Tubi Tuesday: Let the Corpses Tan (2017)

A strange trip, even for French films, “Let the Corpses Tan” is a weird, wild homage to spaghetti westerns that’s anything but ordinary.

Gold. Leather. Naked painters. Naked painted-people. Naked criminals. The sound of leather. Gold rings that play music. An all-night shootout and more are all in store in this week’s Tubi Tuesday, the bizarre art house western crime thriller, Let the Corpses Tan.

Also known as Laissez Bronzer les Cadaveres, this film isn’t just something you watch; it’s something you experience.

French cinema tends to be odd, and this one is no different. Although, it’s hard to tell if the oddity is due to it being French or the film being an homage to classic spaghetti westerns from the 1970s.

There are tons of hard cuts, fast zooms, and tight close-ups of eyes giving a steely stare, not to mention everything creaks and sounds like two leather jackets rubbing together.

The story is somewhat hard to follow because there are many moving pieces. And most of the characters are not mentioned by name or are barely mentioned. Some characters are absent for most of the film, only to appear at an opportune moment.

The film follows a gang of thieves who steal a bunch of gold and head to an abandoned Mediterranean cliffside village where an eccentric and often naked artist named Luce lives. On their way, the criminals pick up two women and a little boy who are also heading to the abandoned village. One of the women is planning on confronting her husband, who is having an affair with Luce.

Soon, everyone grows suspicious of everyone, and when the police show up, the small village explodes into chaos as the criminals, police, and Luce get into a wild shootout.

You may think this sounds like a normal bang-bang, shoot-’em-up style Western, but you’d be wrong. 

First, the leader of the criminal, Rhino, ends up sleeping with Luce and then spends most of the gunfight naked.

One of the random women shows up and gets shot down in a hail of gunfire. But instead of blood and gore, the bullets shoot all her clothes off.

The major sequences in the movie have surreal scenes edited into them, containing a woman wholly shrouded in shadows who is naked and painted gold. She urinates on men buried up to their necks in the dirt.

There is a lot of this that feels similar to Sergio Leone’s films. But I assure you, there are things Sergio would never do.

Ultimately, this is a pretty solid movie that, if nothing else, is a truly unique viewing experience. And while it may not explicitly be a horror film, it’s undoubtedly adjacent to the genre. That’s good enough for me to recommend it to horror fans.

It’s best watched with a good pair of headphones, as it has a certain ASMR vibe.

Check out this unusual film today, now streaming for free on Tubi.