Customer Reviews

Django Kill... If You Live, Shoot

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I will give technical specs on this DVD below, plus info on a few hidden extras (thanks, Blue Underground). I purchased this as part of the "Spaghetti Western Collection" and am reviewing this to give added detail to the generic review of the collection.

I couldn't justify a 2 star or 4 star rating because the lack of quality on the dubbing really dragged this movie across the same parched desert that almost killed Milian's character. But Blue Underground has been doing some fabulous work to keep the lesser- known movies from going into total obscurity, and actually, I'm glad they kept "If You Live, Shoot!" IYLS is also called, "Django Kill," which was only named that way because the distributors wanted to ride the coattails of the previous successes of "Django." However, IYLS has NOTHING to do with Django. At all.

Yet I liked this movie. I've actually watched this more than the "Django" DVD I also have. There's something about the structure of the movie's dark nature that intrigues me. The one scene I suggest you watch is when the bandits first enter the town. I am still floored by it, especially with the music that accompanies the scene. It can be quite shocking to many people, so be forewarned. If you are easily shocked, I suggest you read the slight spoiler in the following graph. If you have a tough side but don't like spoilers, it's your option to read or not to, but I suggest you skip the slight spoiler.

*****VERY SLIGHT SPOILER***** Skip graph, it's a spoiler nonetheless.... The scene starts when the group enters the bizarre town after a rough travel through a desert. A naked child stands with his back to the camera, obviously urinating. A little girl pulls the hair of a boy, and in the English version is heard saying, "Give up. Give up." Play it with the Italian track to discover that she is actually spitting in the boy's face 3 times. Also, a relative pins a young girl to the porch using his boots as she pleads for him to let her go. That whole scene, up to the point where the group reaches the tavern blew me away. It didn't help either when townspeople discovered gold in an injured man's body and used their bare hands to dig them out. ***End of spoilers***

The English dubbing made for the movie pulled it down. Try using the Italian track with English subtitles, it sounds more realistic. Milian's own voice should have been used, but for whatever reason, a more English- sounding voice was used. The two Indians... "With gold- made bullets...." And that singer at the saloon.... blech... I argued over a two- star rating, but there are plenty of macaroni flicks that deserve that. This is 2-1/2 stars, plus 5 stars for the transfer from the print and the care that is involved in making a Blue Underground DVD.

I would get the 4- boxed set, and might buy this movie again if I needed. Why? Because I love the spaghetti western genre and it's slim pickings in the category. I only have about 12 titles or so, and after these, it gets hard to find any more decent ones out there of all the (possibly?) hundreds that were made from the '60s through the late '70s. I would get it again. But for the regular movie buff, you might use your money of "Run Man Run" "The Great Silence" or "Companeros" instead. But purchase the Sergio Leone macaroni first, for they are the benchmarks of the European Westerns.

Technical info: Color in mono sound at 2.35:1 aspect ratio only; 117 minutes; English and Italian languages (mono); English subtitles only; extras include interviews with director Guilio Questi, Milian, and Ray Lovelock; original theatrical tralier; gallery of production stills and movie posters; a two- page insert with detail on the movie and chapter selections; PLUS...three HIDDEN videos! Maybe they're called "Easter eggs," which is fun to find. I hadn't noticed them until just now. They are located when you drag the mouse over the clenched hand (it turns pale) and also there are two pale gun icons that appear on the "Languages" and "Extras" pages which reveal hidden interviews. For those who use the DVD player, follow these instructions: On the Main Title page, go to Chapters and push the arrow key right to illuminate the hand. Press enter. On the Extras page, go to the Main Menu and go LEFT to reveal the gun, and hit enter. On the languages page, go to Resume and go UP to reveal the gun, then hit enter. Cool!

This review refers to "Django Kill...If You Live Shoot"(DVD edition by Blue Underground)....

