.) While killing off Hitler and the German high command is a bold choice for the finale, it also came across as rather silly to me. I get that Tarantino wants to say something about the power of film to change the world, but this is a rather literal way of getting to that (somewhat dubious) point. The flick is just okay, and hardly the great work that many seem to take it for. Contrary to Brad Pitt’s film-ending line, this is not Tarantino’s masterpiece. I’ll stick with Jackie Brown.
Inglourious Basterds can be streamed at Netflix.
The Villainess (aka Aknyeo) (2018) – A hyper-violent Korean take on the La Femme Nikita storyline, this action-packed flick delivers lots of stylish bloodletting, but its convoluted storyline ultimately derails it. I’m also not a big fan of killing off children in movies in order to make the hero’s quest more emotional. (Korean flicks in general don’t share my qualms – this is the same reason I’m not crazy about The Host.) There are lots of blood-spraying sword and knife fights that are imaginatively staged, jumping in and out of first person as the heroine murders literally hundreds of foes. The blistering first-person opening sequence is pretty amazing, and a nifty motorcycle swordfight here clearly inspired a similar bit in the latest John Wick flick. By the end, though, the sheer weight of the non-stop violence wears the film down.
The Villainess can be streamed at Hulu.
High Flying Bird (2019) – I really thought I’d like this one, a Steven Soderbergh-helmed Netflix feature about an NBA agent trying to steer his young client through a lockout. It is a tremendous technical achievement, as Sodorbergh shot the whole thing on an iPhone. The results look amazing, lots of wide-angle shots that take place in real spaces and showcase a really new kind of aesthetic. You couldn’t shoot this with traditional cameras and have it look anything like this. That said, High Flying Bird is a time-haltingly boring exercise that consists largely of the agent talking and talking and talking about how he’s going to “change the game.” I found myself checking the time a lot as I watched. “Can it really only be three minutes since I last checked?” The only thing game-changing about this flick is the way it was shot.
High Flying Bird can be streamed at Netflix.
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