After waiting two decades for a sequel, in 1987 Franco Nero and director Nello Rossati (Alien Terminator) finally delivered the sequel that Italian Western fans had been craving (and had kind of received with thirty unofficial sequels).

Where was Sergio Corbucci, the director of the original, who had co-written the sequel and had initially agreed to direct it? Well, Django Strikes Again was dreamed up and produced in parallel with Duccio Tessari’s Tex and the Lord of the Deep. The hope was that this would lead to a revival of the Western in Italy. But when Ted failed, Corbucci bowed out, possibly not wanting to soil the legacy of what is probably his best-loved film.

Nero had already entered in El Topo territory in Keoma. This feels like a similar tone — at least at first — as Django has left behind the life of the gunfighter — indeed, the movie starts by mentioning all of the cowboys that are dead (that’s William Berger in a cameo) — to become a monk. Yet when he learns from an old lover that he has a daughter that he has never met and that she has become a prisoner of El Diablo Orlowsky (Christopher Connelly in his last role), he has to pick up his guns one more time.

I’ll be blunt. This movie is a pale shadow of the original. That said, there are moments of greatness here, like El Diablo’s butterfly obsession, Django burying his machinegun in a grave with his name on it, Rodrigo Obregón from the Andy Sidaris movies as a henchman, a small role for Donald Pleasence and Nero acting like Stallone as he single-handledly blazes away an entire army with that gigantic gun.

Oh well. At least the ending, where Connelly is ripped to shreds by the slaves he’s treated so wrong rise up and tear him apart as if they were zombies, is pretty great.

How weird is it that I can point to at least two fake Django films that are way better than this, though?

Massacre Time was originally supposed to be an Italian-Spanish co-production with Ringo co-star George Martin playing Tom Corbett. According to Troy Howarth’s book Splintered Visions: Lucio Fulci and His Films, the Spanish side withdrew their involvement and funding after Fulci refused to tone down the script’s violence.

Fulci instead cast Nero at the suggestion of his assistant director, Giovanni Fago, based on his look from the production stills of the recently completed Django. George Hilton was cast in the other lead and had difficulty dealing with Fulci as a director.

This was written by Fernando Di Leo, who co-wrote A Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, A Pistol for Ringo and The Return of Ringo, with the title taken from Franco Enna’s book Tempo di Massacaro.

Speaking of the violence in this film, Fulci would later claim that he pushed Di Leo to make the film as violent as possible, which Di Leo refuted, stating “I don’t know anything about Fulci’s claims that he insisted that I write a very violent movie. Fulci only directed well what was already on the page. The script was good and ready and he liked it the way it was, otherwise I’d have complied to his demand if there had been any”.

Nero and Hilton play the Corbett brothers, with Tom (Nero) coming back to their hometown to find it under the iron rule of Mr. Scott (Giuseppe Addobbati, billed as John MacDouglas for American audiences; he’s also in Nightmare Castle) and his son, Junior Scott (Nino Castelnuovo, Strip Nude for Your Killer).

Linda Sini is also in this. She also is in Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling as Bruno’s mother.

Although an English-language version was made, AIP made their own dub of the film and released it as The Brute and the Beast, making it one of only two Italian Westerns released in the U.S. by the studio (the other is God Forgives… I Don’t!). In the UK, this is known as Colt Concert and in Denmark and West Germany, it was released as Djangos seksløber er lov (Django’s Six-Runner Is Legal) and Django – Sein Gesangbuch war der Colt (Django – His Hymnbook was the Colt). My favorite alternate title has to be what it was called in Hong Kong, Ghost Gun God Whip, and Spain, Las Pistolas Cantaron su Muerte (y fue Tiempo de Matanza) (The Pistols Sang His Death (and it was Time for the Killing).

You can watch this on YouTube.

Back for the third film, Lee Van Cleef is Sabata again in a movie known in Italy as È Tornato Sabata … Haichiusoun’altra Volta (Sabata is Back … You’re Finished Again). Now, our hero is working for a traveling carnival as a trickshot. However, when he runs into an old war acquaintance who owes him $5,000, well…people get shot.