This is a Spaghetti Western like no other. It's not your usual brand where you will find some comic relief among all the action. This one is pure in your face gruesome violence and perverse characters. It is however, a well made film that will keep you involved throughout this tale of evil vs. evil. No good guys here...aside from a couple of well meaning Indians and a woman declared insane by her husband, everyone is bad to the bone. Sound like your kind of movie?...Here's the story...

A gold thief(Tomas Milian), left for dead by his partners and found by two Indians who nuture him back to life,is out for revenge. Upon his arrival in the town called very appropiatley "The Unhappy Place", he finds the gang has already been here, only to meet with a horrible fate, as the towns people here it seems, are even more evil than the gold thieves themselves.As one of the thieves puts it.."Even God would not stay here." Two of the town's important men, have retrieved the stolen gold and will stop at nothing,even sacrificing members of their own families to a gang of depraved thugs, to keep all the loot for themselves. Milian, who may be classifed as an anti-hero of sorts, tries to stop these savages, putting himself in danger as well.It's every man for himself in this dark and graphic look at greed.

The ending is a shocker. It was at times almost like watching some old horror film and I was expecting Vincent Price to appear at any time.

I was amazed at how good this transfer to DVD by Blue Underground was. It's the original uncut version, in wonderful widescreen and had a nice clear picture with good color. The film may be viewed in the original Italian soundtrack(go to languages, or it will automatically default to English),with or without English subtitles. The sound is in DD Mono, but sounds pretty good. There are a few scenes in English(e.g. a barmaid is singing), that are very poorly dubbed, but won't divert from this shocker of a story. Extras include interviews with the director and stars, and a Still Gallery.

If you're looking for something along the lines of say... Peckinpah meets Poe...I would recommend "Django Kill"...

Get the popcorn ready and enjoy...Laurie

Django Kill! is one of the most violent and contreversial spaghetti westerns ever made. Before this Blue Underground release, it was almost impossible to find an uncut version of this film. The DVD is well worth it. Django Kill! tells the story of a Stranger double-crossed by his fellow bandits and then tries to get his revenge. Tomas Milian stars as the stranger in one of the best title characters in the spaghetti western genre. The interviews with Milian, Giulio Gesti, and Ray Lovelock are very interesting since they deal with some of the more controversial scenes in the movie. The trailer is disappointing with the music playing behind the title being shown. In the movie, the violence is truly disturbing including the famous gold-digging in a man's chest and the scalping of one of Milian's partners. One of the best spaghetti westerns ever made with an odd sort of Gothic feel to it. Well worth the price!

I found myself enjoying this movie quite a bit. I'm a sucker for spaghetti westerns of all quality. This one is actually a good film made a bit silly by some poor dubbing. Naturally, it's not up to a Leone level, but it's a bit above alot of the lesser known westerns to come out of Italy. The title is a lame attempt to make this look like a sequel to Django, but it's it's own film. Tomas Milian get doublecrossed out of his gold(It's always about the gold in these films) and left for dead, but soon he's up and running again and pissed! He wants a supersized order of revenge more than he wants his gold. In fact, he seems to lose his interest in the gold, though he gets all tangled up in this mess with the townspeople who are all trying to get their mitts on it. Milian never once says, "Hey folks, this friggin' gold you're fighting over is mine, thank you!" His quest for the doublecrossing bandits leads him to the "Unhappy Place" where adults stomp on kids, undertakers have dry heaves and crazy wives bite their husbands. This town makes quick work of the outlaws before Milian gets there, but once he does he gets tangled up in all sorts of crap, playing all sides kinda like Eastwood in Fistful Of Dollars. While in "The Unhappy Place", Milian gets drunk, gets tortured with stock footage of bats and lizards, blows up a horse with dynamite, sleeps with a crazy woman who sets herself on fire, shoots a guy and admires himself in a mirror, and finally gets away without a penny to his name. A fun movie with a few artsy touches. Two scenes are in Italian coz they weren't dubbed-these are the two bloody scenes. Milian does a rather good job as "The Stranger. He looks alot like C. Thomas Howell. Maybe not quite as badazz as Franco Nero's Django, but he's got a bit more depth. It's actually kinda cool to see a "hero" as being half Mexican, which you don't see alot in westerns. Recommended.

