As the Western began to enter the decade of its eventual and ultimate decline, there was still plenty of time for the returning scoundrels of the genre to get a few licks in before the entire genre called into a whisky bottle to wait out the 80s. One of these impossibly enigmatic bastards was Sabata; an impossibly slick trickster who, with his trick derringer, a team of bouncing sidekicks and the fact that he had been played by both Lee Van Cleef and Yul Brynner over his last two adventures, made him as virtually infallible as God himself. However, despite taking time off from this absurd world of camp gunslingers due to a scheduling conflict, Van Cleef returned to Sabata for his third and final adventure only to find that any semblance of grittiness the series may have had and now been fully replaced with the kind of self aware clowning usually reserved for Adam West’s Batman, or Roger Moore’s James Bond. After two very odd installments that shakily trod the line between cold blooded Western and goofy farce, had Sabata finally managed to outsmart even himself?
As every Sabata film to date has pretty much been a soft reboot with a lot of the same actors playing similar roles, it’s back to the drawing board again as we find our title character now as a former Confederate army officer who now makes his living working at a circus as a quick draw artist who lets paying customers try and stalk him while he effortlessly shoots them down with bullets made of harmless red paint, while somehow not grievously harming them during the experience (although it looks fucking close). Sabata’s circus eventually draws up to a small Texas town where he bumps into his former Lieutenant from the army who not only owes the gunfighter a cool $5000, but he runs a casino that’s so crooked a chiropractor couldn’t fix it. When the owner of Sabata’s circus makes off with all of the earnings, the dapper quickshot decides to stick around to claim his money from the shifty Lieutenant, but in doing so, he once again gets involved in a bigger score which could pay out large if it’s played right.
It seems that local land baron McIntock, is inflicting massive amounts of tax upon the town which he claims is for the town, but in actuality he’s pulling a massive scam and all the savings in the bank’s safe is counterfeit. Of course, that means the Irish baron has a massive horde of gold stashed somewhere and that is what Sabata is shooting for – both figuratively and literally. Joined by a typically makeshift gang made up of the Lieutenant, an acrobat and his partner who can make himself a human catapult and Bronco, a fat, boorish guys who seems to have little practical use; they target McIntock and his men.
From there, things get a little sketchy – and I’m not talking about the stakes. As Sabata plans and plots get ever more confusing, you’re never in doubt that he’ll come out on top, but managing to follow it? Good luck, pilgrim…
While the return of Lee Van Cleef to the Return Of Sabata provides yet another plot-optional and tonally questionable slice of Western a la Spaghetti, it seems that the free-wheeling sense of adventure that came with the series has well and truly backfired as what once was fun and silly has now become incredibly annoying. In fact, Return Of Sabata has become somewhat infamous thanks to its inclusion in the 1978 book, The Fifty Worst Films Of All Time, which may be a bit overly harsh, but also totally understandable if you were to compare Gianfranco Parolini’s six-shooting goof-fest with the likes of the best the genre has to offer.
As I worked my way through the frequently baffling, yet genuinely fun franchise, I was wondering when the series was finally going to collapse under the weight of its own, goofy bullshit and the best way I can think of to quickly describe this inevitable downfall is this: I made mistake of watching it before I went to bed after a long day and as a result, when it came to starting this review I was utterly confused about how much actually happened and how much had been conjured up in my sleep. As it turns out, I had remembered most of it accurately, but that didn’t mean that any of the fucking thing wasn’t incredibly obnoxious all the way through. In fact, we can use one of Sabata’s bizarrely loyal acolytes as a perfect metaphor: in the previous film, one of them had a neat trick where he would drop a weighted ball bearing in a hollowed out portion in his shoe and he would launch it accurately at an unsuspecting enemy’s temple – however, here he has the much more ungainly method of lying on his back with his legs in the air as he stretches the elastic of the catapult between his splayed limbs with his teeth to achieve the same result, but without any of the dignity.
While the first two films got pretty strange, they still worked as amusing exaggerations of the Spaghetti Western as a whole, but comparing the original Sabata with Return is much like comparing The Spy Who Loved Me with the 1967 version of Casino Royale insofar that it’s now become a garish, unfunny parody of a parody that makes no sense and worse yet, it isn’t particularly funny either.
The plot is… negligible (assuming it even exists) and at times so much random shit is occurring I’m still genuinely unsure if the film employs too much story or too little. Van Cleef sleepwalks through the whole thing and if he actually knows what the hell is supposed to be happening during the story, he does a damn good job of disguising it as spends the entirety of the film looking like he’s just waiting to smirk smugly on cue. Everything else just whooshes by without leaving a single mark. You can’t possibly be on the edge of your seat when danger rears its head because you just know that Sabata has already figured it out around two scenes back, even if it was only cooked up one scene ago. What’s worse, the reveals that he was once again has outsmarting his foes all along has now become so tiresome, you start to long for one of the colourless, boring villains to actually succeed in putting a bullet in that smarmy grin just to end the film quicker.
So is Return Of Sabata so bad as to warrant inclusion of a book about the worst films of all time? Probably not and no doubt there are those out there who will adore just how fucking weird and inconsistent it all is with people taking cover from gunfire behind a drum (Because percussion instruments are known for being bulletproof, right?) and Sabata faking his death once again in the final reel in order to squeeze in one last excruciating grin before the credits cut him off.
Don’t get me wrong, I have a high tolerance and a great love for camp movies that play fast and loose with reality and common sense, but once the impossibly perky (ie. annoying) theme tune kicked to signify that this confusing cartoon had finally finished, I was wishing that both Sabata and Van Cleef hadn’t bothered to return at all.
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