Sabata ends up fighting an entire town that puts a tax on everything he loves — gambling, drinking and prostitution. Ignazio Spalla plays another friend, this time named Bronco, and Aldo Canti plays an acrobat who aids our black-wearing protagonist.

As his theme song says, “If you wanna get money and if you wanna get rich and if you wanna get life, you gotta be a son of a…” And so Sabata is. That same song also refers to him as a nine-fingered man. That’s actually true, as Van Cleef lost a large portion of his middle finger while building a playhouse for his daughter.

Director Gianfranco Parolini would go on to make God’s Gun and Yeti: Giant of the 20th Century, a movie that I definitely need to get to.

This movie ended up in The Fifty Worst Films Of All Time by Harry Medved with Randy Dreyfuss. Over the years, I’ve come to love so many of the movies in this book, including Airport 75, The Ambushers, Godzilla vs. Hedorah, The Last Movie, Robot Monster, The Omen, The Story of Mankind and Valley of the Dolls.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

Known in Italy as Indio Black, sai che ti dico: Sei un gran figlio di (Indio Black, you know what I’m going to tell you… You’re a big son of a…), this is the second Sabata entry for director Gianfranco Parolini but switches out the lead role of Sabata.

This time, Yul Brynner is the man in black, taking over for Lee Van Cleef.

Set in Mexico under the rule of Emperor Maximilian I, Sabata/Indio Black is hired by the Señor Ocaño (Franco Fantasia, Zombi) to steal some gold, but our hero and his partners Escudo (Ignazio Spalla, who is in every Sabata movie) and Ballantine (Dean “Red Elvis” Reed, who defected to East Germanty a few years after this movie and continued his singing and acting career) soon learn that they’ve only got sand. Colonel Skimmel has the gold and their money, so they set out for revenge.

It’s not bad, but nowhere near as good as the original. That said, it wasn’t intended to be a sequel, but the name change was because Sabata did so well in the U.S.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime.

I love Hillybillys In a Haunted House, but I had no idea that this film came out before it. It features Ferlin Husky as Woody Wetherby and Mamie Van Doren (!) as Boots Malone (Joi Lansing would play the role in the sequel).

Woody is a Tennessee wood hauler — feels like a song coming on — who inherits a Las Vegas casino only to discover that he’s also been gifted with a $38,000 debt from some shady sources. How shady? They have Richard “Jaws” Kiel as their enforcer.

Luckily, his Aunt Clementine (Billie Bird, Mrs. Feldman from Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol) has an idea to save the day.

Don Bowman plays Woody’s friend Jeepers in both films. You know who is only in this one? Jayne Mansfield, playing Miss Tawny Dawn, a singer who decides to help our hero in his bid to fix up the gambling joint that he was just awarded. This would be her next to last film, which still makes me sad.

You can also listen to plenty of musical numbers from Sonny James, Roy Drusky, Del Reeves, Bill Anderson, Connie Smith, Wilma Burgess, Duke of Paducah, Jr. Carolina Cloggers and The Jordanaires.

This movie is about as cheap as it gets, all mostly shot in a static shot in one room. Even the “Vegas casino” is an obvious set.

Director Arthur C. Pierce is better known for the movies he wrote, including The Human Duplicators, The Navy vs. the Night Monsters and The Astral Factor.

Sadly, Jayne and Mamie never appear on screen together. I think that’s because the world would have stopped spinning and we would have all died screaming from that much volcanic energy in the same area. They were doing their duty staying that far apart from one another.

Bonus points for the stock footage of Vegas. Old Vegas is the best, the kind of cigarette smoke stale, beer smelling, dead bodies in Lake Mead den of sin that I always dreamed that it would be.

BONUS: Along with The Terror of Tiny Town, Doctor of Doom, Ski Fever, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Robot Monster, The Crawling Hand, Untamed Women, They Saved Hitler’s Brain, Bride of the Monster, Project Moonbase, Rocket Attack U.S.A. and The Slime People, this was one of the 13 films featured on the Larraine Newman-starring and Dr. Pepper-sponsored syndicated series The Canned Film Festival.

