This year the Frontierado Holiday falls on Friday, August 1st. That holiday is about the myth of the Old West, not the grinding reality.
GARTER COLT (1968) – Previously, I reviewed the Spaghetti Western The Belle Starr Story, so this time I’m taking a look at this Italo-Western starring Nicoletta Machiavelli. She portrays Lulu “Garter” Colt, a gunslinging beauty who turns heads, breaks hearts and kicks butts all along the U.S.-Mexican Border.
In most Spaghetti Westerns women are around only to be slept with, assaulted and/or murdered, but a select few feature ladies who get to mow down no-good hombres with giddy abandon. One such woman is Garter Colt, who keeps her pistol stuffed into her garter belt, which provides the excuse to frequently flash a thigh while drawing her weapon.
And naturally the low-cut outfits worn by Lulu and supporting character Rosy (Marisa Solinas) allow for additional alluring shots.
Ms. Colt is a professional gambler, so the director also lets the camera linger near her cleavage as she earnestly contemplates her poker hand in assorted scenes.
Our story is set in 1867 as Mexican rebels are on the verge of overthrowing and executing Emperor Maximilian, the Austrian dictator imposed on them by Napoleon the Third while America was too busy with its Civil War to be able to enforce the Monroe Doctrine. Other Spaghetti Westerns, like the original Django and Indio Black depict the Emperor’s European troops as irredeemable bad guys but in this movie our lovely heroine falls in love with a French officer. Continue reading
THE BELLE STARR STORY (1968) – (Original title Il Mio Corpo per un Poker) This movie was directed by Lina Wertmuller, making it the only Spaghetti Western directed by a woman. It has nothing to do with the real Belle Starr, but for name recognition you can’t beat that title!
With Frontierado rapidly approaching on August 5th – or for those of us who kick things off the night before – August 4th – let’s take a look at some of the most obscure but laughably weird Italian westerns. And what better way to start that list than with one of the countless Spaghetti Westerns with phony Django titles? 
1. DJANGO KILL (1967) – Originally titled If You Live, Shoot!, this was one of the many Eurowesterns to be re-released to theaters years later as a phony Django movie just so it could clean up on the guaranteed cash cow of the Django name. 
When our hero’s home hamlet of Jaspen, Arizona becomes a Boom Town after copper is discovered, the place turns into a proverbial web of sin and vale of tears. Michael Culligan (Louis Hayward), the greedy town boss, builds an empire for himself out of crime and greed as the copper rush continues. 
GET MEAN (1975)- One of the weirdest Spaghetti Westerns ever made and that’s saying something! Get Mean stars Tony Anthony and was also released under the title The Stranger Gets Mean, making it the final movie in Anthony’s series of Italo-Westerns as the enigmatic gunslinger known only as the Stranger. 
DJANGO: AN OPERA – Here at Balladeer’s Blog I love sharing my enthusiasms. My blog posts where I provide contemporary slants to Ancient Greek Comedies to make them more accessible have been big hits over the years, so now I’m trying it with operas. A little while back I wrote about how Philip Wylie’s science fiction novel Gladiator could be done as an opera. This time I’m addressing the 1966 original version of the Spaghetti Western titled Django. 
LANGUAGE: Spanish. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that most of my fellow English-speakers find English-language operas to be silly. The prosaic nature of the forced rhymes in a language we are well-versed in does seem to rob opera of its mystique and its grandeur. 
Scene One: The opera would open with a stage version of one of the most iconic visuals from the 1966 film. Our title character, DJANGO, clad in his long blue jacket with his well-worn Union Army uniform underneath it, slowly, wearily drags a coffin behind him as he walks along singing his mournful song. He pulls the coffin via a rope slung across one shoulder. 
COMIN’ AT YA! (1981) – Directed by Ferdinando Baldi, Comin’ At Ya! is often credited with starting the pointless and bizarre 1980s revival of 1950s-style 3D movies. The film stars Tony Anthony, famous to us Spaghetti Western fans for the movie series in which he played a gunslinger called the Stranger. He appeared in others, as well, some reasonably good and others, like Blindman, so bad as to be virtually unwatchable. 
Our main character, Triple H, ain’t havin’ it and sets out to recover his new bride and set free the other unfortunate women seized by the Thompson Gang. Needless to say he’ll also kill every member of the gang as well as some of the snobbish, upper-class Mexican aristos – male and female – who buy the ladies at an elegantly-appointed mansion/ former convent now used for slave auctions. 
GANG OF ROSES (2003) – The annual Frontierado Holiday, coming August 2nd this year, is about the myth of the Old West, not the grinding reality. So is the movie Gang of Roses, which is why I cannot believe the merciless reviews this fun, harmless, escapist movie has gotten. I find it far better than the similar Bad Girls. 
Let me give a quick synopsis, then take a look at the main characters, following which I will state my counter-arguments to the most frequent criticisms leveled at this female-led Western:
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