Go back in time. Imagine you're a pre-teen again, home sick on a Saturday afternoon. You're sweating on the couch, watching TV. As you drift in and out of fevered sleeps, A Fistful of Dollars gives way to Yojimbo, but your brain can't tell where one begins and the other ends and they melt together in the swamp of your grey matter.

The movie you've hallucinated is Sukiyaki Western Django.

One of the four films that bizarre genius Takashi Miike directed in 2007, Sukiyaki Western Django is both an homage to and a commentary on the spaghetti western and chambara genres. In modern dance music terms it would be called a mash-up, but the film has more going on than simply overlaying western elements on a samurai story. Miike's made a movie that's almost completely about the movies, to the point that the film happily smashes through the fourth wall to acknowledge us as we watch it.

The film's most obvious forebear is Yojimbo - a nameless gunfighter wanders into a town that has been all but destroyed by two rival criminal gangs looking to get their hands on the town's legendary gold treasure. But onto this chambara frame is draped the signifiers of the spaghetti western - long, dirty dusters and six guns. At first the conceit seems silly, especially as the Japanese cast delivers their lines in seemingly phonetic English (apparently the film played with subtitles at Toronto last year, but I saw it without. You do have to pay attention to make out the Engrish at times), but eventually you realize that Miike is not making a samurai movie or a gunslinger movie but rather a movie about the weird dreamspace both genres occupy. They're two sides of the same coin - hardly a new revelation to anyone who has seen a Kurosawa film or The Magnificent Seven  - to the point that this story could easily have been told in either genre. But the brilliance of Miike is how he tells it with both.

Just in case the line hasn't been crossed enough by playing out a medieval Japanese story with American western tropes, Miike really goes nuts by having Quentin Tarantino appear in the film. He opens the movie on a stage - a very obvious stage, with a cardboard sun hanging from a wire next to a simply painted cardboard Mount Fuji, and it seems like the movie we're watching is a story Tarantino is telling... until he shows up in the movie as an older version of that character who flashes back to the opening scene where he began telling the story. As part of the audacious metacommentary of the film, that flashback plays purely as a Quentin Tarantino movie circa Kill Bill, replete with an anime sequence and a moment where a character is introduced in freeze frame with her name appearing on screen (of course it's an ass-kicking female being introduced in the flashback - this is Tarantinoesque, after all!). Tarantino's character Ringo explains why he named his son Akira - because he was always an anime otaku.

The film itself also embraces anime beyond the actual animated segment; Miike begins inserting cartoon noises, and some of the character designs seem like anime figures come to life. It's all part of the film's stew of style and genre, like the titular Japanese dish Miike has put everything into his pot to find out how they taste together. I'm sure there's more I'm missing; if ever a film called for a Pop Up Video style commentary, it's this one.

A movie as interested in doing strange things as this one won't always work. There are stretches of Sukiyaki Western Django where the film simply drags, although to show my uncultured gaijin worldview, I've found that most samurai movies get more than a little draggy in the middle. But even when things get slow, Miike keeps enough on screen to reward your attention. Even the most boring of scenes take place in places that seamlessly merge medieval Japanese design with the look of a western - from the ornately carved swinging wooden doors of the saloon to Tarantino's steampunk wheelchair, Sukiyaki Western Django offers a visual delight from the beginning to the end.

What it doesn't offer is a Miike bloodbath. While not one of his 'safe' films, like The Great Yokai War, Sukiyaki Western Django is only as violent as you'd expect a western to be - lots of squib hits, but not much by way of over the top mayhem. Even his trademark perversity isn't on display here; there's a rape scene, but it's downright subdued and classy. I thought for sure that when you got Miike and Tarantino together, even with one of them as an actor, arterial spray would follow, but instead Miike seems to have decided to keep his violence on the level of what you might see in the old Eastwood films, and not quite as much as you'd see in the original Django.

By the way, I won't tell you what the full connection is between this movie and Django  beyond the fact that Miike uses that film's theme and a coffin containing a gatling gun shows up about halfway through the picture. The connection was one I found surprising and funny, especially because it serves as one final metajoke. That also means that people not familiar with the Django films don't have to worry about coming into some kind of impossible to follow homage or something - the knowledge that there was an Italian western with that title is pretty much all you need to know.

I recently rewatched I'm Not There with the audio commentary and was amazed at how the movie is a work of hyperlink cinema; Todd Haynes made a masterpiece of experimental filmmaking that also serves as a jumping off point for a personal exploration of Bob Dylan. Unfortunately, if you're not into Bob Dylan or experimental film, I'm Not There, while wonderful in a pure cinema kind of way, won't have much for you. Sukiyaki Western Django is also a hyperlink movie, one that rewards going beyond the surface and becoming familiar with the subject matter in a deep way, but it is even purer cinema - it's cinema about cinema - but it's also exceptionally accessible on a surface level, even if that surface level is 'Let's get really stoned and watch this weird, crazy midnight movie.' In fact, midnight movie is the perfect way to decribe Sukiyaki Western Django - walking out I obviously thought about the great samurai and spaghetti western influences, but it was El Topo that stuck in my head. Sukiyaki Western Django might be the movie that Jodorowsky would have made if he had movies on his mind more than Eastern spirituality.

Funny and weird and unmistakably Miike, I understand why this film divided audiences when it played Toronto last year. For people who don't know much about film and are just looking for wacky bursts of 'cool' mayhem, this film will disappoint. For others the movie will feel pretentious. But for the right people this film is a shot of pure cinematic adrenaline, a love letter carved into the skin of the one you love.

8.5 out of 10