A spaghetti western, but made in Japan It takes a good 30 minutes to get going, but once it does, Takashi Miike's genre mashup "Sukiyaki Western Django" (First Look, $29; Blu-ray, $35) makes for a western that is truly like no other.
For one thing, all the actors are Japanese and speak phonetic English, making them sound like the backward-talking dwarf from "Twin Peaks." (You'll probably want to watch subtitles.) For another, these gunslingers are just as likely to bring a samurai sword to a fight as they would a six-shooter.
Inspired by the 1966 cult spaghetti western "Django," the movie centers on a mysterious stranger who wanders into a Nevada town ruled by two warring gangs: the "reds," whose Shakespeare-loving leader insists his men call him Henry (as in Henry VI), and the "whites," whose androgynous leader has grown bored waiting for an opponent who can truly test his sword skills.
A chest of gold, a schizophrenic (and seemingly unkillable) sheriff, a legendary killer disguised as a doddering old grandma and a Gatling gun hidden inside a coffin all feature prominently in the plot, which falls somewhere in the middle between Miike's more extreme, tilt-a-whirl pictures ("Dead or Alive") and his accessible ones ("Audition"). Quentin Tarantino shows up in a couple of scenes, but his atrocious acting isn't around long enough to mar the fun.
The Blu-ray disc nicely captures the fine details and blown-out colors of Miike's visuals, and it includes an hourlong making-of documentary.
The documentary's narrator goes hilariously overboard, at one point calling "Sukiyaki Western Django" one of the greatest movies in the history of Japanese film. That's absurd, but the film does provide considerable fun.
RENE RODRIGUEZ, MIAMI HERALD
