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By Fred Blosser

“Binge-watching” is a relatively recent addition to our vocabulary, thanks to 24/7 streaming TV channels, but the concept itself isn’t new. On summer weekends in the 1970s, drive-in theatres offered the same opportunity for immersing yourself in cheap, all-night entertainment. There, you’d binge not on multiple episodes of “Peacemaker” or “Walking Dead” but instead on their Disco-era equivalent: triple or quadruple features of B-Westerns, soft-core sex comedies starring ex-Playboy Centerfolds, Kung-fu imports, and populist vigilante dramas.

Back then, one film on the bill in scratchy, tinny celluloid might have been “God’s Gun,” starring Lee Van Cleef. In the 1976 Western, now available on Blu-ray from Kino Lorber, an outlaw gang led by Sam Clayton (Jack Palance) sweeps into town, demolishes the saloon owned by pretty Jenny (Sybil Danning), and kills a man at the poker table. Jenny is furious when...

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By John M. Whalen

Do the names Sergio Leone, Sergio Corbucci, Frank Kramer, Sartana, Sabata, Tuco or Trinity mean anything to you, amigo? If they do, it’s probably because you’ve seen a few too many Spaghetti Westerns. "Spaghetti Western," for those tenderfoots that might not know, is the name given to a host of western films made in Italy and Spain during the sixties and seventies featuring an international cast usually headed by an American actor who had seen better days. Cowboy actors like Rod Cameron, Edd Byrne, and Guy Madison went to Europe after their TV and film careers petered out to battle outlaws, rustlers and ruthless killers who looked more like they just stepped out of a pizzeria in Palermo than a saloon in South Texas. These movies are wild, violent, and weird, but there was a certain something...

Bourne and Mission: Impossible, right back to Harry Palmer and Danger Diabolik - meet the many pretenders to James Bond's throne...

Since 1962, the James Bond franchise has come to define the spy genre, for good or ill. More broadly, every thriller and action film that comes out now either uses them as inspiration, or attempts to ignore or re-work the tropes that have come to be associated with the series.

Coming off the release of Kingsman: The Secret Service, and with the release of a new Bond film this year, now seems like the perfect time to take a look at a sample of the films which have been inspired by James Bond — either as homages, parodies or reactions.

The Ipcress File (1965)

Produced by James Bond producer Harry Saltzman as a more grounded alternative to the largesse of Bond, The Ipcress File is more concerned with the intricacies of real spy-work — the endless paperwork,...

By Fred Blosser

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On a windy night, a black-clad stranger rides into Daugherty City, Texas. He flips a coin to a scruffy drunk who is strapped for the price of a drink. He exposes a crooked dice game in the local saloon, where most of the townsfolk seem to be congregated. Then he departs. In the meantime, down the street, a gang of acrobatic robbers breaks into the bank and heists a safe containing $100,000 in Army payroll money. The getaway crew escapes town before a wounded trooper can raise the alarm, but out on the trail they run into the stranger, Sabata, who picks them off with a tricked-out rifle and recovers the stolen money.

Thus, in under 15 minutes of running time, Gianfranco Parolini neatly sets up the events that will drive the remaining 90 minutes of his 1969 Spaghetti Western, "Ehi amico... c'è Sabata,...

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve long been a fan of the fairly obscure late 70s King Kong-inspired giant monster epic Yeti, Giant of the 20th Century. Barely released on VHS, never before on DVD, finally - at long last - this delirious b-movie bonanza is finally getting its long overdue DVD release.

For the uninitiated, Yeti, Giant of the 20th Century is a 1977 Italian production shot in Canada and then badly dubbed into English that was designed to ride the coattails of the 1976 big budget King Kong remake. Long before The Asylum the Italians were the true kings of the mockbuster.

From Gianfranco Parolini Aka Frank Kramer, co-writer and director of the Lee Van Cleef/Yul Brenner spaghetti western trilogy Sabata, Adios, Sabata, and The Return of Sabata, and starring Antonella Interlenghi (Fulci’s City of the Living Dead), Tony Kendall (Ossorio’s Return of the Evil Dead...

Swiss label Explosive Media (www.explosive-media.com) has  just released two classic Italian spaghetti westerns on Blu-ray from brand new HD transfers: Giulio Petroni's Death Rides a Horse (1967), starring Lee Van Cleef, John Phillip Law, and Mario Brega and Gianfranco Parolini's Sabata (1969), starring Lee Van Cleef, William Berger and Ignazio Spalla. Both films have their world-wide premiere on the Blu-ray format.

These new releases have newly-produced special features, bonus DVDs and illustrated booklets. Both are available for purchase in Switzerland and Germany via Amazon and have English tracks. Explosive Media released the brilliant Blu-ray version of Lee Van Cleef's The Big Gundown last year, so fans already know the calibre of content and quality presented by this Swiss company.

