Django and Cullen Bohannon Have Moseyed On Up To My Door

Okay, so I treated myself to this swanky blu-ray release of the original Django this week.

According to one of my older review posts I first saw Django when I was at university, but I have absolutely zero recollection of that.

However, I guess, if you squint you can see some traces of influence in the Western movie script I wrote for my degree course.

I watched Django again, for the first time, the other week and was entranced by the violence and mud so prevalent in this once-banned spaghetti Western classic.

At the time, on Facebook, I wrote: "Oh, this was so good! [It] took a couple of unexpected turns along the way".

I'll probably write a full review of the legendary 1966 film when I see it next, now courtesy of this new blu-ray rather than Prime Video streaming. 

What I particularly love about this release is the inclusion of a Quentin Tarantino documentary - almost as long as the main attraction - in which the director sings the praises of Sergio Corbucci and explains elements and inspirations he drew from this work for his own.

On the gaming front, Django (complete with coffin) is available from Wargames Illustrated as one of its 28mm Giants In Miniature figures. Mine is off with Matt the painter at present, but I look forward to sharing him with you in due course.

Django - A Giant In Miniature figure

The blu-ray box set of the first season of Hell on Wheels arrived the other day.

My plan is, once I’ve finished my latest rewatch of Deadwood, to follow that up with Brisco County Jnr then start Hell on Wheels - which I haven’t seen since it first aired on TV.

I'm nearly at the end of Deadwood's second season - taking a break to watch other things when I finish each disc of the collection - so then it'll be the final season followed by the movie.

When it comes to 1993's The Adventures of Brisco County Jnr, the Bruce Campbell-fronted steampunky comedy-western, I'm not even sure I've actually seen the whole 27-episode season of that show before.

I'm looking forward to that as I seem to remember that while it lacks the horror elements there's a distinct Deadlands-style liberty taken with history (kinda giving it a Xena-like feel, but in the Old West).

Jonah Hex (2010)

To be fair the much maligned Jonah Hex doesn't start off too badly, but this sense of bon hommie fails to last through the opening animated credits when it becomes obvious that some idiot (almost certainly in a suit) decided that because Hex is a comic book character he must have a superpower!

Clearly no-one of any import in this production has actually read a Jonah Hex story or else they wouldn't have given him the mystical power to "bring the dead back to life" or screwed-up the movie's first, proper, Western gunfight with horse-mounted Gatling guns.

The handiwork of the daft suit(s) shows itself again when, clearly loving the 'hugely successful' Van Helsing, they felt it necessary to equip Hex with a range of bizarre, steampunky weaponry (because it also worked so well in Will Smith's Wild Wild West). 

The mystical element of the film is totally misguided, adding absolutely nothing more than further Sturm und Drang to obfuscate the fact that the film has little, or no, story - several flashback scenes are repeated to pad the film out and it still only runs to 78 minutes.

Like some mind-numbing Italian horror, much of Jonah Hex comes across as a series of random scenes thrown together at high speed, where the titular character (Josh Brolin) is moving from one place to another, with little explanation as to how this advances the main plot... until Hex finally confronts his arch-nemesis, Quentin Turnbull (John Malkovich).

Megan Fox is in there as well, but her character - Lilah the soiled dove, supposed a love interest for Hex - is about as redundant as the lead character's newly acquired paranormal abilities.

Lilah's main purpose is to serve as a hostage and could easily have just been a stranger Turnbull had plucked from the street.

And there's some poppycock about Turnbull building a nonsensical superweapon, but, like pretty much everything here, it amounts to very little in the greater scheme of things.

Even taking the comic book source material out of the equation, Jonah Hex fails to engage as a fantastical western - The Adventures Of Brisco County Jnr, with Bruce Campbell, did it first, and way better, and on a TV budget.

Everyone associated with this mess of a film should be thoroughly ashamed of what they have produced, especially given what a classy, solid Western comic Jonah Hex was at this time.

It wouldn't have taken much brainpower to have just translated one of those storylines to the big screen.

But the "Hollywood suits" always think they know better!