Shanghai Joe (1973)

Ever wonder what it would be like if Bruce Lee came to America to fight Clint Eastwood in a Western movie? Of course not because it is a ridiculous idea. Ridiculous is the key with Shanghai Joe and while this film might not offer up the martial arts experience of Enter The Dragon or the stylish showdowns of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly it has enough camp value and off the wall mayhem to make for a very memorable cult film.

Shanghai Joe is a Kung Fu master who's greatest life ambition is to come to America and become a cowboy. I'm not one to piss on someone elses dreams but this seems like an awful idea and when Joe arrives in Texas it proves to be an awful idea.

As you would think the old west was probably not the most tolerant of places and times and when this Asian man shows up he is called just about every name in the book. Shanghai Joe is filled to its brim with racial slurs and various other forms of politically incorrect debauchery.

Basically what Joe learns upon his arrival is that Americans have no honor, no respect for others, no respect for human life. They cheat, steal and will find any way possible to stick a man from behind and try to fuck them over. Shanghai Joe does what he has to in order to survive and luckily for us this means being a bad-ass Kung Fu-ing son of a bitch. Shanghai Joe fights his way across Texas and along his way he will fight a cannibal, Klaus Kinski, a bull and various other gun-slinging tough guy types. As if Shanghai Joe doesn't already sound amazing, this one comes complete with lots of gore. We get the expected gun shot wounds but this one also offers up some eyeball gore, severed arms, a man is impaled on spikes, torsos are split open with bare fists and we even have some self surgery going on.

With all these insane shenanigans it is hard to even pick the most memorable scene. I would say its a toss up between the final showdown or the ridiculous fight between Shanghai Joe and a giant bull. Joe takes the giant bull out with a flying jump-kick to the achy-breaky skull. Watch this scene without laughing, I dare ya!

Shanghai Joe has to be one of the most insane Spaghetti Westerns in cinematic history. Gore galore, shoot-em-up chaos, martial arts and some very very bad acting.

If you are in the mood for a strange fistful of pasta check this one out! There is also a sequel to this which I am yet to see called The Return Of Shanghai Joe.

A Man Called Blade (1977)

Director Sergio Martino (Torso, Mountain Of The Cannibal God, Hands Of Steele) chops into the Spaghetti Western genre with the tale of a bounty hunter who's weapon of choice is a hatchet.

 "Those who know me call me Blade because I let this do the talking for me" Sure he uses pistols as well but he is a real bad-ass with his miniature axes. In the opening scene which is also the greatest scene in the movie Blade lobs off a mans hand and takes him prisoner. Later Blade sets him free and next time he appears he has a hook for a hand and  Blade burries another axe into his body, this time leaving him cold and dead. Hatchets are embedded into enemy's skulls, chests, backs and stomachs. In one scene our hero even beats the shit out of some big dogs with the hatchet. A Man Called Blade also offers up some social commentary on religious fascists and their moral laws, a massacre in a blackened cave (yes you guessed it, lots of Hatchet-Fu), a violent revolution between laborers with shovels and pick-axes against pistol wielding bandits, a slow motion shoot-em-up massacre (complete with squibs and a bit of gore), sharp twigs shoved into eye lids and a spike pushed into the throat, mud wrestling (between men), artsy-fartsy falling tree flashback scenes and a tale of vengeance.

A Man Called Blade is also the last wave of the Spaghetti Western and it borrows heavily from Enzo Castellari's Keoma which came out one year earlier and is a all around far superior film. The influence is so obvious with dozens of comparisons, right down to the music and general vibe that the film gives off but where Keoma comes off as a stylish. unique masterpiece, A Man Called Blade also known as Mannaja just comes off as a big ripoff. Another problem with this movie is that it runs slightly to long and it just seems to take for ever to wrap it up when it could have been done pretty easily. Still ripoffs can be a lot of fun and A Man Called Blade does have its gory moments. Check it out for some dismemberment and some violence in the mud but only secondly to the great Keoma.

