The transcendentally violent spirit of Chilean visionary Alejandro Jodorowsky lives on in the bloody Brazilian film Bacurau, a modern-day Western of uncompromised violence and unfiltered vengeance that, if I had seen it last year, would have definitely made the top of my 2019 list.

A few years in the future, the small village of Bacurau is slowly dying, both literally and metaphorically. As an addictive pharmaceutical continues to numb much of the Brazilian populace, the denizens of this town live on, constantly in need of food, water and medicine. Eventually, the town disappears off the map and cellphone service is suddenly disrupted.

As locals are found brutally murdered — including a few children — a group of white Americans and Europeans, led by German-born Michael (Udo Kier), use the town as a form of murder tourism, hunting the people in the street like stray dogs. But the people of Bacurau aren’t ones to run from a fight, unleashing psychedelic hell on the intruders.

A hell of a slow burn, as compact UFOs hover in the sky and dark hallucinations are a fact of life, directors Kleber Mendonca Filho and Juliano Dornelles are rightfully distrustful of gringo influences on their way of life; the white hunters’ jingoistic bravado usually turning to xenophobic tears when confronted with their evil is by no means subtle or unearned.

There’s a beautifully caustic artistry to their storytelling, an acidic Western (Southern?) that’s more influenced by the people’s own native-born resiliency and willingness to preserve at any cost than any two-bit John Wayne flick ever could. —Louis Fowler

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In all the dusty annals of the mythical Western genre, if there was ever a true bastard to tame the Wild West, it was apparently Django or, even better, Django the Bastard, this illicit Italian rip-off of his blood-spattering name.

People are strange when you’re the Stranger, a gunslinger dressed in black (the decided un-Franco Nero Anthony Steffen) who walks into town one day carrying a convenient wooden cross; he plants it dead in the middle of the town square and quickly doles out his six-shooter justice, the only way a black-hearted demon from hell — as we’re told he might be — can.

Meanwhile, the just-as-terrible townsfolk are placing wagers on a game where two poor boys toss a stick of dynamite back and forth, betting dollars on who is going to get a hand blown off first. Welcome to Desert City, population … well, I guess it doesn’t matter, because Django’s got a handmade wooden cross for all of them, which he hands out one by one.

Turns out that this low-rent incarnation of Django isn’t an avenging angel, but rather a former soldier who is seeking revenge on the perpetrators of a brutal Confederate massacre, one that apparently he can’t seem to get over; he crafted this death-bringer persona as way to not only strike fear in the hearts of fellow evildoers, but also to help him through the apparent post-traumatic stress that he is surely going through.

Whatever works, I suppose.

Filmed at a tumultuous time in spaghetti cinema when the men looked like glam-rock refugees and the women like young Melania Trumps, Django the Bastard was originally released under the more family-friendly title of The Strangers Gundown — and it’s gundowns a-plenty that Django delivers in this mostly watchable tale of brutal revenge and copyright infringement. —Louis Fowler

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At the time of The Five Man Army’s release, Peter Graves was roughly midway through his run on TV’s Mission: Impossible. As with that classic series, this Western finds him assembling a group of experts to complete a mission, but director Don Taylor (Damien: Omen II) trades high-tech wows for a lot of dirt and dust.

Graves’ character, The Dutchman, assembles a crack team of rebels to help steal half a million dollars in Mexican Army gold from a train that’s not only moving, but heavily armed. In on the plan are a level-headed buddy (James Daly, 1968’s Planet of the Apes), a cocky local who aims a mean slingshot (Nino Castelnuovo, Strip Nude for Your Killer), a brutish circus acrobat (genre staple Bud Spencer, They Call Me Trinity) and a silent swordsman named, um, Samurai (Tetsurô Tanba, You Only Live Twice).

