Sex, sadism and the supernatural are loosely bundled in Clint Eastwood's stylishly self-conscious western: man-with-no-name satire or fable of mystic revenge, take your pick. Eastwood looms out of the desert, a mirage of retribution on a town's inhabitants who stood by while their honest sheriff was whipped to death. Eastwood seems, not altogether successfully, to be paying off debts to his former mentor Sergio Leone - gratitude he can only express obliquely via the occult references in this distinctive variation on the spaghetti western genre.

A gunfighting stranger comes to the small settlement of Lago. After gunning down three gunmen who tried to kill him, the townsfolk decide to hire the Stranger to hold off three outlaws who are on their way.