For feck's sake! Those sleazy business owners are at it again! Just like Fistful of Lead and I Am Sartana, Pray for Your Death, these guys are setting up the local bank to be ripped off for their own gain. It's a pity that Sabata tracked down the bad guys who nicked the loot, shot everyone involved, then brought the stolen safe back to town. Now he's blackmailing the bankers for a cool thirty grand!And like some Italian genre film hell that keeps repeating itself over and over again, the bankers are played by the same guys who usually play the bankers, the sheriff is played by the same guy who usually plays the sheriff in these films, Romano Puppo is obviously one of the bad guys and Van Cleef's gadget carrying Sabata character looks suspiciously like Gianni Garko's gadget carrying Sartana character, whom is based on Lee Van Cleef's Colonel Mortimer from For A Few Dollars More.What makes this film cooler than the eight or nine hundred other Westerns with the same plot and cast produced by Italy that year is that it's got William Berger as a banjo playing bell covered hippy, a mute acrobat called Alleycat, a gun that fires from both ends and an explosion filled finale to rival all the explosion filled finales of eighties films such as Die Hard and Commando! Can I further sell by telling you that Berger's banjo contains a rifle?It also sidesteps the good guys figuring out who the bad guys are and goes straight for the businessmen trying to destroy Sabata by using bounty hunters, one of whom tells Sabata that he's going to kill him the moment he stops laughing (spoiler: Sabata shoots him), and another turns up as fake priest with a pretty poor ruse for taking Sabata out.It's all nonsense, but it's fun nonsense, and the theme tune sounds like Ween's Vallejo. To quote a Youtube comment: "That creepy homo with the comb over is the best bad guy ever."

The ultra-cool Lee Van Cleef stars as the title character, Sabata, an enigmatic gunslinger dressed all in black. He rides into a Texas town where he gets involved with bank robbers, corrupt businessmen, and a banjo player he has history with. Stylish and fun Spaghetti Western. It may not be up to the work of Leone or Corbucci but it's still a good one. Van Cleef is awesome, as always. He's one of those actors whose screen presence is so great I would watch him read the phone book. William Berger, Ignazio Spalla, and Aldo Canti are all fun. Franco Ressel plays the bad guy and looks like a cross between Buster Keaton and Conrad Bain. Great soundtrack from Marcello Giombini. There were two more Sabata films after this that weren't bad but not as good as this one. Van Cleef returns for the third one but is replaced by Yul Brynner in the second.

Sabata (Lee Van Cleef) rescues a fortune in stolen government money from a gang of burglars and goes up against the big-shot who orchestrated the heist, as well as a bunch of shifty locals, when he offers to keep his mouth shut for a price.An attempt to cash in on Van Cleef's characters from For A Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly, the character of Sabata is a bit of a Colonel Mortimer clone.Lee Van Cleef is pretty cool, the direction fine, and the production values above average. The real problem with the film lies in the script, which isn't as exciting as it could (or should) have been. It's just a little too talky and uninvolved.As far as the sequels go, I'd say skip them, unless you're a hardcore Italian western fan. The Sabata series is probably the worst of all the healthy-budgeted spaghetti westerns. It's a shame too.

I would watch practically any "Spaghetti Western" with Lee Van Cleef because even though the writing was not always great in all the films (such as his two Sabata films), his menacing screen presence was amazing--making him one of the most frightening characters in Westerns. While I definitely preferred him in his films he did with Clint Eastwood (FISTFUL OF DOLLARS, FOR A FEW DOLLARS MORE and THE GOOD THE BAD AND THE UGLY), there is enough eye-popping Van Cleef action to make his fans satisfied. Here, he looked and acted much like the characters in these great films with his piercing eyes, black outfit and amazing skills that were super-human.Unfortunately, at the same time, there were a few major impediments in this film. First, the weird and distracting characters such as 'Banjo' and 'the Alley Cat' did not help improve the movie but detracted from Van Cleef's menacing persona. It's hard to keep focused on the demon-like Van Cleef when these other two are chewing every scene they are in and their on-screen antics are just plain weird. Second, the plot is very convoluted and more complicated than was necessary. Much of this was because of all the weirdos, but much of it was just poor writing relative to the great Italian Westerns made both immediately before and after SABATA. Finally, while it wasn't always bad, the musical score was certainly not up to the standards of an Ennio Morricone score (he did the music for the more famous Italian Westerns). Instead, it ranged from really awful (the opening song in particular) to reminiscent of Morricone--but never his equal.So what you have left is a slightly better than mediocre film thanks only to the screen presence of Lee Van Cleef. Otherwise, try some other Italian Western--almost all of them are better.