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by Yann Benarrous

Is it really worthwhile for me to comment further? Just imagine throwing into a defective Thermomix in no particular order Bruce Lee's early classics, (not-the-best) Blaxploitation undercover stories, few OSS177 and other cheap cold war spy fictions with just a drop of Nunsploitation to spice it up. Tempting, isn't it? No surprise to see the B-movies undisputed ruler Quentin Tarantino resurrecting this underground piece for an interview to the Straight Times while promoting “Kill Bill”.

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Obviously, the name Cleopatra Wong is directly inspired form Jack Starrett's “Cleopatra Jones” (1973), just like the introductive “They call her… “ is a common pattern of the Exploitation scene, the most famous probably being the Spaghetti Western “They Call Me Trinity” (1970). Moreover seeing the coming-from-nowhere-soon-returning-to-nowhere leading actress Doris Young getting renamed Marrie Lee is certainly making her a sibling of King Bruce,...

Tipping their Stetsons to a passel of 1960s Spaghetti Westerns — everything from “A Fistful of Dollars” to “They Call Me Trinity” — and the sort of 1970s Blaxploitation oaters that once provided steady employment for Fred Williamson, director-star Michael Jai White and co-star (and co-writer) Byron Keith Minns have cobbled together “Outlaw Johnny Black,” a fitfully funny but uncomfortably overlong entertainment best appreciated by movie buffs who share the pair’s affection for the genre tropes and stereotypes they seriocomically recycle.

Not nearly as free-wheeling and fleet-footed as “Black Dynamite,” the 2009 satirical comedy that cast White as a Shaft-like action hero, the new film nonetheless provides more than a few good laughs, even when it seems to be taking horse opera clichés a tad too respectfully, and showcases a fine cast of actors dedicated to both the silliness and the seriousness of the enterprise.

White plays the title character, a notorious...

While there's no denying Clint Eastwood has played some of the fastest gunslingers in Western movies, there are plenty of gunfighters played by other Western stars. The Man With No Name and the High Plains Drifter are just a few characters he built his reputation on for being quick-drawing guns-for-hire, but there have been plenty of other actors, from John Wayne to Glenn Ford, who have also done impressive things with a pair of six-shooters. Like lawmen, gunslingers were a common archetype in the American Frontier but allowed for a little moral ambiguity.

Because of their propensity for dark and violent pasts, only particular actors took on this sort of character. For someone like Gregory Peck, who had a tendency to only play heroic parts, they offered a different challenge to change his reputation as a performer. Gunslingers were an important archetype that helped shape the mythos of the Wild West,...

UK correspondent Lee Broughton returns with coverage of a well-realised Spaghetti Western, Michele Lupo’s irony-laden semi-comedy Ben & Charlie. The film’s eponymous anti-heroes are played by fan favourites Giuliano Gemma and George Eastman and the duo receive great support from a number of familiar faces including Marisa Mell, Aldo Sambrell and Giacomo Rossi Stuart.

Ben & Charlie

Region-Free Blu-ray

Explosive Media GmbH

1972 / Color / 2:35 widescreen / 113 min. / Amigo, Stay Away; Amico, stammi lontano almeno un palmo / Street Date, 28 October 2021 / Available from Explosive Media / £22.99

Starring: Giuliano Gemma, George Eastman, Vittorio Congia, Luciano Lorcas, Giacomo Rossi Stuart, Remo Capitani, Nello Pazzafini, Marisa Mell, Aldo Sambrell, Roberto Camardiel.

Cinematography: Aristide Massaccesi

Production Designer: Dario Micheli

Film Editor: Antonietta Zita

Original Music: Gianni Ferrio

Written by Luigi Montefiori and Sergio Donati

Produced by Lucio Bompani

Directed by Michele Lupo

Charlie (George Eastman) patiently waits outside of a Mexican prison so that he can give his...

Above: Prop poster for Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood by Renato Casaro.When the first poster was released in March for Quentin Tarantino’s much-anticipated Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, which opens in theaters today, people were generally not impressed. And rightly so: a poorly composed, awkwardly Photoshopped image of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio leaning against the edges of the poster frame, with a car and the Hollywood sign in the background, it looked like it had been knocked off in a rush for the Cannes Film Festival and would inevitably be replaced closer to the release date with something much better. And eventually an illustrated retro-style poster was released that was a vast improvement. But the Photoshopped version has endured, with a number of variations released in the interim. And it seems that both styles, or either one or the other, are now in theaters. The illustrated poster,...

When it comes to drama and suspense, you can’t beat a poker scene on the big screen. Just like the game itself, you never know quite how the scene is going to unfold and movie goers have had the pleasure of witnessing some highly memorable scenes. Maybe it’s the style that makes them memorable. Maybe it’s the slickness of it all. Who knows? One thing that you can be sure of, however, is that whenever there’s a poker scene in the movies, you certainly won’t leave your seat until you know how it ends. Below in this article, we discuss some of the best, most famous poker scenes the big screen has ever gifted us.

Casino Royale

In Casino Royale, Daniel Craig, starring as the world’s most debonair spy, James Bond, features in one of the most famous poker games in movie history and...

What year is this? Because I’m currently sat here playing a side-scrolling 16-bit style beat ‘em-up featuring the legendary Italian filmmaking duo of Bud Spencer and Terence Hill… Are we sure this is 2018? It certainly doesn’t feel like it playing Bud Spencer & Terence Hill: Slaps And Beans.

