The first thing worth noting is that Bond parodies and rip-offs were always more successful in Europe than in the United States – not for nothing is there an entire Eurospy subgenre far more robust and long-lived than anything that America or the United Kingdom was able to claim. And thus it was the case […]

In addition to their classier, better-known status as the most mature decade in the history of mainstream American cinema, the 1970s could also be rightfully called the Decade of the Rip-Off; not since the onset of World War II taught the world a healthy sense of shame had such a robust culture of knock-offs and […]

From among the Video Nasties L’ultmo treno della notte AKA Night Train Murders AKA Late Night Trains AKA The New House on the Left (1975, Italy) The creators: Director Aldo Lado, a giallo maker of no real import, alongside a team of writers including minor giallo figure Ettore Sanzò, semi-important Western writer Renato Izzo, and […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon hosted by Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies I have a terrible secret, but I trust all of you enough to admit it: I don’t dislike Demons 2. The film has a fairly cast-iron reputation for being a cheaper, stupider retread of Demons – not, in and of itself, a movie […]

Part of the Italian Horror Blog-a-thon hosted by Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies When I decided to review my way through the entirety of the Demons series this weekend, I didn’t realise just how insane a project I was undertaking. When Dario Argento and Lamberto Bava (son of the Italian genre film icon Mario Bava) collaborated […]

Screens at CIFF: 10/9 World premiere: 15 April, 2011, Italy Habemus Papam, “We have a Pope” in English, is the phrase spoken to the masses when the College of Cardinals has succeed in electing a new pontiff. And now it is a movie about a fictional pope’s election and the first few days of his […]

Following the 1971 release of Duck, You Sucker, Sergio Leone became fixated on the idea of adapting Harry Grey’s mobster novel The Hoods into an epic movie about organised crime in the United States, a dream that finally emerged after 13 long years as Once Upon a Time in America. The challenges of getting that […]

Once Upon a Time in America was the most hard-fought film of Sergio Leone’s career. He turned his attention towards adapting Harry Grey’s partially autobiographical mobster novel The Hoods at the very beginning of the 1970s, but a combination of rights issues, financing, and the sheer damn scope of the thing meant that 13 years […]

Following the 1971 release of Duck, You Sucker, Sergio Leone became fixated on the idea of adapting Harry Grey’s mobster novel The Hoods into an epic movie about organised crime in the United States, a dream that finally emerged after 13 long years as

Beginning with Once Upon a Time in the West, in 1968, it becomes difficult to separate the facts in the case of Sergio Leone from the complex layers of myth that he eagerly gathered around himself once it became clear that he was an Important Director. That means that one cannot trust all the details […]

Once Upon a Time in the West opens with a sequence of about 14 minutes or a touch under, that functions very much like a short film prequel to the movie proper, and it is as such the best film of director Sergio Leone’s career. I would very much like to call it the best […]

There is no doubt that A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More are good, even top-notch Westerns. Certainly, lesser movies have remained classics for longer, and if Sergio Leone had never put his name to another film after 1965, I have little doubt that we – by which I primarily mean Western […]