Sukiyaki Western Django (2007)

Takashi Miike proves every time that he is a weirdo. This time around Miike tries his hand at a western but just doing a Japanese western isn't enough for Miike. Instead he chooses to do his own version of the Franco Nero, cult classic, spaghetti western, Django.

The movie was shot in Japan with an all Japanese cast with the exception of Quentin Tarantino. As if this isn't weird enough Takashi Miike chooses to shoot the film in English instead of dubbing over it later. The obvious language problem amongst the Japanese cast just adds to the bizarre tone that Sukiyaki Western Django gives off. Similar to the way that dubbing in Italian horror of the 70's and 80's added a sureal vibe that doesn't exist in the subtitled versions.

Sukiyaki plays more like a prequel to Django then a remake and Miike's stylish form of film making really takes the film further away then anyone could have imagined.

A mysterious gunslinger comes to town in the search of gold but this time he isn't dragging a coffin (that comes later). He is not so humbly greeted by two rival gangs, the Reds and the Whites. Both gangs are in search of the gold and are constantly at war. When our gunslinger doesn't choose sides the odds are stacked against him and we get a total shoot-em-up blood bath. We get a new version of the oh so memorable Gatling gun massacre which really doesn't live up to the Italian original. We get lingerie wearing Asian prostitute (unfortunately no nudity), plenty of gun-fu, some samurai action, crossbow-fu, rape, and a bad-ass bitch who pisses while standing up. holes are blown through stomachs, gang members are blown to shit with dynamite, we get some split skulls with swords, and a man is implaled with a giant crucifix. The best part is that its all done with bright red gore.

Check it out for a fast paced, action packed, mindless good time with bright colors and some very stylized murder scenes. Some call it stupid, some call it art, but I call it fun.

For A Few Dollars More (1965)

This is Sergio Leone's follow up to A Fist Full Of Dollars and a very good one at that. For me this is the weakest in the trilogy but only because I feel it gets a bit slow at times. It still has that Leone style that revolutionized westerns forever.
Clint Eastwood is back as the man with no name and this time he crosses paths with Lee Van Cleef. Eastwood and Cleef both play bounty hunters and they are both after the same man. The man they are hunting is a vicious criminal named Indio and there is a 10,000 dollar reward on his head. Eastwood and Cleef butt heads at first and they have one of all my all time favorite duels in any western. Its a hat shooting duel where they shoot the hell out of each others hats and send them flying through the desert air. I know this doesn't sound like a very entertaining scene but when Sergio Leone is director and you have Ennio Morricone's music playing over it, it really makes for a great piece of cinema. Once the two bounty hunters hats are full of holes and they both realize how dangerous the other is they choose to team up and take on Indio and his gang together.
We get a fair amount of shoot-em-up gun violence in this one but I personally feel the shoot outs in the first flick are slightly more entertaining. Klaus Kinski also appears in this one as a hunchback in Idio's gang of bandits. The final showdown is an excellent set-piece and will later be mastered in the third film in the trilogy The Good, The Bad And The Ugly. Unfortunately nobody laughs at Clint Eastwood's mule in this one but its still an amazing flick from the king of spaghetti westerns.

Cut-Throats Nine (1972)

