SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO (Japan, 2008)
Directed by: Takashi Miike
Starring: Hideaki Ito, Koichi Sato, Yusuke Iseya, Masanobu Ando, Kaori Momoi, Quentin Tarantino.
”A crazy, fast-paced spectacle of a movie, with some stunning action scenes and gorgeously colourful production design.
- Inside Toronto
“Japanese maverick Takeshi Miike has one of his wildest ideas yet -- and that's saying something -- in SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO.” 
- Variety

Lurid, over-the-top, bizarre, outrageous, completely hilarious – and that’s just Quentin Tarantino’s performance in SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO. The rest of the movie is an endless buffet of eye-popping delights that are probably illegal in Canada and Minnesota, but will baste your brain in a sauce made of super-fun and microwave it on “High” for 105 minutes at this summer’s New York Asian Film Festival. Takashi Miike’s English-language spaghetti western is a remake of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 classic, DJANGO, about a hard-bitten gun runner who wanders into a desert town with a gatling gun hidden in a coffin. A huge sensation when it was released (spawning over thirty unofficial sequels and remakes) here Takashi Miike teleports the story to 19th Century Japan and mixes it with liberal doses of A FISTFUL OF DOLLARS and YOJIMBO, then adds generous helpings of female gunslingers, samurai cowboys and plants that grow babies. 

A nameless gunman (Hideaki Ito) rides into Yuta, Nebada, a dusty flyspeck of a town that’s caught in the middle of a gang war between the Heiki (in red, and led by hot-headed madman, Koichi Sato) and the Genji (in cool white, led by baby-faced bad boy, Yusuke Iseya). Setting the two gangs against each other and hoping he can pick up the cash left on the table after they wipe each other out, our hero soon finds things are a bit more complicated than he assumed. There’s the mother of a half-Genji, half-Heiki kid, played by Yoshino Kimura (FINE, TOTALLY FINE) who is out for revenge against the Heiki; her mother, who runs the local general store and who is secretly a legendary gunslinger herself (played by Kaori Momoi, MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA), an indestructible sheriff and more mind-bending, cartoonish ultra-violence than you thought could ever possibly exist, all scored to a thundering, electrifying spaghetti western soundtrack.

Speaking a “Hooked on Phonics” version of English, the cast wades into this cross-cultural mash-up with guns blazing, slaughtering anything that moves and taking no prisoners in this off the hook Western that manages to load a missile with everything cool about samurai movies, westerns, spaghetti westerns and Takashi Miike movies and launch it into your eyes.