AKA Return of Django, Vengeance is a Colt 45
Starring Gabriele Tinti, Guy Madison, Ingrid Schoeller, Daniele Vargas, Ignazio Spalla, Roberto Messina, Giovanni Ivan Scratuglia
Directed By Osvaldo Civirani
With all of the Django clone films and knockoffs floating around at the time, it was inevitable that somebody would get the bright idea to come up with the whole Son of Django concept. Yes! Think of all the opportunity! A young gunfighter picks up the mantle and takes on the violent legacy that his father left behind. There are virtually thousands of ways to make an interesting film involving Django’s son, unfortunately you won’t see any of them on display here. I would even go as far as to say that a film so ripe with opportunity as this would be impossible to fuck up, but Osvaldo Civirani manages to do so against all odds. He is basically handed the entire Django mythos and a genuine excuse to take any liberties he wants. He instead chooses to take none. Django’s son could have been virtually anything, but Civirani decides that it would be just A-OK if he was nothing more than a dull guy in dull clothes with a dull voice and a dull personality to cap it all off.
Click the play button to listen to the song from the film that introduces the Son of Django, They Call Him Django, while you read!
This film is so piss poor and meandering in its execution that I literally had no clue who anybody was or what the hell they were doing for the first 30 minutes or so. We have a guy wandering around the hills alone. He gets his horse stolen, walks into town, gets mistaken for somebody else, shoots some guys, lands in jail, gets broken out of jail, and meets up with the guy who stole his horse. All of this just to introduce the horse thief, who ends up being a relatively minor player. It is only through a song about 30 minutes in that we realize that the main character is the son of Django, seeking revenge for the death of his father. What kind of lame cop-out is that? What respectable director really prefers to dole out major plot points through a song than through on-screen action? That shit might work on Broadway, but here in the realm of Spaghetti Westerns it does not.
Django’s son and his quest for revenge is the only true motivation this film has going for it, but instead it decides to get mired up in some horseshit feud between rival ranchers and their hired thugs. We are treated to long, drawn out scenes of these two guys ordering their men out to fight one other, while each goes on and on about how much of a bastard the other is.
Riveting.
I did not enjoy myself here, it was incredibly boring and I’m only getting more bored writing about it. My review of Son of Django? Here it is:
Don’t see it.
That wraps up Week One of A Fistful of Djangos! Come back next Monday for Will’s review of the 1967 film, Don’t Wait Django…Shoot!