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

• Year: 1967
• Released: 03 May 1967
• Country: Italy, Spain
• IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062082/
• Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/django_kill_if_you_live_shoot
• Available in: 720p, 1080p,
• Language: Italian
• MPA Rating: Not Rated
• Genre: Horror, Western
• Runtime: 100 min
• Writer: Franco Arcalli, Giulio Questi, María del Carmen Martínez Román
• Director: Giulio Questi
• Cast: Tomas Milian, Marilù Tolo, Piero Lulli
• Keywords: cult, spaghetti western, django,

6.3/10

Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! Storyline

The Stranger, a half-breed bandit, is part of a band of thieves that steals a cargo of gold from a stagecoach. However, the Americans in the band betray him and shoot all the Mexicans. The Stranger is not completely dead though, and crawls his way out of his shallow grave, continuing his pursuit of the gold and exacting a bloody vengeance.

Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! Play trailer

Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! Photos

Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! Torrents Download

Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! Subtitles Download

Django Kill… If You Live, Shoot! Movie Reviews

Imperfect, but still interesting.

“If You Live, Shoot!” offers an intense diversion for fans of the Spaghetti Western. It goes on for quite a long time, and gets dull on occasion, but it’s also noteworthy for its content. It’s on record as one of the most utterly nasty of all SWs, with plenty of bright red movie blood and depictions of sadism.

It’s actually not particularly surreal most of the time, telling a rather linear story of The Stranger (Tomas Milian), who was double crossed by his partners in a heist, and shot & left for dead. The opening credits see him emerge from his grave, and two Indians (Miguel Serrano and Angel Silva) witness this. They vow to stay at his side and assist him, under the condition that he tell them what it’s like on the “other side”.

However, this isn’t really what you would call a revenge saga. Soon, The Stranger is getting caught up in greed and corruption in a small town known to Indians either as “The Field of Anguish” or “The Unhappy Place” (depending on which version you’re watching). He gets involved as a few warring factions try desperately to lay their mitts on the gold snatched by The Stranger & gang.

Co-writer / director Giulio Questi (“Death Laid an Egg”) takes his time telling the story, but does populate it with some enjoyably despicable villains, such as Oaks (Piero Lulli), Hagerman (Francisco Sanz), Sorrow (Roberto Camardiel), and Bill Templer (Milo Quesada). There’s an especially fun comeuppance for one of them. Add to that an atmospheric score by Ivan Vandor, two beauties (Patrizia Valturri and Marilu Tolo), and a sense of mysticism, and the results are generally agreeable. The handsome young Milian has charisma sufficient enough for one to remain invested in his character. Ray Lovelock of “The Living Dead at Manchester Morgue” fame also appears.

Good entertainment overall, and worth a look for any SW completist.

Seven out of 10.

Offbeat, But Not As Surreal As Others Will Have You Believe

Bandit Tomas Milian survives an impromptu execution by double-crossing partners. Crawling out of a pit, he’s nursed by two Indians who ascribe mystical reasons for his not dying. Soon he tracks the others to a strange town where inhabitants strung up the gang and took the gold, which another violent big shot is willing to kill to possess.

I don’t quite get what others say about this being “surreal” or “hallucinatory”, as the film appears to be pretty straight-forward to me. It’s weird, but it’s not Eraserhead or Alejandro Jodorowsky weird.

It’s more along the lines of an artiste tying to make a political statement about capitalism, using shocking, violent imagery to attract the attention of the bourgeois and perhaps make the movie attractive to the art-house and grind-house crowds.

Although pretentious, this stays interesting throughout, with a good performance by Milian. However, teen-aged Ray Lovelock’s implied gang-rape by Zorro’s (Yeah, that’s the villain’s name!) horribly-dressed goons was a bit silly and gratuitous.

Brutal and baroque spaghetti Western jaw-dropper

Director/co-writer Giulio Questri really hits it out of the ballpark with this heady combination of extreme brutal violence — watch out for the sequence in which a guy has his body torn apart to retrieve the gold bullets riddled within it and an especially bloody and painful scalping! — and a fierce nightmarish fever dream quality which provides a strikingly off-kilter and horrific ambiance to the whole oddball enterprise. The always dependable Tomas Milian excels as a scruffy stranger who gets double-crossed and left for dead in the desert. Pulling himself out of a mass grave, the stranger arrives in a miserable town called The Unhappy Place that’s populated mostly by rotten evil bastards. Questri does an ace job of depicting the godforsaken hamlet as essentially hell on earth and maintains a strong atmosphere of pervasive moral decay throughout. This film further benefits from a neat array of colorfully nasty villains: Piero Lulli as the treacherous Oaks, Milo Quesada as slimy swindler Bill Templer, Francisco Sanz as the pitiless and untrustworthy Hagerman, and Roberto Camardiel as the ruthless Mr. Sorrow. Marilu Tolo likewise registers well as conniving saloon gal Lori. The inventively quirky script by Questri and Franco Arcalli boasts such inspired bizarre touches as a pesky drunken parrot, the stranger using gold bullets on his enemies, and, most memorably, a vile gang of gay outlaws who rape a handsome teenage boy (Ray Lovelock in his film debut). Both Franco Delli Colli’s sharp widescreen cinematography and Ivan Vandor’s twangy score are up to speed. Rough stuff for sure, but undeniably effective and arresting just the same.