Mark Schusheim was scintillating as the sadistic bald-headed townsperson with a heart of gold in his tough,but sensitive, portrayal of a cad, kicking a dog and rubbing his own shiny head in glee after the scalping of an Indian (nee gypsy), a newly crowned baldie. I particluarly noted the genius of the layered reading of his line, "Gold", rivaling Brando and Dean, though not necessarily in that order.

He was lean. He was mean, with a diasthema to rival Alfred E. Newman and the body of a street tough. For all you Schusheim fans, this is one for your collection: a don't-miss experience!

I agree with the review by L. Tyler. This movie is a piece of trash. The idea is interesting. Is the hero alive or dead? Are we in fact seeing his journey through hell in the form of a Gothic half-western/half-horror film? But the movie we actually see on the screen is an amateurish mess. It trips and stumbles its way from one badly-acted scene to the next. Django Kill is like a parody of some of the lesser of the Italian westerns and, really, the bad ones don't need a parody. I've never before watched a movie that has two scenes accidentally edited out of sequence but Django Kill nonetheless achieves this distinction: watch carefully for this particular gem around the time the Stranger reveals the location of the gold to Zorro's men. The hedonism dripping through this film seems less like art and more (perhaps) like a two-hour fetish session for the director, Giulio Questi. The DVD's extra features include an interview with Questi. He seems utterly unaware of how embarrassing this film is. Questi is a man who is apparently very comfortable in his own shallowness and ineptitude. I love Italian westerns, and I own many of them and, like other reviewers here, I cannot believe that Django Kill is included in some people's lists of the best. It should in fact be near the top of anyone's list of the worst. And, really, for this movie to be added to any list at all is probably more than it deserves.

If youve seen many Spaghetti Westerns you know well how off-beat they can be, but if you havent seen this one, you havent seen the strangest. And before you read any further you should know that the character Django originally played by Franco Nero in the classic of the same name does not make an appearance here; "Django" was tacked onto the title to make more money by the ditributors.

I wont give away much of what what happens in the picture; it starts out with a standard enough opening sequence and a gold-driven plot typical for the genre. After that, it descends into the surreal and violent, which isnt a bad thing if you are ready for it or enjoy midnight movies such as El Topo. If youre looking for a straight-forward western; you'll hate it. Almost all the characters are cruel or at the least without a moral compass, so if you like your westerns with a definite good-guy, look elsewhere (if you are a fan of Italian Westerns this probably isnt an issue). Even seasoned Spaghetti fans should be prepared though for the stangesness and cruelty that ensues in this movie. It is not as gory as Django, but it's themes are at times a bit more sinister, even leaning towards those usually associated with horror movies. In fact, this movie can almost be considered a horror-western.

Tomas Milian is great in this, looking a good deal like Han Solo (no kidding!). Fans of his work in the Sergio Sollima western Run, Man, Run! will enjoy seeing another strong performance sprinkled with toungue-in-cheek humor here.

The presentation is great; a nice widescreen print with restored deleted scenes in Italian with English subtitles. Blue Underground knows how to put a nice package together.

I love Blue Underground. These films are a 100% riot to watch, not that they're funny or poor quality, just that it's so awesome that someone out there is going through the trouble to get these movies to the fans that truly appreciate them.

Now, "Django Kill" has nothing to do with the famous movie "Django" starring Franco Nero as the coffin-hauling hero. Any quick Google search about Italian cinema will reveal that when a film like this gained particular success, dozens of other movie studios jumped on that bandwagon and made sequels. Intellectual Property? Not a problem in the time of the Spaghetti western. The only reason "Django" appears in the title of this movie is to draw in the unsuspecting audience and cash in on the name brand. History lesson over.

