Django Kill... If You Live Shoot! (1967)

aka: Se Sei Vivo Spara
Studio: Blue Underground
Theatrical Release: May 3rd, 1967
Blu-Ray Release: July 3rd, 2012
Rating: Unrated!
Directed by Giulio Questi
Review by Craig Sorensen

Blue Underground continues to re-release their back catalog of genre titles on Blu-Ray with Django Kill...If You Live, Shoot!  I’m assuming that the release of this (and A Bullet for the General) are timed to coincide with Quentin Tarantino’s new film Django Unchained (which WGN’s Dean Richards claims is a remake of the film Django directed by Sergio Leone).  Of course, now that Tarantino has ‘legitimized’ the genre everyone is all aflutter with Italian Westerns.  Or, at least Italian westerns outside of Leone’s celebrated collaborations with star Clint Eastwood.  I won’t lie to you, it does kind of bother me that it takes someone like Tarantino to tell people it’s OK to reevaluate things like this, but I don’t know if we would be getting Blu-Ray’s like this without the extra attention.

OK, so right off the bat, Django Kill... has no relation to Sergio Corbucci’s fantastic Django.  That film was such a big success that many completely unrelated films were retitled to try to cash in.  So, no relation.  Tomas Millian is the star here and he’s not even playing a character named Django.  But, don’t let that deter you, the film has plenty of strange stuff to recommend it on it’s own.  Yes, this is on the more surreal end of the genre.  After Millian is left for dead by the racist thieves that helped steal a cargo of gold from Union soldiers, Millian is nursed back to health by two Mexicans who find him amongst the dead bodies of the rest of the gang.  They craft a set of golden bullets and send him off to get revenge.  By the time he tracks them down however, they’ve been killed off by a town full of lunatics.  But, where has that stolen gold gone off too?  On his quest for gold Millian must contend with a demented preacher, a rotund gangster named Zorro and his gang of homosexual bandits and torture by bats.

Yeah, it can get pretty bizarre.  Which shouldn’t come as a surprise from director Giulio Questi, who a year later would make one of my favorite giallo’s “Death Laid An Egg” in which the main character runs a chicken farm and genetically engineers headless chickens.  Under another director the film could just become another run-of-the-mill spaghetti western.  Thankfully that’s not what we get here.  What makes the film so entertaining is the weirdness factor.  Questi is also able to squeeze out some pretty good performances from a fairly diverse cast.  Millian plays things pretty subdued (and against type) as the unnamed main character.  Roberto Camardiel is great as Zorro as well.

As expected, Blue Undergrounds new Blu-Ray looks pretty good.  I don’t have the previously issued standard definition version to compare this to but I would be surprised if this wasn’t an improvement in every way.  The transfer is a bit weird in that for the most part detail is great but every once in a while the image goes real soft.  Maybe this is just the way the film was shot?  I don’t know.  Otherwise I think this looks great.  Colors look true to what I imagine they would have looked like in theaters.  You get two audio tracks, the English dub and the original Italian, both in STS-HD mono.  And they both sound great to me.  While watching the English dub, expect the dialog to switch occasionally to Italian.  Some of the grislier bits were cut and never dubbed into English.  It’s not as jarring as it sounds.  Evidently the extras are carried over from the DVD.  You get a great, strange trailer; an image gallery containing posters and stills and a featurette called “Django, Tell!” containing interviews with Questi, Milian and Ray Lovelock.