For those unaware Bud Spencer and Terence Hill were Huge in the 70s and 80s, with their Italian-made films traversing the globe, bringing the duo’s particular brand of slapstick violence to homes everywhere. I remember first seeing one of their films late at night on Yorkshire TV and having no idea what I was watching but loving it all the same. The duo’s brand of humour and action easily translated language barriers and both of those are also present in Bud Spencer & Terence Hill: Slaps And Beans in spades!

Bud Spencer & Terence Hill: Slaps And Beans feels like a...

Review by Roger Carpenter

It is arguable exactly when the first so-called spaghetti western was filmed (some critics go all the way back to 1943), but there isn’t much argument about when the genre was popularized, and that was with Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, released in 1964 and quickly followed by even more commercial success with 1965’s For a Few Dollars More. Of all the Italian film genres, spaghetti westerns may have been the most popular worldwide, and literally hundreds were produced, spawning subgenres like Zapatas (political films that criticized imperialism), gunslingers (featuring bounty hunters), betrayal stories, tragic heroes, and even comedy westerns.

The height of the spaghetti western craze was 1968, with 1969 seeing a marked decrease in these types of films being produced. Even though the cycle lasted well into the 1970’s—and some of the best of the genre were produced during that time—the genre was...

The Seventies spaghetti Western spoofs They Call Me Trinity and Trinity Is Still My Name make their Blu-ray debuts next week!

Quentin Tarantino‘s brand of fetishism — the non-foot kind, I mean — is, in some part, an exploration of the cinema on a genre-by-genre basis, and so his filmography has, to my mind, been missing a certain something without a documentary. While he’ll claim there are (maybe) only two features left in him, there’s a chance that one will take that path — or at least have a documentary-like reserve of research behind it.

The subject? 1970. No, not the cinema of the 1970s, a medium-specific topic that’s been covered as much as any, but 1970, a time Quentin Tarantino considers the takeover point for New Hollywood — and it’s fascinated him so much that he’s been poring over and pondering material for four years. So he revealed during a recent masterclass held at Lyon’s Lumière Festival, where the “work in progress” was given this noncommital classification: “Am I going to write a book?...

By Lee Pfeiffer

Bud Spencer, the burly former Italian athlete who became an iconic film star in his native country, has died at age 86. Spencer, whose real name was Carlo Pedersoli, chose his stage name as a tribute to Budweiser beer, which he loved, and Spencer Tracy, his favorite film star. Although Spencer's film found some exposure in the American market, his greatest success was found in European comedy westerns that often co-starred his friend Terence Hill. Among the films that are best known to English-speaking audiences are "Ace High", "The Five Man Army", "They Call Me Trinity", "Trinity is Still My Name!", "Four Flies on Grey Velvet" and "A Reason to Live, A Reason to Die". Among the contemporary actors Spencer counted among his admirers was Russell Crowe. For more click here.  ...

By John Lemay

My Name is Nobody is many things: a 1973 spoof of the “young and old gunslingers” sub-genre that began with For a Few Dollars More; Henry Fonda’s last Western (and Sergio Leone’s to an extent); and even a eulogy on the dying of the Spaghetti Western itself. Spearheaded by Sergio Leone himself, Nobody was directed by Tonino Valerii (Day of Anger) and teams Once Upon a Time in the West’s Henry Fonda with They Call Me Trinity’s Terence Hill. As a combo of Leone’s straight westerns and Hill’s “Beans Westerns” (a slang term for comedic Spaghettis) it amounts to quite the crossover film and could’ve easily been called “Once Upon A Time in the West They Called Me Trinity.” While it is never as funny as Hill’s two Trinity films or as epic as Leone’s “horse operas” it is...

Actor who rose to fame in Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers On a Train, but refused to conform to Hollywood pressures

Early on in his career, the actor Farley Granger, who has died aged 85, worked with several of the world's greatest directors, including Alfred Hitchcock on Rope (1948) and Strangers On a Train (1951), Nicholas Ray on They Live By Night (1949) and Luchino Visconti on Senso (1953). Yet Granger failed to sustain the momentum of those years, meandering into television, some stage work and often indifferent European and American movies.

The reasons were complicated, owing much to his sexuality and an unwillingness to conform to Hollywood pressures, notably from his contract studio, MGM, and Samuel Goldwyn. Granger refused to play the publicity or marrying game common among gay and bisexual stars and turned down roles he considered unsuitable, earning a reputation – in his own words – for being "a naughty boy".

He was also the victim of bad luck,...

Alida Valli, Farley Granger in Luchino Visconti's Senso Farley Granger Dies: Rope, Senso, Strangers On A Train A lengthy big-screen hiatus followed, as Farley Granger's on-camera appearances became restricted to television work. He eventually returned to features in the late '60s, almost invariably in European productions. During that time, he was featured in several Euro-Westerns and horror/gialli (mix of violence and sex) productions. Among the Westerns were My Name Is Trinity (1970) and The Man Called Noon (1973); Granger's gialli and horror flicks included Something Is Crawling in the Dark (1971), Amuck (1972), The Red Headed Corpse (1972), and So Sweet, So Dead (1972). According to the IMDb, Granger's last feature-film role was in P. J. Posner's dramatic comedy The Next Big Thing in 2001. In addition to his film and TV work, Granger also appeared on Broadway in The Glass Menagerie, The Seagull, The Crucible, and Deathtrap. In 1966, he won [...]...