Watch Return of Django For Free

Redundant and unnecessary.

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

SON OF DJANGO is perhaps one of the most notable of all DJANGO rip-offs following on from the success of the Franco Nero vehicle. This one is also called RETURN OF DJANGO somewhat oddly, given that the main character is Django's offspring, come to find out who killed his deceased father. There's the usual debt of inspiration to A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, as the setting is a small western town split by two warring sides. Django's kid is in the mix and soon takes up arms himself.This is pretty much par for the course for the spaghetti western genre, quite cheap-looking in places. The writing lets the film down at times, providing ordinary throughout and letting the audience hang at the confuddled climax. Gabriele Tinti, that familiar star of Italian cinema in the 1970s, is the erstwhile hero, supported by a scene-stealing Guy Madison as the helpful town priest.

Gabriele Tinti, the son of Django, intervenes in a land war between a pair of rival cattlemen, in order to get revenge on the man who murdered his father and burned his house down years before, though things might not be as they seem.Although this is about the son of Django, the plot bears a little more of a resemblance to A Fistful Of Dollars. Things start out a bit draggy, though things pick up a bit in the second half. The best line in the film occurs when the villain exclaims, "No one stays alive who accuses me of killing!" Top-billed Guy Madison has the most interesting role, albeit only a supporting one, as a priest and friend of Django who has to pick up his gun again to help Tinti, a role he reprised in other films.Somewhere behind the scenes is Demofilo Fidani, who later wrote, produced, and directed his own series of pretty bad Django sequels under names like Miles Deem and Dick Spitfire!

Why the Wild East DVD company decided that this particular spaghetti western was worth a DVD release in North America, I can't say for certain. Maybe it was because American Guy Madison was one of the actors in it, but any fans of Madison will likely be very disappointed by how he's used here. He doesn't first show up until more than a third of the movie has passed, and he doesn't get to speak until half the movie has gone by. To add insult to injury, his character really doesn't get to do that much. It's possible the movie could have still worked despite all this, but for the most part the movie comes across as an amateur effort. It looks and feels really cheap, and the feel of the movie is cold and passionless. The bad script makes everything unfold at a really slow pace. That is, when the story makes sense, since there are some really unclear and confusing portions throughout. (Just try to understand the first part of the movie!) This is one Euro western that really gives the genre a bad name.

"Son of Django" amounts to nothing more than the title character's vendetta against what approximates a "Mafia don" in the old west...... It's a routine plot with Jeff Tracy, Django's son avenging his death. I never liked our American westerns much because they mostly seemed so unconvincing...the heroes (like Randolph Scott and John Wayne) and even the villains are way too clean and sterilized for the times, and the killings are antiseptically bloodless for some odd reason. I now watch them just for the plots and the settings, which are superior to the spaghetti westerns.As sub-par as this one is, it's faults are mainly due to the writers and director. Gabriele Tinti cannot be blamed for his lack of any credible dialog. His good-looking, masculine face and weathered,beard-shadowed jaw perfectly resembles those western heroes customarily pictured on American pulp paperbacks. He's long, lean and could be mean, but he's got a lot of soul and some morality, too. My favorite sequence is when he intervenes to stop a brutal and seemingly endless gang beating of an innocent man right in the middle of the town, in front of the victim's wife. It's hard to believe that Tinti, who looks like the perfect, slightly grubby epitome of the western hero was stuck for most of his career as a supporting character in "Emmanuelle" films. What a waste!I give this film a 7 out of 10 just because of Tinti's magnificent presence which illustrates the ideal of the American western hero. With a better script worthy of him, this could have been a standout and a new direction for his body of work.