Return of Sabata

Return of Sabata opens with such promise. Lee Van Cleef's gunslinger clambers around a warped fun house, blasting assassins to acid rock licks while a committee of evil green overlords look on, impassive. Van Cleef prowls this cluttered, canted arena like a tiger, the opposing gunmen full of nerves and trepidation. They back away at his approach, Sabata's presence so powerful that the snap of his revolver reload is enough to extinguish candles. Disappointingly, this surreal touch is quickly punctured, then outright abandoned, replaced with a scattershot plot centred around Sabata's reflex objection to sales tax.

Gianfranco Parolini's final stab at Sanata is awful, a film full of dangling threads and character relationships based on shallow, physical proximity rather than anything organic or, God forbid, logical. Van Cleef, presumably bored with the role, catapults himself into full-on parody. This is the unbeatable cowboy reinterpreted as a gurning lech - Sentenza pulling comedy faces, hurling nerds at flustered showgirls then striding along a narrative path that amounts to running circuits around the saloon that houses his best girl, Annabella Incontrera's underused Maggie. Excruciatingly discursive, Return of Sabata's main contribution to the character's collapsing mythos is a few peculiar notes of violent bigotry - Sabata proudly fought for the Confederacy and also displays an open contempt for gentlemen of Irish descent.