The Italian-produced, Spanish-shot, and internationally cast cowboy movies of the 1960s, known on these shores as spaghetti Westerns, have been admired and appreciated by Japanese film buffs (who refer to them as “macaroni Westerns”) for four decades. The fact that Sergio Leone’s initial international success, 1964’s “A Fistful of Dollars,” was lifted from Japanese filmmaking maestro Akira Kurosawa’s 1961 “Yojimbo” (Kurosawa had borrowed his own influential both-sides-against-the-middle plot structure from the American detective author Dashiell Hammett) offered Japanese audiences a familiar and flattering pop-culture reflection. The low-budget Italian filmmaking practice of relying on strong visuals rather than crudely dubbed-in dialogue to tell a story insured that Japanese audiences did not become lost in the translation.

Takashi Miike, the iconic director of “Ichi the Killer,” “Dead or Alive,” and “Audition” and Japan’s king of breakneck-paced grotesquerie, belongs to the generation of Nipponese film lovers raised on the macaroni Western diet. Like his friend and booster Quentin Tarantino, Mr. Miike is particularly enamored of Sergio Corbucci’s 1966 film “Django,” about a gunslinger caught in a small-town duel between the Ku Klux Klan and a gang of Mexican bandits. Mr. Tarantino has acknowledged that the notorious ear-cutting scene in “Reservoir Dogs” was an homage to a similar sadistic amputation in the Corbucci film.

For his part, Mr. Miike has taken a considerably more ambitious step toward saluting “Django” by directing and co-writing “Sukiyaki Western Django,” a remake-cum-valentine to Corbucci’s muddy, blood-soaked original.

In a prologue to the film, which opens Friday, a Zen-possessed master gunfighter played by Mr. Tarantino sets up the anachronistic narrative conceit of “Sukiyaki Western Django.” An unnamed drifter played by Hideaki Ito arrives in a 12th-century Japanese mountain town where two groups of outlaw samurai pistoleros war over control of the territory, and a treasure hidden somewhere within.

Mr. Miike has chosen to burden his mostly Japanese-speaking cast with English dialogue pronounced phonetically. What begins as a bizarre artistic pothole becomes, over the course of 98 minutes, a conceptual impact crater of nearly unmeasurable depth. Two small armies of otherwise capable and accomplished Japanese thespians struggle to deliver such self-conscious, overwrought lines as “Keep it in your pants, lily liver,” in a language that, like Mr. Miike himself, few on-screen (with the exception of Mr. Tarantino) speak with any confidence or fluency. The results quickly become acutely embarrassing.

This discomfiture extends considerably as both outlaw groups are costumed in attire more appropriate for a showdown between Duran Duran and Adam and the Ants than bad guys and worse guys. A turgid, alternately somber and facetious spate of plot contrivances from the original “Django,” involving a beautiful widow and various unsettled scores, occasionally comes into focus through a frantic hail of violent confrontations and outright massacres. But the hastily staged and drearily derivative bar fights, dismemberments, and showdowns in “Sukiyaki Western Django” are no match for a script that offers little more than tongue-tied machismo, nor do they speak well of a still-born design ethos that suggests the foppish on-screen outlaws really should have mounted their horses sidesaddle.

“Sukiyaki Western Django” seems less a feature-length salute to the Corbucci film than a slumming pass at the superficial genre tourism and creatively bankrupt cinematic name-dropping that have often been the rickety foundation of Mr. Tarantino’s own directing work. The director-director mutual admiration society is, in fact, so pronounced that Mr. Miike even includes an anime introduction of a female gunfighter called Bloody Benton, who parallels a similar female assassin’s animated origin story digression in “Kill Bill: Vol. 1.”

Even at their most brazenly unoriginal, spaghetti Westerns such as Corbucci’s “Django” were the result of an intricate mesh of influences, now long-vanished marketplace idiosyncrasies, and a postwar Italian filmmaker-training system that was considerably more rigorous than that received by working in a video store. Like most of his peers, Corbucci had, by the time of his revered 1966 film, toiled away in Rome and Spain, first as an assistant and then as a writer of “giallo” movies (think “spaghetti-horror”) and the helmer of crackpot low-budget sword-and-sandal films such as “Goliath and the Vampires.”

“Sukyaki Western Django” reduces Mr. Miike, a prolific and often strikingly original filmmaker, to the level of fanboy auteurs like Mr. Tarantino by ardently yet arrogantly romancing the most superficial aspects of a movie canon whose roots go deeper than anyone involved in this film’s creation felt obliged to delve. Somehow frenzied and yet sluggishly labored, this unengaging, noxious folly is closer to a defecation than a dedication.