I’d heard about Django Kill a couple of years before I actually bought the DVD. Unfortunately, I got information about the movie secondhand. I thought the movie had to do with zombies. There weren't any zombies, sadly, but there was a guy who came back from the grave for vengeance. That was one of the recurrent themes in the Clint Eastwood movies as well as several other western films.
The star of the movie is Tomas Milian. He made several of the Western movies before moving into the crime arena as a series of villains and renegade cops working outside the rules like Bruce Willis. He’s still active in television and movies today while he’s in his seventies.
Django Kill is supposed to be one of the bloodiest westerns ever filmed at the time, in the late 1960s. In fact, the disc contains scenes that had been cut out in the film release. Of course, this is before Sam Peckinpah left his indelible mark on the Western movie with classics like The Wild Bunch and Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. But only by a few years.
The movie really isn’t much different than any of Eastwood’s Man With No Name Westerns. Except that there’s no humor or comic relief in the constant sea of shifting loyalties that takes place in this film.
Most of the so-called spaghetti westerns end up with a tough-as-nails hero who is selfishly motivated but finishes up serving some greater good by the end of the movie. Normally he is caught in a crossfire between two rival gangs, neither of which is truly better than the other.
That happens in this film. After being shot and buried alive, Django (the stranger) rides into town seeking the people who killed his friends and tried to murder him. By the time he arrives, those bad guys have already been dealt with by the town. As it turns out, the town is filled with people that are evil and malicious.
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