Dir: Demofilo Fidani (as Miles Deem)
Star: Jeff Cameron, Jack Betts, Gordon Mitchell, Klaus Kinski
a.k.a. Adios Compañeros, A Fistful of Death and Ballad of Django

Virtually worthless, this is little more than a shallow cash-in under virtually any of its titles. Giù la testa was the Italian name for Sergio Leone’s Duck, You Sucker, and it’s got absolutely nothing to do with Django – there is no character by that name present. Even its central character is named after Macho Callahan, a Hollywood Western starring David Janssen, made the previous year. Just to confuse matters more, Adios Compañeros is also one of the alternate titles for A Coffin Full of Dollars – another Western which starred Kinski, was directed by Fidani and saw release in 1971. And Ballad of Django was used for The Django Story, also a Fidani movie from the same year.

Any of those would probably be rather more impressive than this waste of time, in which Klaus barely appears.  While I admit, it’s a lot of fun when he is present, his role feels like it’s eventually going to be significant in some way, perhaps as the power behind the local throne. It’s therefore an immense disappointment when the end credits roll, without that happening. When he’s gone from this film, he’s gone, folks. Do not expect him to return, or be anywhere close to as important as the poster below would have you hope.

The focus is, instead, on Macho Callaghan (Cameron) – note the “g”, for legal reasons! – who is the sole survivor of the Carson gang, after they are attacked and massacred by Butch Cassidy (Betts) and his gang. After recovering, Callaghan teams up with another renegade, Buck O’Sullivan, to take revenge on the people responsible – a process complicated by Cassidy’s group having split in two, with Buck among the men now following Ironhead Donovan (Mitchell). Those two parties hold no love for each other either, having split after a rigged game of poker. The vast bulk of the running time sees Callaghan and O’Sullivan working to infiltrate Ironhead’s gang, and/or attack Cassidy’s. It’s all incredibly dull, even by the low standards of Fidani, whose reputation as among the worst of spaghetti Western directors is certainly not diminished by this.

Proceedings reach the absolute pits when he somehow convinces Ironhead that the appropriate strategy to take Butch by surprise, involves having his men walk towards the Cassidy hideout, holding medium-sized shrubs in front of them as “camouflage”. Admittedly, in terms of Callaghan’s actual aim – to wipe them out – it proves highly effective. I’m just staggered any self-respecting outlaw would agree to something which looks like a cross between a community theater production of Macbeth (“Till Birnam forest come to Dunsinane”) and Monty Python’s How Not to be Seen sketch. And don’t even get me started on how two saddlebags can create a greater conflagration than the bombing of Dresden.

It’s all poorly and stupidly plotted, not least the way that in this world, punching each other’s lights out is apparently a rite of initiation, necessary to establish any kind of trust. Buck betrays Macho and rides off; after our hero chases him down and they have, not their first fist-fight (more on that in a moment), that they become fast friends. Similarly, Ironhead is suspicious of Macho, until they have a set-to, and the gang leader is bested in combat. To borrow a line from Demolition Man, I guess “this is how insecure heterosexual males used to bond.” The only slightly interesting twist is the revelation, right at the end, that Callaghan wasn’t just a cold-blooded outlaw, though I am less than convinced it makes sense, given all that has gone before.

The sole bright spot is Kinski, who has a very brief yet memorable role as Reverend Cotton, the cleric in charge of the local town – to save you the bother, he arrives around the 18-minute mark. Yet, as you’d expect out of any man of the cloth played by Klaus Kinski, he’s not exactly your normal minister, even if we do first encounter him in his natural environment of church, telling the story of the Good Samaritan. [It’s an interesting throwback to Jesus Christus Erlöser] Callaghan enters the church at the end of the service, and the Reverend gives him a dollar from the collection plate, also offering him a job as a “watchdog”, saying “My parish is full of marauders.”

Not that Cotton appears to need aid, apparently believing in the proverb, “God helps those who help themselves.”. For it turns out he’s a dab hand at horseshoes, and the next time we see the Reverend, he is about to clean up at a nearby contest. He has already won a barrel of whiskey(!), adds a new saddle to his haul, and is about to go for the holster and Colt pistol set, saying “I want to win it. That way, we’ll have a few less murders!” [All these hints are why I was expecting him to be more significant] Callaghan swoops in, uses the dollar he was given as an entrance fee to the competition, and wins the gun instead, though Cotton doesn’t appear to mind.

Kinski’s third and final scene comes at the end of a bar brawl in which Callaghan and O’Sullivan have been heavily involved. They spill from the saloon into the main street, still punching each other’s lights out, and Cotton rushes in to break them apart, yelling as he does so, “All men are brothers! You have to love each other… I SAID LOVE!” This is clearly a two-fisted man of God, and he seems particularly upset that this fight is taking place on the Sabbath. That’s the end of Kinski: roughly ten minutes has elapsed between his first appearance and the last, and with his departure goes any reason to keep watching this dull, idiotically-scripted piece of cinematic dreck.