Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name spawned imitations, variations and shameless rip-offs keen to emulate his success at the box office. Within months of A Fistful of Dollars’ release, Giuliano Gemma was playing Ringo, who was then followed by Franco Nero’s Django, Tony Anthony’s The Stranger and Gianni Garko’s Sartana – each providing their own twist on the Eastwood antihero, and each of them then subject to their own spate of unofficial sequels, spoofs and cash-ins.
Sartana tapped into more than just his Spaghetti Western predecessors – a mysterious figure, he has a spectral quality, aided by his Count Dracula-like cloak which also nods towards comic strip figure Mandrake the Magician, with whom he shares a penchant for card tricks. He takes pride in his appearance unlike the Eastwood’s dusty wanderer or Nero’s mud-caked drifter. And there’s a dose of James Bond too in his fondness for gadgetry and the droll sense of humour.
Unsurprisingly, this unique figure in the genre was treated to four official follow-ups. The Complete Sartana collects all five films, presented here in brand-new restorations: If You Meet Sartana... Pray for Your Death, I Am Sartana, Your Angel of Death, Have a Good Funeral My Friend... Sartana Will Pay, Light the Fuse... Sartana Is Coming, and Sartana’s Here... Trade Your Pistol for a Coffin, in which George Hilton replaced Garko in the lead role.
Crooked bankers plan an insurance swindle and hire a Mexican gang to steal the bank's gold but they also pay Lasky's gang to kill the Mexicans.
Sartana is falsely accused of robbing a bank and must find the real robbers and clear his name.
After witnessing a brutal massacre, the legendary hero Sartana is ready to do some investigating. Almost everyone in the tiny town of Indian Creek seems eager to buy up the property left behind by the murder victims, and one of them could well be behind the killings. The sheriff himself is not ab...
Wily roving gunslinger Sartana arrives in a small town and tries to find a hidden fortune of half a million dollars in gold and two million dollars in counterfeit money. Naturally, a bunch of other treacherous folks who include conniving widow Senora Manassas, shrewd fellow gunslinger Grand Full,...
Sartana, bounty hunter and gunfighter, witnesses the robbery of a shipment of gold. He finds his way into town where he meets with a lot of suspicious stares from the locals. He also meets with Samuel Spencer, who seems to own the company in this company town. The gold shipments are being stolen,...