Django

Originally banned in Britain for its comic-strip iconoclasm and graphic violence, this rates alongside Leone's 'Dollars' trilogy as one of the daddies of the spaghetti/paella Western. It's a clean- up-and-paint-the-town-blood-red revenge drama with a difference. Nero's mud-spattered ex-Yankee soldier, first seen squelching towards a US-Mexican border ghost town, a coffin forever in tow, has every Western hero's quality in extremis. His speed-of-light gunslinger outlaw has a romantic heart - his wife was killed by one of Major Jackson's KKK-like henchmen - and an enigmatic morality. He solves the war between Jackson's men and General Rodríguez' bandidos by dispensing death to all, but his sympathies are shown when he later teams up with Rodríguez for a gold heist. Corbucci's style is a mix of social realism, highly decorative visuals, and finely mounted action sequences. For the rest, there are enough mud-wrestling prostitutes, whippings, ear-loppings, explosions and scenes of wholesale slaughter to keep any muchacho happy. Funny, visceral, bloody, no-nonsense entertainment with a touch of class.