Movie Review: If You Meet Sartana, Pray for Your Death (1968)

I love a good spaghetti western. I think of every genre (or subgenre) of film, the one with the highest floor for me is the spaghetti western. I don’t think these movies have to do a whole lot right for me to truly enjoy.

That having been said, the first Sartana film is far from bad, but it’s not the masterpiece that The Great Silence or A Fistful of Dollars is. Sartana is very much your prototypical spaghetti western hero — mysterious, a man of few words, but also incredibly violent.

He’s definitely a character you can work a film around, but I’m not sure it won’t get tiring in all the other Sartana movies (which I’m 100% planning on seeing, if nothing else for the incredible titles such as Have a Good Funeral, My Friend…Sartana Will Pay).

Klaus Kinski’s great, too, but that should go without saying.

I think this is really just an incredible score away from being one of the classic spaghetti westerns. The score isn’t bad, but Piero Piccioni is no Ennio Morricone.

Rating: 7/10