Wizard-8 Review of Now They Call Him Sacramento

Now They Call Him Sacramento (1972)

One of the worst examples of the genre

[31 March 2012]

In the 1970s, the spaghetti western was in a decline, both in the amount that were being made every year, but also in the average quality. "Now They Call Him Sacramento" is proof of the latter, a spaghetti western so bad that it has to be one of the worst ever made. It's a cheap enterprise; evidently 90% of the budget was reserved for the climatic sequence of a western town being destroyed. I'll admit this destruction looks kind of impressive, but the sixty minutes that run before it are extremely threadbare, with tacky production values, such as the evident fact that the Italian filmmakers couldn't afford to shoot in Spain but shot in the green and lush Italian countryside. The rest of the movie is just as bad. The story makes no sense, with characters (a number who are never even named) with confusing motives and alliances. And while the movie aims to be comic, the various gags (including a lot of slapstick fighting) have no grace or comic timing. An AWFUL movie!