Who could've predicted that, 14 years on, we'd look back at Pulp Fiction as an exercise in restraint? Or admire the infamous ear-ectomy in Reservoir Dogs for its delicate insinuation?

Probably not even Quentin Tarantino. But since 1994, he has fallen in love with explicitness, from directing grindhouse (Death Proof) to producing torture-porn (Hostel and Hostel II) to playing bit parts in Sukiyaki Western Django—a garish, gory collision of spaghetti western, Japanese samurai drama, and splatter flick.

Two clans, the white and the red, have invaded a small mountain town and decimated the place by fighting to a bloody deadlock. (Don't wonder why. It hardly matters.) A lone gunman shows up, each side wants him, and director Takashi Miike commences painting the town red—with blood!!! Bodies are sliced, diced, trampled, impaled on crosses, blown up with dynamite, and shot from impossible distances (a thrilling sequence, in which the leader of one gang uses the wind to guide his bullets across a wide valley).

Sukiyaki Western Django is exploitation's exploitation: excessive strip scenes, children watching their parents die, heaping helpings of Orientalism and Occidentalism. Cleverly, Miike directed his Asian actors to try to imitate Western American accents. The resulting garble is a perfect distillation of Sukiyaki's heterogeneous soul. It combines real things in odd ways, producing a dizzying alternate universe, but one that, as all alternate universes must, has a rigorous and consistent internal logic—samurai can slice flying bullets with their swords, but nobody can fly.

Most of the rest is goofy fun: a painted, fake-looking backdrop of Mt. Fuji; shoot-outs; stampedes; saturated colors; double-dealing characters; buffoons and secret agents; and a few deeply disturbing moments (it'll be awhile before I can scrape the grotesque sequence involving the near-rape of a fatally injured woman from the inside of my skull).

So the movie is excessive. But is it good? No—it's hokey bullshit. But it embraces its hokey bullshittiness, as in this quote from Tarantino's character: "The sound of the Gion Shoja temple bells echoes the impermanence of all things; the color of the sala flowers reveals the truth that to flourish is to fall. The proud do not endure, like a passing dream on a night in spring; the mighty fall at last, to be no more than dust before the wind."

Personally, I prefer the subtlety of slicing off a man's ear and setting him on fire. But I'm old-fashioned.