Memorably, the Dutchman uses burritos to explain his master plan to his amigos. Once that plan is put into practice later, Army becomes a winning effort. Before then, the film is light on action and heavy on conversation (with a script co-written by Dario Argento, one year shy of switching career gears to the giallo), but all that talk serves a purpose in setting up the bickering ways among the quintet. This Army ends shy of being great, but its spy-esque exploits make it a good contender for converting the Western-averse. —Rod Lott

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Hubba-hubba! The carpetbaggers match the drapes when Agnes Moorehead takes her four single and ready to mingle (mostly) carrot-topped daughters (Rhonda Fleming, Teresa Brewer, Cynthia Bell, Kay Bell) from the titular city of Seattle to Gold Rush-era Alaska for some snowbound romance and minor Klondike mystery-solving, as the gals try to find their newspaper publisher father’s murderer whilst pitchin’ woo with the fool’s gold worth of lonely prospectors that permeate the Arctic climate.

In between the absolute roster of wonderfully misplaced musical numbers by the likes of Hoagy Carmichael, Johnny Mercer and Ray Evans, these flame-maned fillies are a vivacious trio of backtalkin’ spitfires that are always sampling scandalous cosmetics like “rouge” and high-kickin’ them glammy gams to tunes that uses words like “Alabammy” and “honeylamb,” with momentarily blonde sister (and all-around pesky tomboy) Nellie the constant brunt of gender-fluid ribbings because, even at 12 years old, she’s not a hot-to-trot redhead ready for marriage like her flame-retardant hermanas.

Mother Moorehead, years away from her role as the shrewish Endora on TV’s Bewitched, tries to keep a tight leash on the foursome, but those 1950s-era hormones are running wild and free in 1900s Yukon Territory. With a liberal amount of ankle skin and hand-holdings, all gloriously filmed in 3-D, you actually feel like you’re right there in the parlor, courtin’ one of those interchangeably gorgeous sisters to a badly timed and ill-fitting Jerry Livingston and Mack David tune! If only IMAX had been around then …

At 90 minutes, director Lewis R. Foster’s effervescently buoyant Those Redheads from Seattle is a fun Technicolor throwback where two-fisted men engaged in fisticuffs over the ownership of women in general, and these dames not only like it, they fall madly in love with the big galoots and/or palookas because of it, with a finale full of comically ribald weddings to back it up. If we walk away from Seattle with any lessons learned, it’s that gentleman might prefer blondes, but everyone loves a redhead.  —Louis Fowler

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First things first: Jack the Ripper Goes West is a bullshit title. Second things second: I concede it is infinitely more marketable than the film’s original title, Knife for the Ladies, which simply sounds like the misheard end result of a kindergarten game of Telephone.

In the desert town of Mescal, the men and women are all agog and abuzz over losing yet another perfectly good prostitute to murder! The latest victim had her throat slashed not only horizontally, but postcoitally. Now that somebody’s homicide spree has hit the magic number of three and the cantankerous sheriff (Jack Elam, The Cannonball Run) has no cotton-pickin’ idea who’s responsible, Mescal looks yonder to St. Louis to hire curly-haired detective Edward R. Burns (Jeff Cooper, Circle of Iron), basically a Hercule Poirot for cowpokes. Investigatin’ begins; stabbin’ continues.

There’s nothing wrong with grafting the Whitechapel legend of London onto the dusty landscape of the American Western; mixing and melding of genres is encouraged. But director Larry G. Spangler (The Soul of Nigger Charley) and his writing team (one-third of which is Academy Award winner Seton I. Miller, screenwriter of such classics as Here Comes Mr. Jordan and The Adventures of Robin Hood) have no idea how to lasso that into a compelling story. Evidence of this shows in the picture’s schizophrenic nature, undecided if it should go whole-hog mystery or horror or whathaveyou. No amount of eye candy from Diana Ewing (Play It as It Lays) or glee gained from the bonkers performance of Ruth Roman (The Baby) can make up for Spangler’s cattle-drive pacing, which is why the funny ending isn’t worth the sit to get there.

If you’d like to see a true Ripping yarn with equally psychotronic leanings, watch Jess Franco’s Jack the Ripper instead. Heck, or just watch the one with David Hasselhoff. Either leaves this in the dust. —Rod Lott

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