Django Strikes Again (1987)
The story goes (according to the two minute interview on this disc) that Franco Nero and his good buddy Nello Rossati were in Columbia shooting Alien Terminator together when they decided they should do a sequel to his classic spaghetti western Django. This must have come as a surprise to Sergio Corbucci, who made the original and wasn't invited to join in their reindeer games, but who am I to begrudge Franco the chance to cash in on the name of Django when every single other person in the Italian film industry had already done so years ago?
So how do you go about filming a spaghetti western in the jungles of Columbia? Well, you don't! I'm not sure who this leathery old guy straining to carry the machine gun is in this movie, but he sure isn't the cool, stoic gunslinger that had his hands all mashed up at the end of Django. Sure, he's called Django (uh, except for when he's undercover as Brother Ignatius, but more on that later) and he's played by the same guy that shot wounded people as they lay bleeding to death back in 1966, but this Django has somehow morphed into one of those jungle super heroes/avengers like Indio or someone. You know the type - he runs around saving women and works with the church, all the while plotting to destroy the evil white guy that's invariably behind all the raping and pillaging that's bothering him.
When I found out that Nello also co-wrote this tumorous mass, I began to have this vision of he and Franco sitting at some Columbian resort in between Alien Terminator takes plotting out this movie. Franco was probably sipping on a blue drink with one of those little umbrellas in it while Nello walked around with a pad of paper and pen and said stuff like, "okay, Django is retired and is becoming a priest since he has had enough of the violence and death in his life, but just when he thinks he's out of the biz, they pull him back in! See, he has a daughter and the mother has been killed and the little girl has been kidnapped by slavers on a really big, powerful gunship. Django comes out of retirement to rescue her, free the slaves, and save the tribe!"
All the while Nello is pitching these ridiculous ideas, Franco is sipping his drink and nodding, wishing that he had learned English well enough so that his career wouldn't have peaked when he had an affair with Vanessa Redgrave while they were filming Camelot way back in 1967. Little did he know that Django Strikes Back wouldn't necessarily be his professional low point, since he had not yet appeared in Megiddo: The Omega Code 2. (I felt like I should send Franco money or be a sponsor like on those commercials with all those dirty kids - "for just the price of a cup of coffee each day, you can keep Franco Nero from embarrassing himself in Christian movies! Michael York also needs your assistance immediately!")
I felt a strange sense of Italian calm wash over me though when I saw the name of Christopher Connelly come up as one of Franco's co-stars. Chris got blinded by purple laser beams in Lucio Fulci's Egyptian possession movie Manhattan Baby , played Hot Dog in Bronx Warriors, and also starred in Jungle Raiders, Raiders Of Atlantis, Cobra Mission, and Strike Commando! Heck, he even was in The Martian Chronicles! Surely, if anyone could save this disaster, it would be Chris!
Sadly, that would not be the case. I know that correlation doesn't equal cause in these sorts of things, but I will tell you that Django Strikes Again was the last movie listed as having been made by Connelly before he ended it all with cancer. During his two minute interview, Franco is the consummate gentleman bemoaning the loss of both Connelly and William Berger who was also in the film - he probably bemoaned ever having met Nello, but I assume that was cut because the interview would have almost been four minutes then.
Dead guy Donald Pleasance is also in this movie (Is it too early to start talking about a curse?) though he doesn't have a big part in things. Considering that this is only one of eleven different movie and TV projects he was credited as having been in during 1987 (God, did he have loan sharks after him or something?) you can understand that he was pretty beat most of the time. With these old and dying guys in the movie, it's no wonder they had to shoot it in Columbia. They weren't going to get insurance anywhere else.
So, Django has retired to some jungle monastery and is working on becoming a monk or something, which means that he wears white robes and his hair is curly and stuff. Later when he drops the Brother Ignatius gimmick, he acquires a dark woolen bandito outfit, his hair gets slicked back and tied up in a Steven Seagal pony tail and he runs around with his Chuck Norris beard shooting people from a funeral carriage with his machine gun.
Django talks a little more than he used to and just to show you how completely they botch things here, he even acquires a little moppet sidekick that gets him out of tough spots. That's pretty suspect to be sure, but in one scene he even diagnoses a slave who's been injured as having a broken ankle! Is he doing his residency at that monastery or what?
Chris Connelly plays a guy named Orlowsky who is some type of military guy that has a bunch of men in his little army chug up and down the river in their really snazzy steamship. He's the kind of guy who is fond of dressing up in these really ornate white uniforms with lots of gold braids and has a scantily clad black woman as his slave/mistress/whip-wielding overseer. He also has a really bitchin' butterfly collection!
It's the old "bad guy with a sissy hobby" routine and his collection is almost complete. All he needs is the rare (and probably mythical) mariposa something or other - it's a really big black butterfly and somehow Donald Pleasance was supposed to find it for him, but didn't which is why he's enslaved with the natives. (For another dopey movie that hinges on the search for a fancy butterfly see The Perils of Gwendoline.)
When he's not sticking pins in bugs, Orlowsky is taking little kids prisoner to work at a brothel somewhere up the river. One of these little brats is Django's daughter, so he takes a leave of absence from the monastery to whup ass. Django must be a bit rusty because he gets caught and enslaved, but then Donald helps him escape in a barrel. The next thing we see is Django digging up his own grave! All real Django fans know that's where he keeps his machine gun !
Your gag reflex gets a workout when he starts talking to the machine gun, like he was Robert Duvall chatting up Tom Cruise's stock car in Days Of Thunder. He is still sort of Django though, so he keeps the chit chat to a minimum and he goes off to shoot some people. Then he picks up his junior partner (his sister was kidnapped or his family was killed or he won the essay contest or something), gets into his funeral carriage and starts cruising around the jungle looking for trouble.
The remainder of this very long movie (thanks for restoring the pointless 5 1/2 minute prologue - this movie didn't already move like a middle-aged monk lugging a machine gun around through the jungle) is generally Django wandering around, getting leads on where his daughter is. There's some very bad action scenes where Django does stuff like putting his little eight year old friend in charge of the machine gun while he scouts out the brothel. ("Uh, I'll be back in about twenty minutes. If you hear me screaming, just ignore it.")
Eventually Django gets recaptured and is sort of helped out by Orlowsky's slave who is peeved that Orlowsky has taken a new woman. That's a subplot that shows you what's wrong with this movie. The movie is supposed to be about Django and his run-of-the-mill quest for revenge. We've accepted the fact that this will not be a stylistic western that uses the genre to show us the wasteland of men's souls, but why would you ever think anyone would care anything about Orlowsky or his private life? Isn't it enough that we have to share his crappy butterfly hobby?
The last part of the movie is something straight out of Rambo or Missing In Action with Django blowing up the slave camp over and over and over. The highlight is watching Donald Pleasance pull a lit piece of dynamite out of his pants!
A totally nauseating experience that normally could be written off as just another cheap rip-off of a superior film, but the participation of the original Django himself makes it all the more reprehensible. I hope that the scowl Franco wore throughout the film was because he realized what he was involved with, but it was probably just the smell from his clothes.