Editor Reviews:

Description:
Tomas Milian (TRAFFIC, RUN MAN RUN) stars as a half-breed bandit double-crossed and left for dead who rises from the grave to seek his revenge. But when his quest leads to a bizarre town called 'The Unhappy Place,' he is plunged into an odyssey of gruesome torture, graphic violence and relentless sexual depravity. This is the landmark movie that fans and critics still consider to be the strangest - and most controversial - 'Spaghetti Western' ever made. This is DJANGO KILL!

Director Guilio Questi (DEATH LAID AN EGG) and co-writer/editor Franco Arcalli (co-writer of ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA and LAST TANGO IN PARIS) shocked the world with this hallucinatory tale of greed, corruption, perversion and beyond. Also known as SE SEI VIVO SPARA (IF YOU LIVE, SHOOT!), this definitive presentation of DJANGO KILL! has been created from original Italian negative materials with all its infamous scenes of savagery and slaughter now fully restored for the first time ever in America.

Amazon.com:
Consensus holds that Django, Kill--more properly, If You Live, Shoot!--is the most depraved, decadent, and altogether delirious spaghetti Western of that definitively depraved, decadent, and delirious genre. Tomas Milian plays a Mexican outlaw brought back from the dead to wreak vengeance on his former gringo colleagues. Too late: the gang has already fallen afoul of the most thoroughly corrupt town in Euro-trash history. Where to begin describing this twisted tarantella? It starts with so many crisscrossed flashbacks that you could mistake it for a sequel. One story pretty much ends, to be succeeded by another, like an old silent feature by people who used to making one-reelers. Then there's Mr. Sorrow and his pet army of black-shirted, teeth-flashing gay gunslingers. And the naked Milian, crucified and left to be ravished by rats, bats, and an iguana. Director Giulio Questi intended certain political overtones. Discuss among yourselves. P.S.: This is the uncut version. --Richard T. Jameson

Rating : - Despite whatever faults - 5 Stars for throwing out the rule book...
if not spitting on it and stomping it into the dust. This one has quite a bit in common with Fulci's 'Four of the Apocalypse,' beginning with a complete rejection of the conventions of the genre, a generally unwholesome atmosphere, unexpected scenes of Gothic excess that had to be pushing the envelope at the time, and so on.

To contemporary eyes it may look cheap and slack, and the over the top violence will probably look unrealistic with its copious daubs of bright red paint. None of that really matters to me. Giulio Questi has conjured up a really sick and sordid atmosphere here, and re-tailored the Western as a savagely anti-capitalist allegory painted in the broad moral colors of a fairy tale - not a Disney fairy tale, but the old-school European versions full of twisted baroque violence (Cinderella's stepsisters cutting off pieces of their feet to fit in the glass slipper and then getting their eyes pecked out by birds at the royal wedding - that kind of thing).

One thing I love in this movie - the reaction shots. Whenever something dreadful is going on (which is often) the characters pause to watch and so does the movie. There is lots of lewd leering and chop-licking in this movie as it seems to be populated by amoral monsters with morbid, sadistic and/or prurient scopophilia. The rape scene is nothing but a string of these lecherous gazes as the black-shirted gang of "muchachos" violate poor (young) Ray Lovelock with their outrageously knowing eyes. What's really going on in the scene is implied so heavily that you can't really even say it's "implied." As everyone digs like savages into the roasted pig on the table, their threatening looks of longing tell us that chicken is definitely on the menu for later. The sexual looks aren't that different, though, from the ogling of the townspeople during the lingeringly photographed and edited mass lynchings earlier in the movie, or in any number of scenes where the characters seem to almost drool over the violence. Just check out the insert of the bald guy during the scalping scene.

Gold gets a satisfying workout here, both in the physical sense (notably as an instrument of death) and as a symbol. It's all in keeping with the gritty, grand guignol underworld journey - which was borrowed on heavily by Jum Jarmusch's 'Dead Man.' In this case, the road to Hell is paved with gold, and the filmmakers must have sat down and made a list of every depravity that could be done with and in the name of the sparkly stuff. (It is right in keeping that when faced with the probability that a grave will be violated in the name of greed, that it ends up being a whole cemetery of graves in an orgy of frantic digging.)

There are also numerous moments that predate a more experimental cinema that was just around the corner. The final moment of weirdness with the two little kids (and a number of other moments) could have been slipped in there by Goddard, and there is some pretty delirious editing here and there.

Most people probably will not like this. Western fans will hate it. People drawn by the grisly reputation the film has gained are likely to be disappointed. However, if you want something unique and off the wall, this is it. A sick little classic.

Here's hoping for a domestic release of Questi's highly regarded giallo 'Death Laid an Egg' in the near future.