Last night I watched The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a (the?) 2008 South Korean spaghetti western by Kim Ji-woon (Korean title Joheunnom Nabbeunnom Isanghannom … aka “Nom Nom Nom”). Set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Manchuria, it’s a tale of gangsters, killers, bandits, and a treasure map. Inspired by Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, GBW takes the same trio of a bad guy, a kooky bad guy, and a “good” bad guy, adds a cast of other assorted colourful bad guys, plus the Japanese army, and sets them all at each other (with weapons ranging from a morning star to a machine gun — one of the things I enjoyed about the film was its milieu of cultural and technological worlds in collision). I have to agree with the reviewer who called it “a cartoon of a cartoon” — and some of the cartoon lines are faint, notably in the characterisation department. And as you might expect in a cartoon of a spaghetti western, there are no female characters to speak of, except for a few decorative girls and a granny, who was cool in an old silent granny way but didn’t have much screen time.  But I still thought it was a lot of fun. (Not to mention that Byung-hun Lee as “the Bad” Park Chang-yi is my kinda man in black.) Here’s the trailer.

My other recent discovery in the spag-western field is the Spaghetti Western Orchestra. An Aussie group, formerly the Ennio Morricone Experience, they do what their name suggests: play spaghetti western theme music, with great playing, amusing theatrics, and fine scream-yodelling. This is their version of The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.