Light the Fuse... Sartana is Coming

Giuliano Carnimeo and Gianni Garko's Italian western series concludes with Light the Fuse... Sartana is Coming, yet another entry that starts off strong before rambling off into complete nonsense. Light the Fuse's opening act briefly swings the character back towards spectral unease by having him saunter into shot just as a couple of corrupt peace keepers murder a Judge. Naturally, Sartana intervenes before turning himself in at the nearest penitentiary - a collection of barred, blistering pits, dug into the earth then filled up with lawbreakers.

This prison setting allows Carnimeo to explore a previous untapped knack for cruelty. Sartana is urinated on after asking for water and an uncooperative inmate is doused with acid in an attempt to loosen his tongue. Although not unusual for Italian Westerns, this sadism is quite surprising for Sartana, a shoot-out series that doesn't otherwise dwell on injury or the application of pain. Gunshots, rather than blowing meaty holes through men, tend to either strike them dead or, when somebody is making a point, graze their skin.

Unfortunately this tougher framing doesn't hold, soon Sartana is breezing through the usual double-crosses, far more excited about a shuffling automaton named Alfie - a wind-up toy designed to look like a racist caricature of an Apache warrior containing, variously, a lighter, a flamethrower and, finally, dynamite. An assassin with a custom, silenced Derringer stalks the town where Sartana is conducting his investigation but, somehow, the two never really cross paths to any significant degree. For the finale, Sartana makes good on a promise (from earlier in the film) to open a music hall. The man in black unpacking a pipe organ-cum-howitzer to conduct a symphony of carnage for an advancing, hapless, cavalry.

Have a Good Funeral, My Friend... Sartana Will Pay

After missing a sequel, Gianni Garko is back for Have a Good Funeral, My Friend... Sartana Will Pay. Sporting a blonde horseshoe moustache and a much paler, sickly complexion, the actor now looks more like a boozy, middle-aged Rutger Hauer and less a time displaced Iain Glen. Despite Garko's reappearance, Giuliano Carnimeo's film still has no room for Sartana as a supernatural proposition, instead Have a Good Funeral's portrayal leans further into the assured, high-stakes gambler persona that previous sequels corrected to. Sartana is also firmly grounded by, not just the film's gold rush back-stabbing, but - in a first for the series - human, sexual desire.

Sartana's influence on Daniela Giordano's Abigail Benson is such that the heiress takes to emulating the cowboy's ostentatious-but-grim outfit in a combative coda that suggests a Sister Sartana spin-off that, unfortunately, never came to be. Despite this missed opportunity, Have a Good Funeral is still one of the better Sartana entries. Carnimeo's film demonstrates a firmer grasp on its upheavals, deploying twists and treachery in ways that excite rather than baffle. As always, everyone is on the make, from George Wang's Fu-Manchu-in-repose casino owner to Indian Creek's bank managers and law enforcement. Bounty Killers are incompetents, smuggled in from rival productions, as if to prove Sartana's supremacy over the Spaghetti Western prairie. As always, Garko's gunslinger navigates these dangers with ease, gleefully forking out for increasingly flowery burials as the bodies pile up.

Sartana's Here... Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin

Sartana's Here.. Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin starts well enough, the first act detailing the gunslinger's efforts to free a mother and her child from the grip of an overbearing bandit. This vignette, knowingly replaying beats from A Fistful of Dollars (and Yojimbo before that), represents a simplicity of purpose and morality largely absent in this series' sequels. Sartana is briefly allowed to torment and tighten the noose, again a phantom that operates slightly out of step with reality. Original Sartana actor Gianni Garko is replaced by George Hilton for this instalment, the new actor bringing an ironic, detached energy to the incessant betrayals. Hilton's face is gaunt and sunburnt, closer to a Carlos Ezquerra drawing of Walton Goggins than Garko's Eastwood by way of Iain Glen.

This substitution helps massage the decision to move the series away from an Old Testament haunting to conniving, invincible nonsense; Hilton much more able to traverse the farcical twists (including several clashes with the competitor brand that poached If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death director, Gianfranco Parolini) that Trade Your Pistol throws his way. Although Tito Carpi's leisurely screenplay lets him down, director Giuliano Carnimeo again proves himself adept at manufacturing up stress situations. Conspiring with editor Ornella Micheli and cinematographer Stelvio Massi, Carnimeo uses the brief moments where Sartana isn't present to press in on the vulnerable. Nosing into their hopeless scuffles with gold rush heavies - the camera rocking nervously in the face of advancing cruelty.

I am Sartana, Your Angel of Death

Compared to its predecessor, I am Sartana, Your Angel of Death is an immediately less engaging proposition thanks, in no small part, to the decision to abandon the previous film's supernatural qualities. The ghostly hindrance seen in If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death is replaced in this sequel by a more fallible, human interpretation. Framed for a crime he did not commit, this Sartana not only frets about his good name being tarnished, he also finds himself at a distinct disadvantage when fending off the bounty killers who pursue him - particularly José Torres' tracker, Shadow.

This sense of impending doom only holds for the first act or so, likewise Sartana's evil doppelganger commits no further bank robberies; Giuliano Carnimeo's film apparently completely uninterested in piling on either pressure or tension. While it's laudable that Angel of Death is not constructed to simply replay or remix Gianni Garko's first stab at the role, it is outright bizarre that Tito Carpi and Enzo Dell'Aquila's screenplay does next to nothing with its new, assailed premise. Pray for Your Death's crisscrossing betrayals and paranormal abilities are saved for this film's conclusion, by which time Angel of Death has long since twisted itself to a point of numbed absurdity.

While the film's plot makes little attempt to wring anything fresh from Sartana's loss of control over his image, director Carnimeo and cinematographer Giovanni Bergamini use camera movement to simulate a world slipping out of whack. The frame frequently collapses when describing gunshot injuries, sinking to the floor with the pirouetting dead. Punch outs are even better. The camera either placed directly behind an aggressor so that their arm travels right up the centre of the frame before colliding with a face or, in a later beating, the actual target of these haymakers. Punches are hurled directly at the audience, the fingers of the fist filling the entire screen. Our perspective rocks and recoils with each head-shaking impact - an agitated energy otherwise absent from I am Sartana, Your Angel of Death.