While Django was admittedly the more colorful and fun character (what’s more fun than a guy dragging around a machine gun in a coffin?), the two main characters, Silence and Loco, make for an overall better movie because of the dynamic between the characters where it’s not clear who’s good and who’s evil.

Loco later leaves no doubt he’s a piece of trash, but for a while, Silence’s modus operandi wasn’t exactly the classic western anti-hero gimmick you would expect.

Silence (Jean-Louis Trintignant) is a mute and while he’s shacked up with the widow of a guy whose death he’s supposed to be avenging, a flashback to his secret origin is triggered when he stares mournfully into a flickering candle. The young Silence witnessed the murder of his parents and had his vocal cords cut by the evil general store owner who was in on the killings.

Klaus Kinski plays the bounty killer named Loco and if he isn’t really crazy, then he at least looks the part, being the only blonde guy in the movie with big puffy lips, angular features and these saucer-sized blue eyes.

Silence is riding through the area (the snowy Spanish Pyrenees substituting for Utah) and gets involved when he shoots the thumbs off of some bounty killers and kills some others. Silence only kills in self-defense though which makes him this ultra good guy, right?

Sure, except it becomes apparent that his ideals regarding killing involve him actually trying to provoke people into trying to shoot him, so that he has an excuse to blast them!

The evil shop keeper wants Loco to kill Silence, but Loco refuses because there isn’t an official bounty out on Silence. This doesn’t mean that Loco is averse to getting into a bar fight with him though.

Loco may look crazy, but it turns out that he’s crazy like a fox! He knows that Silence is going to try and get him to lose his temper so that Silence has an excuse to shoot him, but Loco is determined to keep his cool.

It’s made a bit difficult for him when Silence stands in the bar and throws a match in Loco’s shot glass and then chucks a whole cigar into it. Loco must be a non-smoker because he has someone else hold his gun and instead of killing Silence, he kicks him in the head and starts to just beat his ass all over the bar!

Silence whacks Loco in the face with a nice chunk of firewood and looks like he’s going to get his chance to shoot Loco when Loco goes for his gun, but the sheriff interferes and hauls Loco off to jail.

Loco escapes though an ingenious plan that involves him having to take a dump, hooks up with his cronies and captures all the bandits and holds them hostage in the saloon until Silence shows up.

Corbucci distinguishes himself here with his stunning use of the snowscapes and with both Silence and Loco decked out in nearly identical black get-ups they look like a pair of undertakers stalking one another across some kind of frozen hell, determined to play out their little revenge drama even as the world that gave birth to them begins to disappear.

While Silence is clearly the good guy and Loco the villain, Corbucci still draws them with a little more depth than you would expect from your typical “quiet drifter/psycho killer” combo and makes the film that much more intriguing, leaving us to puzzle out what he was trying to tell us with the way things turned out.

Throw in the fact that Silence even managed to squeeze in an interracial affair during all this horsing around and this really stands out as the un-western of its era. Corbucci takes the genre that he pretty much pioneered, holds a slightly twisted mirror up to it and produces something that surpasses his classic Django and stands on its own, not just as a great western, but a great film. And if you don’t care about great films, you still get to see thumbs shot off!

© 2009 MonsterHunter

The morning after sheep herder Eddie had visions about sheep, Professor Clemens and his easy hippie assistant, Mariposa, show up at Eddie’s sheep farm to check on him. They find him hiding under a bunch of hay next to a gigantic sheep embryo.

Clemens immediately pulls out his mutant-sized portable tape recorder and starts babbling about what a gigantic embryo he’s found and how important it is. They load it up (it just looks like a really big, bloody, malformed cow pie) in the specially designed incubator he carries around in the bed of his pickup for just such occasions and head back to the Indian Flats Research Center.

At the lab, Clemens continues his diatribe about various gases and giant sheep and the movie frequently cuts back to him so that he can dole out more information about the area and why there’s a giant sheep embryo in his lab. He talks about how miners used to speak about a strange and terrible prehistoric beast that roamed deep in the mines and that it was most likely bunk except for the strange fossils that Clemens has found.

