Asian filmmakers have been letting their "spaghetti-western"-freak flags fly at the Toronto Film Festival lately.
This year saw the ultra-violent Korean entry The Good, the Bad and the Weird.
Last year introduced audiences to Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django -- which is finally hitting local theatres now.
Both are over-the-top, cartoonish and stylishly shot.
But Miike's "ramen western" seems more pointedly silly, what with shotguns that blow holes in people big enough to shoot other people through, Quentin Tarantino along as a sensei named Ringo who brutalizes a young woman into becoming a killer a la Kill Bill, and, weirdest of all, an entire Japanese cast speaking phonetically in English.
Sukiyaki Western Django uses subtitles anyway, joining a couple of Aussie flicks I've seen in the category of movies with English-language dialogue that had to be spelled out. (At times, Tarantino himself inexplicably speaks in the same pidgin English).
Miike's wintry samurai-era town could easily pass for a Sergio Leone set.
It's a beautifully shot millieu for a plot we've seen many times before (A Fistful of Dollars for one) -- a gun-slinging stranger (Hideaki Ito) comes to town, where he finds himself in the centre of two rival gangs, both of which want to conscript him when they find out how well he handles a firearm.
The Heike (a.k.a. the Reds) and the Gengi (The Whites) are at war over a hoard of gold nuggets being mined by a populace who've been turned into slave labour.
The historical period of all this is mysterious, but Kiyomori (Koichi Sato), the leader of the Reds, is obsessed with the British War Of The Roses (where the Reds won) to the point that he insists on being called "Henry."
Meanwhile, a little boy and his mother are suffering the aftermath of a Romeo & Juliet/Red & White tragedy.
The smirking Gunman has his own agenda as it turns out, and when pistol whip comes to shotgun blast, he has an unexpected ally in a legendary revenge-driven outlaw known only by her nickname Bloody Benten (or B.B. for short).
It's all a set-up for a crazed climax that includes the baddest-of-the-bad-guys walking around with a Gatling gun in his arms (how much do those things weigh, anyway?) mowing down everybody in sight while laughing insanely.
Sukiyaki Western Django often comes off as camp, but camp with a lot of creative muscle behind it.
Teruyuki Kagawa is particularly over-the-top as the hysterically deranged town sheriff, sing-songing lines like "I die. You die. She dies. He dies. We all die."
Meanwhile, Tarantino is never going to win an acting Oscar, particularly not for the hilarious scene where he plays a wheelchair-bound geriatric version of Ringo, the latex slathered all over his face like stucco on a bungalow.
But Miike knows how to film cartoonish violence with style, and the sillier the movie becomes in its mayhem, the harder it is to turn away from.
(This film is rated 18-A)
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