@PlaceboEffect - there's a reason why "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly" gets mentioned a lot. It is, quite simply, possibly the best western ever made, undoubtedly in the top 10, and a splendid movie in any genre. Obviously if you're completely unfamiliar with spaghetti westerns, Sergio Leone is a great place to start because his westerns are superb (apart from "A Fistful Of Dynamite", which is a bit dodgy by his standards, though still pretty good by anybody else's). Leone is possibly the best director ever when it comes to composing his shots like paintings, and nobody else could have gotten away with the finale of "The Good, The Bad And The Ugly", where three men stand perfectly still for five minutes, and somehow it's exciting. Incidentally, hardly anybody catches on that Clint Eastwood's character, mysteriously referred to as "Blondie" (I assume they thought up the names before they cast the actors, otherwise how could Mario Brega be playing somebody called Wallace?), isn't the same guy we see in the other two films, both if which take place over 10 years later. Because if he is, how did he completely lose the ability to use a rifle superhumanly well between films?

@Cedar - I'm afraid "Blazing Saddles" doesn't count. A spaghetti western is defined as a western made by an Italian production company, almost always in the sixties or early seventies, and almost always shot in the Almeria region of Spain, which looks a lot like the American southwest, is much nearer to Italy, and is far cheaper to make movies in. Also, since Mexicans are of partly hispanic ancestry, Spanish extras make very convincing Mexicans. Watch any western shot in Israel to see why this matters. There are Jewish westerns, honest! Though for some reason, not very many.

However, "Blazing Saddles" does owe a huge debt to spaghetti westerns, many of which were comedies that combined the usual western tropes with juvenile slapstick and sometimes scatological humor. At that time, for some unknown reason, the Italian movie industry could pull off absolutely anything so long as it was absurdly over the top. I recall a spaghetti western I saw ages ago, the name of which escapes me, in which the hero spends the first part of the film pretending to be effeminately gay for no reason at all, and the rest of it defeating most of his foes by hitting them in the face with a frying-pan, even though he has a gun and is very good with it. There's also a running gag where a minor character repeatedly lands face-first in shit, some of it human, and one of the few fatalities occurs as a result of a stick of dynamite stuck up somebody's arse.

Comedy spaghetti westerns are best exemplified by "They Call Me Trinity" and its sequel "They Still Call Me Trinity", starring Terence Hill and Bud Spencer (not their real names - unconvincingly pretending to be American was a common trait among Italian western actors), two men who crop up a great deal in this genre. Terence Hill even managed to co-star with Henry Fonda in "My Name Is Nobody", which may or may not have been partly directed by an uncredited Sergio Leone.

I haven't seen "Django Unchained" because a while ago I became allergic to Tarantino films. Once the man himself crossed the line that made him preternaturally annoying (if Buddhism is telling the truth, QT was one of those nasty little dogs that constantly emit high-pitched yaps in his previous incarnation; and having learnt nothing, he'll be one next time too; or possibly plankton), it became hard to listen to any line written by him without imagining him saying it in his nasty little yappy-dog look-at-me voice. Though if the reviews of "The Hateful Eight" are anything to go by, he's well on his way to an implosive onanistic ego blowout, and will shortly become a nasty mess of interest only to the underpaid workers who have the terrible job of scraping Quentin Tarantino's massive autoerotic ejaculations off the sidewalks of Beverly Hills (who are almost certainly contractually obliged to be called Derek and Clive).

Anyway, now that an outdated and rather obscure pop culture icon called Django is an unexpected hit again, it might be worth looking at that old movie called "Django", in which the hero isn't black, but he does have a machine-gun with which he mows down the KKK. Plus, by an amazing coincidence, severed ear torture (which somehow manages to be funny). And, for no reason at all, women wrestling in mud.

Watching old movies isn't terribly fashionable nowadays, but the thing is, unlike sci-fi or horror where the clumsy not-so-special effects look laughable today, westerns are about people in a landscape which actually exists, so the best of them have production values identical with what you'd see in a similar movie made today. They're only "old-fashioned" because in those days, certain subject-matter was taboo. But in Italy, nothing other than explicit sex was off-limits, so spaghetti westerns have a refreshingly uninhibited quality which revived the moribund western genre in the same way that "Watchmen" and "The Dark Knight Returns" turned superhero comics into a thing people cared about again just when they were about to die. A lot of these films are absolute dross, but there are plenty of nuggets too, many of them unexpected. Jack Palance surviving crucifixion by Apaches because his pet hawk ate his hand? Yes, really! And after that, it gets sillier...