He takes Mariposa deep into one of the mines and all this nasty orange gas comes out and chokes her out. Clemens rescues her and once they are up to the surface, he continues explaining about how all this gas down there must have been from the dead prehistoric creature. He then theorizes that the gas seeped into the grazing lands of the sheep. Once the sheep ate some of this contaminated stuff, a mutant baby resulted. Really, it’s your archetypical mutant baby origin story.

Barnstable is still trying to get some mining leases and decides to try and cozy up to the locals by hanging out and being “one of the guys.” This is where that dastardly sheriff puts his nefarious plan into action. He convinces his dog to act like he’s been shot by Barnstable during one of the shooting events that’s going on. This will get the town really pissed at Barnstable and no one will want to deal with him then.

The plan goes off without a hitch and they even have a funeral for the dog in a church with a little casket! Don’t worry about Rover though, he’s okay – the sheriff sent him down to stay with relatives in Albuquerque !

As you can imagine, the townspeople are completely mortified by this terrible turn of events (they all loved the sheriff’s dog!) and they refuse to even answer the door when Barnstable comes around to try and buy up mining leases. I love a fake dog funeral as much as anyone, but when are we going to see a giant sheep attack?

The Godmonster is eventually unleashed and once on the warpath, it is a sight to behold. The filmmakers went with the “guy in a giant sheep suit” with this one and the result is the ugliest, cruddiest looking giant sheep you’ve ever seen. It lumbers around on its hind legs and one of its front legs is really shorter than the other (which hangs limply down) and sometimes it emits a noxious orange gas!

The Godmonster runs off into wilderness with Mariposa following it. It is at this time that she tries to talk to the Godmonster and begins dancing with it, but Eddie gets jealous and throws a rock at it and the Godmonster runs off to terrorize some kids and blow up a gas station.

Finally, Clemens and the mayor join forces to capture the Godmonster alive. This involves the ridiculous scene where a bunch of cowboys circle the sheep and lasso it to the ground. The Godmonster is put in a cage and driven out to the town dump where the mayor makes the exciting announcement that the sheep is going to be put on display as a tourist attraction!

The mayor also announces that he went ahead and sold the town out to Barnstable’s boss. The town revolts and throws trash everywhere! Some people are chased by cowboys and the truck with the Godmonster on it is pushed down a mountain of trash where it explodes, thus tragically ending the Godmonster’s brief run as a giant-monster threat.

I thought I did pretty well following the barnyard shenanigans of this movie, but I really don’t have any idea what was happening at the end. Who was doing what to whom and why? This whole business with the mayor and Barnstable, was alternately boring and confusing, serving to distract from a good story of a giant sheep run amok.

The liner notes provided with the Something Weird DVD allude to the fact that this is a cautionary tales about ecology or pollution or racist mayors and fake dead dogs, but I still don’t know what the movie was trying to tell me. Is progress good? Or bad?

The mayor is obviously a bad guy, but he represents an anti-progress view, at least until he suddenly sells the town out at the end. Was it about pollution and too much waste? And what did any of it have to do with a prehistoric monster’s farts creating a giant sheep?

I’ll confess that I sat in rapt attention throughout most of the film, mainly because I wasn’t sure if I was really seeing what has happening and also because I was giddy with anticipation over the much-promised giant sheep! The film’s fatal flaw though was not enough Godmonster and his ferocious farting and way too much real estate bickering between guys in ugly cowboy outfits.

© 2009 MonsterHunter

Buck is the canine guardian of a camp of gold miners headed up by Zeb (Bruno Minniti who teamed with director Tonino Ricci in such favorites as Days Of Hell, Rage, and Thor The Conqueror) and his son with longish pansy hair, Kevin.

When the Whip Gang invades and kills everyone though, Buck demonstrates the wisdom of a thousand normal butt-sniffing dogs by allowing himself to be caught and hauled off to be used for some dog fighting back in town!