This movie, also titled "If You Live, Shoot!" features Tomas Milan as the unnamed hero who is betrayed by his group of bandit buddies after a gold heist and left to die in the desert. Barely alive, he crawls out of his open grave and ends up in a town called "The Unhappy Place" where he finds his betrayers already dead by the hands of the townsfolk and a bizarre journey begins.

This is one of those legendary "banned" movies that was said to be so graphic in its perversion and violence that everyone got all up in arms about it. By today's standard the violence and gore is tame and follows the same conventions of most exploitation flicks of its day, but the truly disturbing thing about Django Kill is how strange it is.

The story of Clint Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter" is a good allegory to the plot of Django Kill, up to a point. In both movies a mysterious stranger arrives in town to dispense justice on those who have wronged him. The difference is this:

In "Drifter" the hero is amoral, driven, and utterly invincible. It is one of the few examples of western cinema where the hero doesn't undergo some sort of trial by fire (eg. getting beaten up). The stranger arrives, rallies the town to his cause, and delivers his revenge with brutal efficiency. Indeed, in the end it is revealed that the Stranger was at one time the town's marshal who was brutally murdered by a band of outlaws. He no less than rose from the dead to exact his revenge.

In "Django Kill" the hero arrives in town to find his prey already dead and then he ... does nothing. By no real fault of his own this stranger ends up in the middle of a town feud, is captured several times, and just sort of drifts along with the action. The town itself is the real star of the show as its myriad of strange inhabitants drive what could be considered the film's plot. "The Unhappy Place" is home to a collection of wretches who, among other things, use their children as footstools, publicly urinate wherever they please, lock their spouses away from the world because that's how they get their jollies, and subject themselves to the perversions of a man named Zorro who is served by a band of black-clad homosexuals.

If this movie hasn't intrigued or offended you yet, there's something wrong.

To be perfectly fair, I didn't follow Django Kill very well on my first viewing. It may take one or two showings for you to really understand what's going on as well. The film tends to drift from one scene to the next sometimes without the aid of fluid connectivity. Newton's laws don't apply to this film. Sometimes there is an action with no obvious reaction or consequence. Sometimes nothing happens at all. Sometimes the stranger is captured, tied to a crucifix, and then left at the mercy of a horde of bats. What a strange torture ... of course, the whole movie is strange.

If you're looking for a coherent film, you won't find it here. To some movies that is a detriment, bu to Django Kill it is one of its most enduring traits. The simple fact that nothing really make sense and that the hero you should be rooting for is by in large a very passive presence makes it all the more interesting. Double unfortunately ... I'm kind of double talking myself here ... I found that to be kind of tiresome. The "violent" scenes which include a scalping and a group of townspeople who literally tear apart a wounded man to get at the gold bullets that killed him are kind of corny, but that's sort of the point.

I'm not a huge fan of this movie, but I'll give it credit where it's due. The biggest problem I had watching "Django Kill" was I was left with a severe lack of fulfillment. I'm not watching spaghetti westerns to emphasize with the characters, but it's one of those movies where you invest your interest and it never really pays off. The person you should be rooting for doesn't really do anything deserving of your attention. The final few scenes don't even involve him that much. It is to my memory one of the only westerns I've seen where the hero doesn't fire his gun. He might, once or twice, but that's about it. There really isn't the requisite showdown between hero and villain and in the end you're sort of left wondering what just happened.

The DVD itself is presented well. You can only do so much with these old movies, but Blue Underground gets the job done. If you want a slightly more cohesive experience, watch the film with the Italian audio track and deal with the subtitles. The English dub is laughable at times and certain aspects of the movie make more sense in Italian. There are a few extras including trailers and an interview with director Giulio Questi and stars Tomas Milan and Ray Lovelock.