Cut-Throats Nine is my personal all time favorite western. It is often referred to as a spaghetti western which really isn't accurate because its not Italian. Cut-Throats Nine came out of Spain and it doesn't even look like a western. First off almost the whole movie takes place in the snow, up in the mountains. This just adds to the bleakness to one of the nastiest, violent, nihilistic westerns ever made.
The Cut-Throats Nine is a group of criminals on a chain gang who are being transported to a new prison by a man named Sargent Brown and his daughter Sarah. Sgt. Brown loses his horses and the carriage when a group of bandits attempt to rob him. Now Sgt. Brown along with his daughter are trapped in the middle of nowhere with minimal food and water and a group of murderers and rapists all chained together by the feet. The only thing keeping the Sgt. and his daughter safe from the blood thirsty chain gang is his pistol.
Its not long before the Cut-Throats find out that the chain that binds them together is made of gold. From here on the movie gets more violent and nihilistic. These men are Cut-Throats in every sense of the word. There is no morals here, no remorse and its everyman for himself. If one member of the chain gang breaks his leg the others will happily kill him. There is one scene in the movie where a member of the chain gang is strangled and when none of the Cut-Throats will confess to Sgt. Brown the Sgt. forces the gang to take turns carrying the corpse. While the Sgt. Sleeps the Cut-Throats throw the corpse in the fire and the body is severely charred and burned up. Its a pretty gross scene but the point isn't the gore. The point is the how savage these men are. They burned the corpse so the Sgt. would have no choice but to chop the leg off of the stinking, burned up rotten corpse. True Cut-Throats only care for themselves and this movie shows that in great detail.
Cut-Throats Nine is one of those movies that manages to stay miserable all the way through. There is no happy ending here and you never really expect one either. Every character appears to be doomed in their own way and the ending proves that they are. We have gory gun shots to the face with blood spurting from an eyeball , a machete to the leg, we have the charred corpse BBQ, intestines spill out with a knife to the guts, there are hangings, a rape scene, explosions, horses falling down snowy mountains, strangulation's, a woman has her brains blown out with a shot to the head. The violence seems to go on and on in this one.
Cut-Throats Nine is actually the movie that made me realize I liked westerns. It wasn't Django or The Good The Bad And The Ugly. This one opened me up for a whole genre that I thought was relatively boring. This one is more for the horror fanatic. Check it out!

A Fistful Of Dynamite (1971)

A Fistful Of Dynamite a.k.a. Duck, You Sucker is one from the great, king of Spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Leone. This one came out three films after A Fistful Of Dollars (the one that would change westerns forever). Although not as good as the original trilogy or Once Upon A Time In The West, Dynamite is obviously a Leone film (which means its good). I feel that this one lacks a bit on the artistic visuals that made his previous films so cool but none the less its still a good fun movie. One of my favorite moments is right in the beginning where a group of rich upper class scum sit on a train and fill their filthy greedy Mouths with food while they degrade a Mexican peasant and spew their political, class war race hate out freely along with the mashed potatoes and what ever other filth they are shoving into their faces. The thing that makes this scene work so well is the camera work and the close up shots of these food stuffed mouths. The film does have some political statements to make like the one I just mentioned. Its the tale of a Irish revolutionary strapped with dynamite who joins forces with a Mexican bandit. Together they start the "Mexican revolution" and blow the hell out of everything from banks to anyone who wears a uniform. So if you like explosions or westerns or especially Sergio Leone you should see this movie, Just don't expect The Good The Bad And The Ugly.

Django, Kill (If You Live, Shoot) (1967)

Another Spaghetti Western to cash in on the far superior Franco Nero title Django. This one is a bit confusing because the plot is kind of all over the place. Over all its a very disjointed film and things seem to happen for no reason. Django Kill is definitely a movie from mars. Although confusing at times the story is strange as hell. It follows a half white, half Spanish bandit who is double crossed by his gang, robbed of his gold and left for dead with a bullet inside him in the desert heat. He is brought back to health by some generous Indians and he plots out his revenge with a pistol full of solid gold bullets. There is probably some kind of statement being made here and I don't really care what it is because by the time he acts out his vengeance and fills the bastards who fucked him over with gold, there is a whole new outfit of bad guys. This is where the movie gets really weird! These guys are a gang of homosexuals led by a ruthless gay bandit named Zorro, but this Zorro doesn't cut little Z's into the ass of your pants. Nope, This one kidnaps teenage boys and gang rapes him. Of course our anti-hero doesn't approve of this kind of thing and goes to war with the all black wearing, queer gang of bandits. For me Django, Kill is just a  Spaghetti Western but the overall strangeness and trashy story that it gives adds on viewing points. Some of the other highlights in the film is a really cool scene where one of the gay bandits is burned alive. We also have an exploding horse strapped with dynamite. Then we have a alcoholic Parrot who requests booze and in a drunken stupor mocks the bad guys and tells them that death is on its way. Quote of the movie is in a birds voice "I need a drink!" If not for anything else Django, Kill (If You Live Shoot) is worth watching for that one scene.