Review: "Django Unchained" is slick and strange splatter western

"Django Unchained" R
Quentin Tarantino usually has a flair for remaking kung fu movies or propeganda films, so tackling Italian robber gunslinger movies seemed kind of his thing. Fortunately, someone did tell him to make it linear, unlike some of his other works, such as Pulp Fiction. The story diverges hard from the Italian gunslinger movie, which itself was a spoof of spaghetti westerns of America, and of the Three Musketeers, and ventures into the cruel demented realm of pre-Civil War America, circa 1862.
     On a midnight road bound for a slave auction, a slaver and several sweating chained up men run into a traveling dentist who is not what he seems, but is in fact a gun for hire, a bounty hunter, who plans to buy one of the men, Django, a mysterious tall black man, among the others. The bounty hunter's plan goes abit south when the slaver refuses, so he shoots him dead and frees them all, taking Django as a free man, and giving him a new life as a hired gun.
     The bounty hunters arrive in a town where the sheriff tracks them to the tavern and is killed, but when the constable shows up, they make up a story that he's a wanted man to be delivered to justice, dead or alive, but preferably dead. They use this at every town they visit, all across the west and into the south.Most of these elude to dozens of old westersn and spoofs and the killings are done with gory almost comical abandon.
     Eventually Django tells the hunter of his lost wife, another slave, who lives on a plantation called Candyland, an infamous parody of something out of Gone with the Wind, but without Scarlett. The master of the house is a wily nutcase and his man servant, father figure, who happens to be one of the smartest of his slaves also. Eventually there is a major confrontation over getting the hired girl via lying about wanting to buy up a fighting man from him.
     This movie is not to be taken seriously. It is a horror comedy which happens to deal with slavery and make it look like an archetype, but it's not. It appears they intended merely to be as offensive as possible. It is a far better movie than his remake of Inglorious Bastards. It is on a par with Reservior Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
     Do not see it with small children. Do not see if it you're easily offended.
Review by Adam Browne