That title translates as Hey buddy…That’s Sabata. You’re Finished! Gianfranco Parolini had gone from making Eurospy films to If You Meet Sartana Pray for Your Death, which was a success but the series ended up being given to director Giuliano Carnimeo.

Producer Alberto Grimaldi then got in touch with Parolini to make a new series. He had a great actor to star in it, too. Lee Van Cleef, whose work in Leone’s films is the stuff of legend. What may not be known to many is that a car crash in 1958 nearly cost the actor his life and career. He actually went into interior decorating with his second wife before getting back into movies three years later, but any time he rode a horse, he’d always be in great pain. That’s kind of amazing, because for someone so well-known for being a cowboy, he gutted through it to give us all these awesome roles. What can you say for a guy whose tombstone literally says, “Best of the bad?”

Sabata is basically a man who can’t be stopped. He can hit any target and has really no morals, which is a great combination for the Italian West. He carries a four-barreled derringer and a rifle that he uses to wipe out just about everyone he meets.

The one enemy that he doesn’t immediately kill is Banjo (William Berger), who keeps trying to play every side against each other. He also has a great weapon that he hides in the music instrument that lends him his name.

There’s drunk Civil War vet Carrincha, who throws knives at people, and his only friend, a Native American named Alley Cat who can escape anyone and is the master of acrobatics.

The bad guy here is named Stengel, one of the town’s leaders who is robbing the bank to buy a railroad. Sabata learns the secret and has to deal with thugs being sent his way for the rest of the film. Stengel has a dart gun in a cane, which is pretty awesome, and he’s played by Franco Ressel, who was in 121 movies, a resume which includes Hercules the Avenger, Blood and Black Lace, Password: Kill Agent Gordon, Have a Good Funeral, My Friend… Sartana Will Pay and Naked Girl Killed in the Park.

This movie is a blast — everything great about Sartana but with Lee Van Cleef as the hero instead of Gianni Garko (or George Hilton, George Martin, Jeff Cameron, William Berger, Hunt Powers, Johnny Garko, George Ardisson, Robert Widmark or the lack of anyone playing the role in a movie named Let’s Go And Kill Sartana).

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

About the Author: Paul Andolina is back on our site. You can check out his blogs Wrestling with Film and Is the Dad Alive? for more.

I love spaghetti westerns, something about them has intrigued me since first viewing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. I go through spurts where I watch a slew of them and then get a bit burnt out or my viewing interests take a huge leap in another direction for a while. I spend hours sometimes going through Amazon Prime’s catalog and looking for spaghetti westerns and I came across Day of Judgement.

Day of Judgement from 1971 is about a yankee soldier who returns to find his homestead destroyed and his son and wife murdered. All that is left in the rubble is a small tin windup drummer. He sets to carve a vengeful path through those that perpetrated the heinous act. Each man he encounters is met with the strange noise of the tin drummer and told to make their play when the drummer stops. 

Ty Hardin plays the stranger who comes into town and starts paying the gravedigger and undertaker to keep digging and making coffins until he tells them to stop. It’s a violent western with typical tropes, the stranger coming to town to seek vengeance, a sheriff that may or may not be on the up and up and plenty of bullets flying throughout its runtime. It has a few small moments of nudity as well which may interest some folks. I like that the sheriff is pretty much sleeping with prostitutes the entire movie and saying he’s trying to find the man who is killing all the folks.

It’s a decent little Italian western with its most notable feature being that it lifts Ennio Morricone’s score from Hellbenders and drops it into this film. I think the drummer is enough of a gimmick to keep those looking for something to watch in this genre interested in it. I was drawn in by the soundtrack which I was vaguely familiar with as I bought a few volumes of the spaghetti western Cds that compile themes and main titles from spaghetti westerns. I’ve yet to see Hellbenders but I do plan on watching it soon. I think those who are looking for decent time with a western will find much to like about Day of Judgement especially the gravedigger who constantly warns everyone that judgment day is upon the town.

Full movie on YouTube: