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Before my sweetie-wife came into my life I had never seen any ‘Spaghetti’ westerns, not even the famous classics. She has introduced me to several and it is not unusual for us to find lesser known or forgotten ones on Ad-Supported Streams services such as Tubi. It’s no surprise that when we stumbled across Django’s Cut Price Corpses on Tubi that we would give it a spin.

With Luigi Batzella’s filmography in existence it is truly a slanderous crime that Ed Wood is often labeled the worst director. I have watched several Ed Woods movies, some even in a proper theater, and none are as clumsily constructed as Django’s Cut Rate Corpses, whose title honestly sounds like Django get his corpses factory direct and passes the saving on to you.

The plot, what little there is, is inconsistent. Django, a bounty hunter, is on the trail of the Cortez brother in Mexico, who have robbed a bank and kidnapped a woman. Along with large man seeking the brothers for the theft of a saddle and a laconic gambler, Django eventually faces the gang down in a chaotic shootout.

What makes this movie stand out is the utter incompetence of the filmmakers. Not once, not twice, even just three times, but several times I was distracted in scenes by the persistent and moving shadow of the camera operator. We were treated to the camera operator’s intrusion into the scene because Batzella insisted on hand-held, unsteady shots that were far too frequent and far too long. The editing was as terrible as the framing with the final battle’s geography an utter mess so that not only could you not decipher where anyone was in relation to each other, but it repeated appeared that characters fired upon their friends as often as the enemy.

Now was the writer immune from this level of incompetence. After our heroes are captured by the gang and suffer a whipping of such lackluster intensity that even a novice fetishist would be embarrassed the kidnapped woman sneaks up and cuts the heroes free. Django and the other man escape, but the kidnapped woman stays. It isn’t that she tries to follow and is recaptured, no, she just stays there, because the script insists upon it.

I have watched many a bad Italian/Spanish western that were far from good and even Ed Wood’s The Bride and The Beast with its suggestions of bestiality are quality films compared to this.

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This weekend the long-anticipated completion of Denis Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s landmark Science-Fiction novel, Dune, hit wide theatrical release with Dune Part 2.

Dune Part 1 released in 2021 after a delay due to the COVID-19 pandemic introduced audiences to the Atreides family, one of the Great Houses of a far future galactic Empire, an Empire riven with feuds and competing power-centers. Following betrayal and a surprise attack that destroys House Atreides that film’s protagonist, young Paul Atreides, and his mother flee into the deep desert of the planet Dune seeking sanctuary with the planet’s indigenous inhabitants, the Fremen.

This film, Dune Part 2, completes the adaptation as it follows Paul and his mother as they attempt to integrate themselves the Fremen’s culture and deliver justice or revenge upon their enemies while avoiding a cataclysmic galactic war that Paul’s precognitive powers foresee.

For those familiar with the source material this will be a fairly faithful adaptation of that story, though there are major elements that have been omitted, fans of Alia of the Knife are sure to be disappointed, and the timescale of the second half of the novel has been greatly compressed rather than sped through as with the earlier theatrical adaptation by iconoclast director David Lynch. The essential beats of the story are there, and the final resolution remains generally unchanged. Villeneuve and screenwriter Jon Spaihts have brought forward some of Herbert’s thematic elements that were made clear only in sequel novels, yet not so much as to spoil another entry in the franchise as Villeneuve has stated he would like to conclude this adaptation as a trilogy.

Hans Zimmer, himself a fan of the original novels, returns to score this film with a soundtrack that tonal matches his work in Dune Part 1. The cast is enhanced with Austin Butler, Christopher Walken, Florence Pugh, Lea Seydoux, and an uncredited Anya Taylor-Joy providing a glimpse of what a third film might include. Greig Fraser’s cinematography continues to the outstanding and he and Villeneuve’s experimental work with infrared photography adds an alien ‘otherness’ to some scenes.

All in all, those who consider themselves fans of Dune Part 1 are likely to be fans of this conclusion with anticipation for the next installment from this quite talented filmmaker.

Dune Part 2 is currently playing in theaters worldwide.