Obviously, this would allow time to come up with a solid revenge scheme.  A scheme that has Buck battling another dog while the guys in charge of the dog fights inexplicably brawl amongst themselves until the good guys appear and break it up!

That the magic bracelet hasn’t even played into any of this shows that this tag team effort from Ricci and American exploding car movie company PM Entertainment is nothing to lift your leg up and piss all over!

After the too-short slow motion massacre laid on the miner’s camp, trapper Natty and his sidekick, the faux-Indian medicine man Shanka, arrive to find that Kevin has somehow survived.  There’s no trace of Zeb, though since he was shot twice and dumped in the river, things don’t look too good for him.

Natty patches up Kevin and they leave the camp to head back to town, but not before Shanka leaves a note for Zeb in case he gets better from his bullet wounds and hypothermia and returns to the camp.

Kevin wisely advises that Buck might come back as well, but how will he know what’s happening since he can’t read?  Shanka immediately performs some juju mojo voodoo and announces that Buck can now read!

If you’re like me, you no doubt are now having visions of a bespectacled Buck poring over the sports section of the Winnepeg Sun checking out the latest CFL scores.  Unfortunately, Shanka turns out to be the con man everyone says he is because at no time during the film does Buck show any interest in the written word!

It’s hard to feel sorry for Shanka when a trapper threatens him for selling him some fake medicine and when he runs afoul of some real Indians who smear him with honey and threaten him with a giant beehive!

But as is usually the case when a giant beehive makes its appearance in a movie, things begin to get borderline entertaining!

A bracelet that Shanka has given Kevin turns out to be all sorts of magic! Kevin throws a trinket from it and a giant smoke bomb goes off freeing Shanka from his honey-lathered deathtrap!  But that’s just some opening act magic because right after that the freaking beehive starts floating in the air and going after the Indians!

The bracelet also enables Kevin and friends to find his father, transport people from place to place and to make them immaterial!  It also turns a bad guy’s knife into a bunch of flowers!  It’s magic AND wacky!

A magic bracelet is only as good as the plot it services though!  And being that this is Buck’s, Ricci’s, and Minniti’s final film, all the stops are pulled out like the bullet dug out of Kevin by Natty with just a knife while Shanka pretends to faint!

The Whip Gang is lead by a Bible-toting woman who is supposedly the mother of the rest of the miscreants in the gang.  As far as sadistic gangs go, they’re pretty good with Bobby Rhodes (Demons, War Bus Commando) as Goliath and Falcon Crest vet Abby Dalton as the deranged leader.

This isn’t some family friendly movie where the bad guys do prat falls either.  They’re stabbing, shooting, and whipping hapless trappers when they aren’t setting each other on fire and chucking their own off a cliff!

But what about the Zeb?  Proving that these arctic cowboys were as tough as the era’s dogs were smart, Zeb makes it back to town, recovers, is accused by the Mounties of killing everyone in the camp for the gold (despite showing them where the gold was and that he somehow would have had to kill about ten other guys while his kid and super dog watched), escapes, and goes after the Whip Gang himself!

That’s all pretty bad ass, but the less said about how he got boondoggled by the leader of the gang and had to be bailed out by the sharpshooting Natty, the better.

When the Whip Gang finally square off against Natty, Shanka, Kevin, Zeb, and Buck, it’s pure Italian movie mayhem at its best!

There’s the hoped-for showdown among two giants of unknown 1980s Italian movies, Rhodes and Minniti, that involves Minniti clubbing Rhodes with a giant log.

There’s Kevin’s magic bracelet causing all sorts of mischief including allowing him to punch a guy about a hundred feet in the air.

There’s also a very nice paper-mâché avalanche that surely necessitated the disclaimer at the beginning of the film regarding the safety of the animals involved in the film.  The disclaimer was in Italian so I am just assuming that it said no horses suffered anything worse than bruised dignity when they were knocked over by some fake rocks.

