7/10
One of the most surreal westerns I have seen
26 October 2016
I may be giving Django Kill a higher star review than what I'd usually hand such films, but it's a strangely addicting film. First of all, this review is mainly for the English-dubbed film (with references to the original Italian version), which does NO justice for the main character - "The Stranger" (Tomas Milian). His actual voice is so very much better than the dubbed version, and the producers did a poor job of choosing whose voice would carry him.

The first scene... I simply can't get that opening out of my head. It literally can turn your head upside down, just as some of the filmmaking showed. There are scenes, characters and animals in this first montage which is pretty jaw-dropping. It invites you to a place where you simply don't want to visit. And while my gut instincts told me that the gang shouldn't keep going, they do. But they are a group packed to the gills with six-shooters and attitude.

Everything was named "Django" for a while following the original film's success, but this feature has no Django at all. If you haven't seen Milian in such films as "Run, Man, Run (1968), you won't be able to appreciate his talent in Django Kill. He has expressions and body language that should have been featured more effectively, which speaks to the lack of wisdom of the direction and production. Having said that however, I just cannot get some of the scenes in this film out of my head. At the very least, get a hold of a dual language version of Django Kill! to compare the English with the Italian, as well as the subtitles, which reveal a few masochistic moments that wind up being lost by the time the dubbing was set. For instance, a girl in the English dub says "Give up! Give up!" while you see what REALLY happens in the Italian version. Films like this, and The Great Silence (1968) took Italian westerns to atypical locations than the Leone copycat films.
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