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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Flying in the face of probability, Ethan Hawke has two Westerns in theaters at once: The Magnificent Seven and In a Valley of Violence. The difference? About $89 million and, here, Hawke screaming at a vulture.

Moseying away from the genre that established his often-brilliant career, indie-horror darling Ti West (The Innkeepers) saddles up for a simple tale of a Civil War vet en route to Mexico. Accompanied by his trusty attack dog (Jumpy, Pups United), Hawke’s Paul stops in the one-horse town of Denton, Texas (where the traffic has yet to suck), to sit a spell. The local bully, Gilly (James Ransome, Sinister 2), takes offense to this stranger not showing him the respect he believes he is owed, all because his bum-legged father is the town marshal (John Travolta, whose recent I Am Wrath revels in similar vengeful themes). Gilly and his yellow-bellied trio of lackeys commit two horrific acts of violence (true to the title), for which Paul vows revenge … assuming he lives through it.

There is not much to this Valley, which is entirely West’s intent as writer and director — not just here, but his work in general. The picture is streamlined, efficient — a straight-and-narrow cowboy’s hat tip to Sergio Leone’s Dollars trilogy of spaghetti Westerns, starting with co-opting its animated credits. It is John Wick set in the 19th century, trading neon for dust, business suits for boot spurs.

“Those men left me with nothin’,” Paul says. “I’m gonna leave them with less.” And the film shines as an example of less being more. While not totally giving up elements of horror (read: blood spurts and spills with gory aplomb), West proves his minimalist approach to visual storytelling works as well on the frontier as it does in provoking fright. Hawke is reliably strong, while Travolta is tempered from his tendency to ham. The pic, however, belongs to Ransome, stealing the spotlight as he adds another role of weaselly menace to his mantle. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or Focus World.