Dir: Giuliano Carnimeo
Star: Gianni Garko, Frank Wolff, Klaus Kinski, Cameron Mitchell
a.k.a. I am Sartana, Your Angel of Death and Sono Sartana, il vostro becchino

After the success the previous year of If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death , there was enough interest to merit a franchise. Although there was a new director, Carnimeo replacing Gianfranco Parolini, Garko returned to reprise the title role. Kinski, who had a small part in the first movie, also came back, albeit playing a different character. He has a little more to do, this time round, and the film benefits as well from having a less-jumbled and better thought-out script.

The North Western Bank prides itself on being impregnable: “Our bounty killers are the best,” states one particularly threatening advertisement. This challenge is apparently accepted, with a raid on one branch liberating $300,000 from its vaults. The clothing worn by its leader causes blame to be laid at the feet of Sartana (Garko), who is surprised by this, since he had nothing to do with the robbery. He needs to find out who was really responsible – and fast, because as a result, a reward has been placed on his head, dead or alive. And attracting the attention of people owning names such as Butch Dynamite, Slim Shotgun and Tracey Three Aces, is never a good thing…

With the help of Buddy Ben (Wolff) – who may be playing both sides of this battle – and despite the ringleaders trying to cover their tracks, Sartana follows the perpetrators to Poker Falls, an early 20th-century version of Las Vegas. But before he even arrives there, he has to fend off those with an interest in bringing him in, including a local sheriff, as well as those with more mercenary aims. Leading the pack of the latter is the charmingly-named Hot Dead (Kinski), who is probably the worst gambler ever and needs the reward money to pay off his debts.

It’s a very well-written script. Garko only agreed to play the character if the story avoided the vengeance-seeking cliches, and this movie does a particularly good job of finding different territory to explore. Sartana comes off as remarkably smart: whenever he does something, it feels as if he already knows how people are going to react, and is ready to respond. He’s always one move ahead of everyone else, and that’s before he even takes his unique four-barrelled pistol out of its holster. When he does, the always calm and collected Sartana then proves that size doesn’t matter. Oh, and did I mention his fondness for close-up magic? No, seriously: the opening credits feature his card skills, and similar talents also come into play at various spots throughout.

“I don’t hurt anybody when I shoot. They die, right away…”
— Hot Dead

Not that he exactly needs them when going up against Hot Dead, with Mr. Dead being the world’s unluckiest man when it comes to gambling – to the extent that you wonder why he bothers at all. All three of the main scenes involving Kinski demonstrate this in one way or another: we first see him losing five grand, and using the wanted poster of Sartana as collateral for further bets. [For some reason, Hot Dead’s theme on the soundtrack starts off sounding curiously like a banjo version of Santa Claus is Coming to Town, before drifting off in its own direction over the final few notes]

The second has him, riding in a stagecoach on the trail of Sartana and, again, getting taken to the cleaners in a poker game. There is something of an excuse here though, as his opponent is getting help from his lady accomplice, who can see Dead’s cards and advise appropriately. Still, he recovers his losses when five bandits – “worth $1,500 each” – make an ill-advised attempt to rob the coach, resulting in their corpses being stacked on the top like luggage. The poker game then resumes, Dead admonishing his opponent, somewhat mournfully: “Don’t cheat. I’ll lose anyway.”

But it’s the final sequence which is the most fun, the only one where Garko and Kinski share time, and it’s so entertaining you wish it had been the focus of the entire movie. It helps that the dubbing for Dead is really good: he’s given a very soft-spoken, somewhat Southern drawl, which completely fits his elegant dress sense and, along with some of his mannerism, perhaps hints vaguely at an ancestor of metrosexuality. This encounter comes in Poker Falls, after Sartana has been pursued through the back alleys of the town. It’s nice, for once, to see these, since most Westerns of the time take place almost exclusively along their location’s main street.

Our hero is eventually driven back into a casino, and is about to be gunned down, when salvation arrives from an unlikely source. Hot Dead, who has at least switched from poker to a primitive slot-machine, guns down the attacker – albeit only because he wants the reward for himself. However, it turns out he owes Sartana five thousand dollars, and “I don’t want people saying I killed you to welsh on a debt.” They play a double-or-nothing hand (above), which Dead naturally loses, despite shooting bullet holes to turn Sartana’s ace into a three. “You only won because I was persecuted by misfortune,” he complains. But in a cool twist, the bounty hunter turns over the wanted poster to settle the debt – effectively abandoning his pursuit of Sartana and the $10,000 reward. Dead instead walks out, saying as he goes, “We’ll play another hand, some day.”

The film should have ended at that moment. Instead, it meanders to a rather ridiculous ending involving Sartana in a gun-battle at a church. This, bizarrely, was previously established as being the location of what seems to be an Old West version of fight club. This appears to take place in near-total darkness, though the outcome shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. The Sartana series would carry on, producing several, increasingly outlandish and Kinski-free entries. Sadly, the “Hot Dead” series I really wanted to see, never materialized.