As for the viewer, only a mild case of heartache will be experienced when the movie concludes with a group photo, what with this being so many great showbiz folks’ final work. Twenty-five years after Ricci contributed to Italy’s first wave of wilderness dog movies with White Fang To The Rescue, he puts an exclamation point on the genre by leaving a Buck-sized dump of a movie full of enchanted jewelry, minimal dog action, 19th century special effects and bad dubbing for all to savor!

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The double-DVD set (also containing the dubious sequel Django Strikes Again) has a rather impressive booklet describing about a billion of these knockoffs and retitlings, giving you a fascinating look at how the foreign movie market operated when it came to exploiting a popular trend. (These movies frequently just took the name and ignored all of the details that emanated from the original, thus one knock-off finds the Django character being an escaped mental patient trying to regain his memory.)

The real Django though has all the memories he needs and we know by his solitary wandering, his stark black outfit and the coffin he drags behind him that he is a haunted man.

The film isn’t terribly explicit about what it is that haunts him, but it is clear that some super villain named Major Jackson wasted the love of his life, presumably while he was out fighting in the civil war. He pointedly tells someone that he couldn’t help his love because he was too far away. In that comment he tells us everything we need to know about what happened, the guilt he carries and the pain that is fueling his revenge. Of course there’s also a bunch of gold he’s aiming to steal!

Django happens upon a group of Mexicans whipping a woman because she tried to run away from them. Django’s been off in the wilds by himself for awhile, so I think that it’s understandable that he’d just like to stand around and watch for awhile before deciding whether to get involved or not. Suddenly shots ring out and all the Mexicans are dead!

Across the way are a bunch of gringos, all with stylish red sashes and/or red hoods. Having killed the Mexicans, they come and get the girl and get ready to burn her at the stake. They’re pissed at her because she deserted them for the Mexicans in the first place.

Django is apparently more into seeing women get whipped than he is watching them get burned alive, so he approaches the guys and they hardly have time to lip off to him before he’s shot them all!

The woman he rescues is named Maria and he takes her into the deserted town with him. Back at the saloon/whorehouse, only Nathaniel the saloon owner and his passel of hookers remain, everyone either killed or scared off by the war between the Mexican rebels and Major Jackson’s private army.

Major Jackson ambles over to the saloon to see what’s going on with this Django character. He brings several of his buddies with him and gets in Django’s face talking smack about how great it was that he brought his own coffin.

Django responds by killing just about everyone except Jackson. He asks Jackson how many men he has left and Jackson tells him he’s still got 48 guys in his employ. Django tells him to bring them all next time so that he’ll have an advantage!

Django and Jackson’s men have a showdown that sees Django getting down behind a big log that is laying across the middle of the muddy street. He’s eyeing the horizon, waiting for Jackson and his army and I’m thinking that maybe this Django guy has bitten off more than he can chew, but deep down I knew he had some kind of ingenious, crazy scheme that would get him through this battle. But what was it? And what pray tell was in that coffin he’s been lugging around with him the entire movie?

Jackson and his men arrive and Django goes into his coffin and busts out a machine gun! For the next two or three minutes he sprays Jackson’s army with it, leaving a town full of dead guys in red sashes. Jackson gets away and Django later explains (very briefly of course) that he let Jackson get away because he might be useful down the road.

The Mexican rebels come back to discover that Django has single-handedly wiped out almost all of Jackson’s army. Their leader, General Hugo Rodriguez and Django go way back to when Django saved his life in prison. The Mexicans want to go back to Mexico, but they can’t because they just don’t have the firepower to get past the Mexican army.

Django has a plan that involves making an incursion across the border to some fort and stealing all of Major Jackson’s gold that he’s got the Mexican army holding down there. Doublecrosses and a showdown in a cemetery brings things to an impressive conclusion.

Django must have seemed like a revelation to those raised on John Wayne horse operas. Director Sergio Corbucci’s west is one where no one is to be trusted, everyone is a potential enemy, and the only thing you can hold onto is your guns and the awful memories that force you to keep moving.

