DJANGO

Back when Quentin Tarantino was still in a booster seat, this rampaging, vengeance-crazed Italian powderkeg ripped open the spaghetti western genre, leaving a trail of corpses and about a hundred sequels and knock-offs.

Unmatched euro-star Franco Nero is Django, a tortured drifter who wanders the populated wastelands of a nightmarish west, dragging a heavy coffin through the sands behind him. He stumbles across a small, dying down filled with banditos, racists and unwashed psychopaths, and it doesn't take long before the lead heats up and the bodies lay cold.

Sure, Sergio Leone's iconic "Man with No Name" trilogy had already firmly established the European western, but DJANGO director Corbucci assaulted it with as much grit, grime, rage and mania as you'd find in the actual law-free days of free-range homicide. It's a major achievement in dust-choked, breakneck misanthropy, now restored and ready for rediscovery in the light of the new Tarantino film (which also co-stars Franco "Django" Nero himself!).

So drink a gallon of kerosene, set your mother on fire and head on down to the Alamo for the most explosive, amoral, blood-hungry western of the 20th century: DJANGO!!