Are you going to enjoy "Django Kill?" I don't know, maybe? It deserves a viewing for fans of the genre at least to say that you did it. It is one of the more memorable entries in a sadly underrepresented genre of film making. Hopefully the guys at Blue Underground can do some more digging and resurrect a few dozen more of these classics.

I'd heard about DJANGO KILL for a couple years before actually bought the DVD. Unfortunately, I got information about the movie second hand. I thought the movie had to do with zombies. There weren't any zombies, sadly, but there was a guy who came back from the grave for vengeance. That was one of the recurrent themes in the Clint Eastwood movies as well as several other western films.

The star of the movie is Tomas Milian. He made several of the Western movies before moving into the crime arena as a series of villains and renegade cops working outside the rules like Bruce Willis. He's still active in television and movies today while he's in his seventies.

DJANGO KILL is supposed to be one of the bloodiest westerns ever filmed at the time, in the late 1960s. In fact, the disc contains scenes that had been cut out in the film release. Of course, this is before Sam Peckinpah left his indelible mark on the Western movie with classics like THE WILD BUNCH and PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID. But only by a few years.

The movie really isn't much different than any of Eastwood's Man With No Name Westerns. Except that there's no humor or comic relief in the constant sea of shifting loyalties that takes place in this film.

Most of the so-called spaghetti westerns end up with a tough-as-nails hero who is selfishly motivated but finishes up serving some greater good by the end of the movie. Normally he is caught in a crossfire between two rival gangs, neither of which is truly better than the other.

That occurs in this film. After being shot and buried alive, Django (the stranger) rides into town seeking the people who killed his friends and tried to murder him. By the time he arrives, those bad guys have already been dealt with by the town. As it turns out, the town is filled with people that are evil and malicious.

For whatever weird reason, the two Indians that help save Django make bullets of gold for him to use on his enemies. It almost sounded too much like the Lone Ranger for me.

Then the plot gets really strangely twisted. Two of the most powerful men in town divide the gold the original outlaws brought with them. A third powerful man finds out about the gold and wants it. He's willing to kill whoever it takes to achieve his goal.

For the rest of the movie, Django bounces back and forth between the three rivals, between two women - one a gold digger and the other a madwoman, and the town itself. The body count increases dramatically.

I can't really recommend this movie. There's nothing here that you haven't seen before, and probably better elsewhere, if you've seen spaghetti westerns. All of Clint Eastwood's efforts were better in my book. But if you love that kind of entertainment, DJANGO KILL will certainly fill a couple of hours for you.

I bought this film recommended highly in guide but the guide should be if it does not have many reviews its not well k.own enough outside the genre which must be weird for western fans to hear hard core wild-west bandits raving in stylish Italian.Or go with the chipmunk-voiced dubbing in American.
NO its not violent or sadistic.Take the bullet grabbing scramble from the man's innards-red paint gushed out and this was undoutable as blood is not orange-scarlet and its texture was al wrong.Likewise when striped over ttthe men being hanged which was also unrealistic but credit is due as even to this day hanged men look asleep when in fact a nasty death where the eyes bulge and the tongue goes black.It was real science to get the neck to snap so they only looked asleep.Its not to do with being dated made I 967 either since Hitchcock's "Psycho" from 1960 was undoutable blood in1960 even in black and white.
More a question of stylish Italian than a surreal grateful sexual fantasy by the men-where did that singing broad come from if not imported from a European caberet from lots of money.I mean does that town look like it had a hair-dressers? And the supposed intro shot into town looked too staged to be real. Although the 1st shot of the naked kid was shocking. But more due to bad fiming I suspect.They say he was pee-Inge but hard as I looked I couldn't see any sign of a fountain so he must have been waggling down there for another purpose.
maybe it was the Italian,the director who was dated and to cautious about how far to go when Uk and Usa were way ahead. Even italien Tv is painfully to watch and worse to hear these days as the culture isdirected away from drama or even taste in music arewhy especially in north of Italy.