In Daugherty City, Texas, the U.S. Army has stored $100,000 in the bank overnight — a record amount for the institution. In an ingenious heist, Old West-style, the 2-ton safe is swiped. The next day, it’s returned — along with the dead bodies of the men who stole it — by sharpshooter Sabata (Lee Van Cleef, Escape from New York), who rode into town just before the theft.

Accepting $5,000 as a reward, Sabata believes the Virginian Brothers acrobatic act, also in town, were in on it. He uses this knowledge against the crime’s mastermind, the wealthy land owner Stengel (Franco Ressel, Blood and Black Lace). Rounds of blackmailing, double-crossing and dynamite-blasting ensue.

The first of three Italian films on the can’t-miss gunslinger, Sabata is a winning one, not just for showcasing Van Cleef at his bad-ass best, but for having so many tricks up its sleeve. For example, Sabata has another gun concealed within the pop-open butt of his pistol, while his on-again/off-again ally Banjo (William Berger, Keoma) has a rifle hidden inside the ever-present musical instrument that has earned him his nickname.

Directed by Frank Kramer (an Americanized pseudonym for Gianfranco Parolini, God’s Gun), Sabata brushes a slight 007-ish marinade atop an already above-average spaghetti Western that, like its lead character of “the man with gunsight eyes,” has perfect aim. The stunts — particularly those of the bouncing, leaping acrobats — are amazing. —Rod Lott

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I am convinced that there is a good movie — or at least a fun one — lurking within the bowels of Jonah Hex. Being unfamiliar with the long-running DC Comics series, I cannot comment on how closely the film hews to the original narrative, but it’s hard to fathom how a story about a viciously scared gunman who talks to the dead and wields steampunk armaments could be boring.

At least, I couldn’t fathom it before Jonah Hex came to be. What should have been a pulpy Western mesh of Blade and Pale Rider is a flat-out disaster, actually making Wild Wild West seem not so bad in retrospect (that armored spider was pretty cool).

Hex has two saving graces. One is star Josh Brolin, scowling and growling with the best of them, lending his scenes an air of gravitas the film never deserves. Two, it’s only 74 mind-numbing minutes long, minus the credits.

Otherwise, this may be one of the most ridiculous movies of the decade, chock-full of actors who should know better. As the villain, John Malkovich yawns his way to another paycheck; Will Arnett is spectacularly miscast as a Civil War soldier; Michael Fassbender capers about, waiting to become famous in Inglourious Basterds; Watchmen‘s Jeffrey Dean Morgan shows up for some reason; and Michael Shannon (Take Shelter) appears in the background. And Transformers object Megan Fox as the town whore Jonah loves? Suffice to say, I’ve seen more sexual heat in a Kirk Cameron church flick.

Here’s the crux of my argument: If, while watching a movie, you suddenly say, “Hey, Tom Wopat! Cool!,” the movie sucks. —Corey Redekop

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Roughly the 24th Django sequel, Viva! Django — alternately known as A Man Called Django and the confusing W! Django — puts Anthony Steffen (The Night Evelyn Came Out of the Grave) in the character’s saddle for his fifth and final ride. The title says it all.

Here, the drifter Django rolls into a town all but abandoned, save for morbidly obese saloon owner Paco (Donato Castellaneta) and his too-hot-for him wife, Lola (smoldering Esmeralda Barros, King of Kong Island), who works there as a, um, “feisty little filly.” Django tells Paco he’s looking for the four men behind the Four Leaf Clover Gang, who murdered his wife. Our cigar-chomping hero carries his smokes around in a music box that displays his dearly departed’s photo and, when opened, conveniently plays the film’s über-hummable Piero Umiliani theme.

After disguising himself as a friar and igniting much dynamite that sends hapless citizens through candy-glass windows, Django meets Four Leaf vet Carranza (Stelio Candelli, Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires). Django knows Carranza was the only one who had nothing to do with it, but demands his help to find the other three.

Simple plot, simple pleasures, gringo. Director Edoardo Mulargia (Tropic of Cancer) lightens the mood of the original with noticeable comedy upfront, but that doesn’t mean violence takes a backseat. Although not particularly bloody, the flick delivers plenty of gunshots, most of which hit their greasy targets. Not a single one is Django, of course; he’s too much of a badass, like when he uses a branch to rig a fake arm in his coat to make it look like he’s surrendering. Silly villains — Django surrenders to no one. —Rod Lott

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Django: The “D” is silent; the movie is not.

Sergio Corbucci’s answer to Sergio Leone’s masterful Dollars trilogy helped entwine the spaghetti Western further into the DNA of world cinema. Starring as the title traveler is Franco Nero, the scruffy Civil War vet who pulls a coffin behind him as he drifts from town to town. As the film opens, he saves a perfectly lovely woman strung up for a good whippin’ from bandits.

She’s Maria (Loredana Nusciak, Gladiators 7), a prostitute fleeing from Major Jackson (Eduardo Fajardo, a fun name to say) and his band of red-hooded executioners who collect “protection money” from uncommonly muddy ghost towns that don’t need protecting from anything but more rain. Jackson follows her and Django to one of the saloons on his racketeering list.

Jackson finds out the hard way what’s in Django’s coffin: a Gatling gun, with which our protagonist easily kills all the baddies but Jackson himself, and that’s only because he has designs on Jackson’s bonanza of bullion. Only through joining forces with Mexican Gen. Rodriguez (José Bódalo, Companeros) can Django hope to snag it.

With more trigger pulls and resulting bullet wounds than the era was used to, Django shoots its way into your good graces. Corbucci (Super Fuzz) keeps the story going without losing steam, proving that an epic feel can be attained minus an epic length. Naturally, Nero is the big (and quick) draw as Django, a Western antihero who could use a good antidepressant. Often imitated, never duplicated, this is one quicksand-sinkin’, cork-spittin’, mud-wrasslin’, ear-shavin’, bottle-shootin’, hand-breaking good time! —Rod Lott

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There are some cinematic disasters that live on despite their failure, achieving a dubious kind of legend that actually serves them better than if they had succeeded. The Legend of the Lone Ranger is not one of them. In fact, it’s a film few people remember and even fewer ever talk about. When it flopped, it skipped right past infamy and went directly to oblivion instead.

The only reason I’ve remembered it over the years is because of a sweet childhood memory involving my parents waking me up to watch the Betamax copy they’d rented while coming home from a night on the town. I’ve come to assume that they were probably slightly tipsy when they did this, since they never did anything like that ever again, but I still find the recollection of it moving nonetheless.

Returning to the movie three decades later, I feared the worst, especially knowing its star discovery — the improbably named Klinton Spilsbury — was a male model who never acted again after having all of his dialogue replaced by James Keach (who occasionally sounds recorded in an echo chamber), so I was pleasantly surprised by how entertaining the experience of watching it turned out to be.

That’s not to say it’s a good movie, but rather that I found much amusement in its inelegant attempt to marry the charming innocence of the classic Lone Ranger iconography with the graphic brutality of the post-Peckenpah/Leone Western landscape. Imagine The Apple Dumpling Gang with gaping bloody bullet wounds and you can almost picture it. Does The Legend of the Lone Ranger deserve its obscurity? Probably, but that won’t stop me from returning to it again. —Allan Mott

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