Visually, Corbucci amps up the western with fast-cutting gun battles, brutal fights, and some pretty graphic gore. Franco Nero certainly looks the part here, with his piercing eyes, black hat, and an outfit (his Union army uniform) that symbolizes his inability to shed the past.

Based on its reputation, I kept waiting for more to happen. Just a guy with a machine gun and a coffin? Some easy gold thefts? No truly spectacular dialogue? (Of course, since Django is fairly taciturn that should probably be expected.)

When he did deign to speak though, the dubbing left much to be desired. The guy who dubbed Django sounded so stiff and stilted that you wondered if Django wasn’t a robot or something. It mars an otherwise enjoyable, though over-praised film.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

The legend of Buffalo Bill seems to have been created mostly by Ned Buntline (Burt Lancaster), an author of dime novels and when Bill and Buntline got crossways with each other (that’s how we say it on the prairie) Bill simply started writing his own dime novels, romanticizing all the things he did.

Altman uses Buffalo Bill’s story to illustrate America’s desire to invent its own past (since it has relatively little of it compared to places like Europe and Asia) as well as the fact that we have a desperate need to make our heroes into celebrities and force them to live a bigger-than-life persona that no one could possibly inhabit for any amount of time without being utterly destroyed as a person.

Altman’s premise is an enticing one: show us what Bill was like through the prism of the show business machine and what happens when he signs up his former foe, Chief Sitting Bull, for a season at his Wild West Show in an effort to boost returns at the box office.

Throw in the fact that the creator of the Buffalo Bill legend, Ned Buntline, has shown up and is hanging around just adds to the possibilities.

And for the first part of the movie, everything plays out as you would hope.  Paul Newman, like Buffalo Bill, is a natural star with his rascally smile and piercing eyes and you can’t help but be held enthralled whenever he’s on screen doing something wacky.

The movie is at its best when they play with movie-western stereotypes we’ve all been raised to expect.  After Sitting Bull (through his right hand man, Halsey) gives Bill some spiritual mumbo jumbo about the leaves and stuff, Bill fires back something along the lines that it don’t matter much about the leaves so long as he knows which way the wind is blowing, then whispers to one of his men that he was just giving some of that “murky logic” back to Bull that he gave him.

Eventually though, the movie doesn’t generate much in the way of laughs or for the matter anything in the way of interest, at least until the closing moments.

The  problem is that for the middle of the movie, Altman seemed to lose track of the point he was making and got swallowed up by the story and the impenetrable machinations of Sitting Bull.  If Altman manages to demystify Bill and the whole idea of the frontier hero, then he doesn’t do much with Sitting Bull or the Indians.

Sitting Bull proves to be a problematic performer making a bunch of demands and saying that he will do the show only because he had a dream that he would meet the Great Father (President Grover Cleveland) by signing up with the show.  There are a few bumps along the way where Bull usually ends up outsmarting Bill and Bill manages to convince himself that it was in fact he that had outsmarted Sitting Bull all along.

Sitting Bull’s dream comes true and he finally gets to meet the president.  He wants to ask Cleveland to do something for his people, but Cleveland won’t even listen to the request.  Sitting Bull leaves and the next thing we know, he’s been killed at Standing Rock.

The only thing that comes from this is that it causes Buffalo Bill to have a drunken vision of Bull hanging out in his house with him!  Bull sits there silently as Bill wanders around his house (more of a trailer – they are on tour after all) and bemoans the nature of celebrity.

You’re tempted to tell Bill that he got exactly what he deserved.  You wanted to be famous, you were complicit in this process and tried to live the legend, knowing full well it was all a bunch of buffalo chips. Now that you’re trapped by your own fame, you’re crying because you’re suffocating beneath everyone’s expectations? Well, I’m not RSVP-ing your pity party pal!

Bill, though a showman, is still a human being, and he knows that all these people are living vicariously through him and the worst part of all is that the life they’re living vicariously through him never really existed at all.

When Buntline and Bill  finally meet near the end of the film, they don’t say much and Bill says he’d love to have him back at the show, but some of the others don’t like him.  They both know it’s really Bill that couldn’t stand to have him around.  Who wants to have this guy remind you every single day that everything you’re doing, everything everyone is lauding you for is completely false?

When Buntline leaves the saloon, he tells Bill “it was pleasure to invent you.”  Confronted by the reality of his origins in his meeting with Buntline and the realities of the West in his dream with Sitting Bull, what does Buffalo Bill do?

The next thing we see is him at the show performing with Halsey playing the part of Sitting Bull (dressed up in big headdress and war paint) in a ridiculously fake fight where he ends up killing Sitting Bull raising his headdress triumphantly for the adoring throngs! American heroes may be tortured souls, but the show must go on, especially when that’s all that you know.

Never as funny as you would hope it would be (probably because you suspect there’s a lot of truth to things here) and rather aimless in the middle, the movie is worth looking for because of Newman and the fact that the themes of our country’s need to worship famous people and to constantly re-write the recent past to our liking are just as relevant today as they were when this movie was released (July 4, 1976 – take that America!) and when the movie takes place.  Like the hero it portrays, the movie is a flawed, but interesting take on the beliefs of this country, both perceived and real.

© 2011 MonsterHunter

McKay comes back to his fiancée’s home where her daddy (the Major) has a big ranch and is embroiled in a age-old dispute with Rufus Hannassey, the patriarch to the white trash clan that has some land near the Major’s ranch. Both Rufus and the Major need access to the water on the Big Muddy, a piece of land owned by Jean Simmons.

Since he’s an outsider, Jim McKay doesn’t understand the backward ways of the people in the Big Country. (About every ten minutes in this movie some local goober would reiterate to McKay that he was in the Big Country to the point that he and Jean Simmons actually joked about it later on!)

I’m guessing that this Big Country place was probably Texas and if so, it just proves the conventional wisdom that the rest of us regular states would gladly give Texas back to Mexico if they would only take it.

In the Big Country, you were only as tough as your reputation and when you were hanging out with old crusty guys named Major, Burl Ives, and a wild stallion called Thunder, the cut of your gib was measured by whether you got irked when Charlton Heston called you a liar.

Peck though makes a pretty convincing case for his pragmatism and also benefits from the fact that he beats ass when he wants and has the guts to stand there while someone shoots him in the head during a duel. There really ain’t no substitute in the Big Country for being crazy brave.

You see, when you boil it all down, this is a movie about some joker from the city outwitting the country rednecks at their own game. In the end, Peck gets the prized land, ditches the annoying (and not nearly as good looking as Jean Simmons) fiancée, and gets rid of the Major, Rufus, and Rufus’ son (Chuck Connors). He even learns to ride Thunder!.

What I liked about Peck’s character was that in spite of these hillbillies and their various attempts to co-opt him to their own ends, McKay just went ahead and did what he wanted on his own terms. I’m not real sure what this actually accomplished, like with the horse or battling Heston to a standstill without any one around.

On the plus side, he was able to lose his fiancée and scored lots of cool points when the fiancée came crawling back and he told her that it wasn’t going to work out, but that he was staying and had bought the land her daddy had so desperately wanted. Oh well, at least you’ll always have your dried up old daddy and thirsty cows to keep you warm at night!

Of course, with any three hour movie, this one has its share of problems. I’m still trying to figure out why when it was finally over, I was wishing that there had been more scenes with Heston, Simmons, and Peck. You would’ve thought with the excessive running time that we would have gotten our fill of the stars, but we didn’t.

I also found my interest fading whenever Rufus or the Major or someone started whining about whose cows were going to get whose water and I wondered why McKay just didn’t ask Jean Simmons to move back east with him and let these country folks fight it out by themselves. Really, what did McKay care about any of this?

Still, it’s easily a must see for one important reason: Heston is pure Heston! You’ll have to pry The Big Country from my cold dead hands! You know, because it was so long, I died of old age watching it.

© 2011 MonsterHunter