I wasn't exactly sure what to expect with this one, but can you blame me for wanting to see it based on the title alone? "If You Meet Sartana...Pray for Your Death." That title is so amazing that it becomes stupid, and then goes right back to amazing again. And they made a whole series of these. There's "I am Sartana...Trade Your Guns for a Coffin," "Light the Fuse...Sartana is Coming" and my personal favorite, "Have a Good Funeral, My Friend...Sartana Will Pay" among many others. Those sound like the titles of episodes of "Dragonball Z." I get such a charge out of that.
So who is this Sartana dude, anyway? Well, based on the film that I saw, I can say for a certainty that I'm not exactly sure. However, a few things are painfully clear to me. The first is that he wears black, as any self respecting western hero is wont to do. The second is that he is a very good shot. And the third is that, generally speaking, if you double cross him or choose to be evil around him in any way, roughly everyone around you in a twelve mile radius is going to die. I could be off on the numbers slightly, but it's a pretty good ballpark figure.
There's honestly not a whole lot I can say about "If You Meet Sartana," and that's not because I'm at a loss for words. The reason is because I'm honestly not sure what was going on at any point. And that's not because it was complicated. In fact it's dirt simple to a degree that you honestly stop caring pretty early on. All I can do is give the basic setup: There's a stage couch transporting gold from a bank. It gets attacked by bandits. Then Sartana (John Garko) shows up and -
EVERYONE DIES.
I'm not joking when I say that. After the three minute mark of the film, there are so many back stabs, betrayals, sudden massacres and seemingly random characters showing up only to be snuffed out to make way for the next ones that it's nearly impossible to keep track of who anyone is or what they're talking about or doing. Yeah there's some crooked bankers and an evil mayor and his wife and a lot of bandits and some Mexicans and William Berger with his piercing blue eyes, but that's not what's important. What IS important is the fact that roughly every five minutes we get another scene where the ground ends up littered with both shell casings and blood. That's how this movie rolls.
It quickly becomes tedious and frustrating considering that there's never time or reason to get to know any of the interchangeable characters since they all die before you even know who they were or what they were doing. Add to the fact that it's such a fool-proof guarantee that no matter which character you're talking about (besides Sartana), it's a certainty that they will be betrayed by whichever other character is in the same room as them, who will then in turn then be betrayed themselves and so on, and we come to the point where even trying to understand the plot becomes a complete waste of time. It really is an amazing display of revolving door violence.
It's like a game of Telephone, only with shooting the person who just whispered the phrase.
Do you want to know the most incredible thing about this movie, though? I swear this is going to blow your minds:
I liked it. I'm dead serious. This was a fun movie despite me having no concept of what was happening. It's almost like a bizarre experiment trying to test how much violence can be physically crammed into an hour and a half block of time, plot be damned, while remaining stone-faced serious for its entirety. Most movies that try that are attempting to be ironic or comedic, a la "Shoot 'Em Up" or "Machete" or the like. But this movie is just too badass to contain anything less than a body-count that would make Reb Brown nod slowly in admiration.
Watching it is almost like drifting off into another plane of existence composed entirely of six-shooters, flying bullets and sweaty guys squinting. It's watching the tide roll over your sandcastle. It's the Mythbusters cutting a station wagon in half with a half ton of termite. You're in it for the destruction. What the hell else do you want? And in terms of doing what it set out to do, "If You Meet Sartana" is very good at all that.
You can't see it, but just two feet to the left is like a hundred dead bodies. That was from before lunch.
This is a dynamic movie, and the steely-eyed, chisel-jawed John Garko (real first name Gianni) is very charismatic and brings a great physicality to the performance, although much credit should probably be given to the dude dubbing him. Most all the actors are great here, actually. My favorites were the eccentric old undertaker Dusty (Franco Pesco), the slimeball murderer Lasky (William Berger), and Mendoza (Fernando Sancho), the horrendously sweaty Mexican General straight out of "¡Three Amigos!" Those guys were awesome and a lot of fun to watch. In addition, this is shockingly well-filmed. The camera work is superb, throwing a lot of very creative shots and dramatic reveals at us which are far beyond what I would have normally expected, including a haunting first person perspective sequence which must be one of the best I've ever seen.
One of my favorite things about watching movies is being pleasantly surprised. One of my other favorite things is discovering films and new genres that I previously had been unfamiliar with. "If You Meet Sartana...Pray for Your Death" fulfills both of those things, and while I'm not holding out hope that I'll find many other films in the genre as well made or entertaining as this one, I will have to be checking more Italian Spaghetti Westerns out, because I had a good time.
This trailer is absurd.
THE BOTTOM LINE - I liked "If You Meet Sartana...Pray for Your Death." Whether or not you will is kind of up in the air, honestly. Liking cheesy westerns or drive-in, grindhouse fare is a start, I suppose. But if the thought of seeing the kind of movie that inspired the look and feel and violence of "Django Unchained" sounds like a good time to you, this probably will be.
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