Death Rides a Horse

Fifteen years after four bandits massacred his family, a young man (John Phillip Law) seeks revenge. Several of the men responsible now hold positions...

With Leonardo DiCaprio snagging a best supporting actor Golden Globe nod this week for his villainous role in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained, out in theaters Christmas Day, the lens has narrowed on the normally hero-prone actor embodying a cackling, cruel plantation owner.

Turn your eyes, then, to these three clips from the exploitation spaghetti western homage, below. In this first clip, DiCaprio showcases sleazy, blue-eyed charm as Calvin Candie, facing off against Jamie Foxx as freed slave Django. “Where did you dig him up,” DiCaprio sneers to Christoph Waltz’s dentist-turned-bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz, with Foxx standing nearby.

By 1962 his career as an actor was over. A car accident in ’58 had left him with a shattered kneecap and a recurring limp, so Lee Van Cleef decided to call it a day. Hell, he’d been getting tired anyway. The parts were no good and he was sick of playing two-bit snakes in countless big and small screen Westerns. Sure he’d been in some classics – classics like High Noon (1952) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) – but he was always too ugly to play the hero.

“In just about every film I ever made I was killed off by John Wayne or Gregory Peck or Gary Cooper,” he recalled without nostalgia.

See his face was frontier mean: narrow eyes, taught skin, mouth curled in a half amused snarl. He was told if he wanted better parts he’d have to get that hawk nose of his fixed. So...

If you're like me and constantly have a movie soundtrack playing in your head during the most random moments of your life, then you might want to consider ThinkGeek's Personal Soundtrack Shirt as an essential part of your wardrobe. Thanks to the cutting edge modern technology in this tee (is that the Twitter bird?), you'll have 20 available soundtrack tunes to add to your everyday existence, and the ability to download your own.

The shirt was invented as a gag gift for April Fool's day but the geniuses at ThinkGeek Labs had such an overwhelming response to the product, they decided to unleash the shirt on the public for purchase year round. A working speaker on the front plays the smooth sounds of your choice (10 music themes or 10 sound effects) and includes a 20 button remote, because fumbling between "Disco Floor" and "Sexy Time Theme" would be highly embarrassing. There's an Sd...

An insurance fiddle on a strongbox of gold is initiated by a scheming cabal of town dignitaries in Gianfranco Parolini's 1968 angel of death film ... If You Meet Sartana, Pray For Your Death. Into the breach steps the Sartana (Gianni Garko), the most stylish character ever to set foot in the usually grubby and sweat-drenched world of the Spaghetti Western. He takes it upon himself to serve justice upon the outlaws, Mexican bandits and corrupt officialdom, in the process walking away with a coffin-load of loot, as he influences events, turns up unexpectedly, or simply takes matters into his own hands with the silver Sharp's Derringer and Winchester rifle that play integral roles in his personal arsenal.

Ample death, ample destruction and muchos double-crossing quickly follow.

Sartana, to give it the more popular and less unwieldy title, brings together such heavyweights of the Spaghetti Western genre as Gianni Garko (Blood At Sundown,...

Reduced to catching frogs for food, Confederate soldiers returning from the war are treated as second-class citizens and hunted down by a gang of bounty hunters (in a similar premise to The Great Silence), operating under the protection of local law enforcement agencies.

Guiliano Gemma (The Day of Anger, A Pistol For Ringo) plays Michael 'California' Random, one such soldier who takes the naive Willy Preston (Miguel Bose) under his wing. When his companion is shot in the back and strung up for stealing a horse, California travels to his parents' Georgia ranch to break the bad news. In typical style he falls for Helen, his dead comrade's sister, and following the senseless killing of three Confederates by bounty killer Rope Whitaker (Raimund Harmstorf) and his men, he gets caught up in the ensuing crossfire as federal agents arrive to take Whitaker down. The sister is taken hostage as the gang make their escape,...

Jeffman from Head Full Of Snow recommends five Spaghetti Westerns not directed by Sergio Leone.

A bruised and battered stalwart of the late night cinema circuit, the Spaghetti Western held a bastardised, custom-job revolver to the head of its inferior American cousin and relieved it of both its basic premise and last shred of decency; joyously blurring the line between right and wrong and leaving morality swinging from a ragged noose in the hot, desert sun.

The Spaghetti Western was an Italian phenomenon, mostly financed by Rome's famous Cinecitta Studios, although there were plenty of co-productions with other Euro countries like Spain and Germany, even stretching as far afield as Israel if you count the soul-sapping awfulness that is God's Gun. One man is responsible for popularising the Spaghetti Western, Sergio Leone. If you're a follower of LateMag's frequent forays into the weird and wonderful worlds of cult cinema you'll probably know his films already.