One Damned Day at Dawn... Django Meets Sartana!

Fabio Testi takes a job as the new sheriff in a lawless town besieged by two ruthless gangs. Meanwhile, tough mystery man Hunt Powers also arrives to take care of some unfinished business. Considering the title of the film, you can pretty much guess who these two strangers turn out to be!

A derivative, so-so spaghetti western, One Damned Day At Dawn...Django Meets Sartana! has good atmosphere, production values, and two decent actors in the title roles, just not a very good script.

As in all three films I've seen from director Miles Deem, it's just too rushed and sloppy for it's own good, though not as bad as the other two.

I would recommend this only for people who have already seen everything else.

Django and Sartana team up to fight back against two gangs of outlaws who are terrorising a lawless town.

The unique angle of this Italian western is in combining both the Django and Sartana characters together, both of whom had their own series of spaghetti westerns. Although it does have to be said that this distinctive aspect has to be set against the fact that both protagonists only resemble these characters in name and act decidedly differently than usual. Truthfully, it seems obvious that these names were only applied to the characters as an after-thought. Quite honestly, this is a very clichéd and derivative affair with stock characters such as an enigmatic bounty hunter and amoral villains aplenty. But despite all this, I found it overall to be slightly better than average for this kind of thing. It didn't descend into tedium too often and its sparse running time seemed like good manners on the part of the film-makers. So, while any seasoned fan of this kind of thing is highly unlikely to find anything new here, I still think it entertains more effectively than many others in the sub-genre.

This kind of western are too much accepted in Brazil, mainly because around the late sixties had a invasion from this Italian productions in ours theatres over the cheapest price allowed for fits in Brazilian pockets, another important thing to ad is about a strong violence available in those pictures a bit more than american productions, in this one a usual movie about endless Django against contless Sartana, nothing new just the same on bad image of course!!

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First watch: 2017 / How many: 1 / Source: DVD / Rating: 4

Fabio Testi, dressed as Tom Baker in Doctor Who, turns up in a windy town and announces that he's the new sheriff. That's all fine and dandy, the locals say, but then they point out that there's a bunch of Mexican jerks that ride into town now and again to steal stuff, and that lot are affiliated with an even bigger bunch of jerks, who think they run the town and make a big show of playing 'keep away' with Fabio's gun, pulling his pigtails and making fun of his really long scarf.

Testi, unable to stand up to these bullies, goes back to his sheriff's office to mope and listen to The Cure. Shaken, he's now got to figure out how to get rid of these guys, but what you're thinking is "Well buddy the most important plot point I'd like to know is how these two bad guy gangs got together – that'll help the momentum of the film greatly". You're in luck, because we get a flashback that goes on for so long I wasn't sure if the film had moved on to some future bank heist involving the bad guys.

Hunt Powers is here too as Django (but dressed as Sartana) and maybe he's the answer to Testi's problems, seeing as he appears to have a six- shooter that can fire twelve or more bullets with being reloaded! He's also not a timid pussy like Testi's character.

Director Fidani is not so much the 'Ed Wood' of Spaghetti Western so much as a he is a trailblazer for how utterly trashy Italian cinema would become after the money started drying up. Here, he fills the film with everything he can think of – laughing bad guys, drinking, food eating, punch ups, gunfights at dawn, wind, punch ups, walking, looking, smelling, fire, glass raising, blinking, punch ups, shaving, roof climbing, Mexican doing the Times crossword, crossing streets, looking out of windows, looking into windows, pouring beer, brushing dust off of trousers, smoking cigars, Ames taping, hyperfine splitting, horse riding, squinting, scarf wearing, stereographic projection mapping, opening doors, crying, sitting, Morphological analysis and re- examination of the taxonomic circumscription of Acosmium, drooling, pointing, putting socks on, tracklaying and resignalling for the East London Line extension, baking, wriggling toes, scratching, wondering, The implementation of the AMPHORA2 workflow for phylogenetic analysis of metagenomic shotgun sequencing data, stirring, singing, farting, flirting, punch ups, etc.

As with most of the follow-ups to DJANGO this bears all the signs of having been tampered with in post-production in order to accommodate the most tenuous of links to that successful series. In this case, however, the makers have decided to double their money, or hedge their bets, depending on which way you look at it, by attempting to cash in on not one but two series. Not having seen any Sartana movies I cannot comment on how well this has been accomplished but in the case of Django I have to say it bears little resemblance to Fulci's DJANGO THE RUNNER let alone Corbucci's original. I spent most of the film under the impression that the man in black would turn out to be Sartana but in fact he was Django and the most spurious of reasons was given for making Sheriff Ronson that Sartana character.

That aside what was the film like in itself? Well there was almost nothing about it to mark it in any way unusual. All the customary genre cliches were in place, with a few added touches to put it down as a shoddy spaghetti western: leering close ups, sweaty villains, sporadic violence, rudimentary characterisation, and so on. Unfortunately there was none of the sub-genre's visual flair to take your mind off the banality of the plot.