''Comin' at Ya!'' is a Spanish-American
3D Western film
The Western is a film genre defined by the American Film Institute as films which are "set in the American West that mbodythe spirit, the struggle, and the demise of the new frontier." Generally set in the American frontier between the Calif ...
, featuring
Tony Anthony,
Victoria Abril and
Gene Quintano and
directed
Direct may refer to:
Mathematics
* Directed set, in order theory
* Direct limit of (pre), sheaves
* Direct sum of modules, a construction in abstract algebra which combines several vector spaces
Computing
* Direct access (disambiguation), a ...
by
Ferdinando Baldi.
It was produced as a co-production between American company
Filmways
Filmways, Inc. (also known as Filmways Pictures and Filmways Television) was a television and film production company founded by American film executive Martin Ransohoff and Edwin Kasper in 1952. It is probably best remembered as the production c ...
and The Lupo-Anthony-Quintano Company, an independent company. Released in 1981, the film effectively started the 3D film boom of the early 1980s. The same filmmakers returned in 1983 with ''
Treasure of the Four Crowns''.
Plot
H.H. Hart, a bank robber, loses his wife to kidnappers on their wedding day. Subsequently, she is traded as a prostitute by villain Pike Thompson. H.H. Hart races against time to find his wife, with the help of a
Scottish
Scottish usually refers to something of, from, or related to Scotland, including:
*Scottish Gaelic, a Celtic Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family native to Scotland
*Scottish English
*Scottish national identity, the Scottish ide ...
preacher
A preacher is a person who delivers sermons or homilies on religious topics to an assembly of people. Less common are preachers who Open-air preaching, preach on the street, or those whose message is not necessarily religious, but who preach com ...
. The film features many 3D effects, many of which are intended to "fly off the screen" at the audience.
Cast
*
Tony Anthony as H.H. Hart
*
Gene Quintano as Pike Thompson
*
Victoria Abril as Abeline
*
Ricardo Palacios
Ricardo López-Nuño Díez (2 March 1940 – 11 February 2015), better known as Ricardo Palacios, was a Spanish actor, film director and screenwriter.
Born in Reinosa (Cantabria), Palacios graduated from the Official Film School in Madrid as an ...
as Polk Thompson
* Lewis Gordon as The Preacher
Development
Quintano and Lupo were Xerox salesmen who formed their own office supply firm who were interested in getting into filmmaking. They were partners in a publishing firm with Tony Anthony, a filmmaker who had made a number of spaghetti westerns. Looking for an angle they decided to make a film in 3-D, believing many younger film goers would not be familiar with it.
3-D had been a brief craze in the early 1950s with films such as ''
Bwana Devil
''Bwana Devil'' is a 1952 American adventure B movie written, directed, and produced by Arch Oboler, and starring Robert Stack, Barbara Britton, and Nigel Bruce. ''Bwana Devil'' is based on the true story of the Tsavo maneaters and filmed wi ...
'' but quickly fell out of fashion. It was also a Western when those films were not very common.
Quintano and his partners worked for four years on the film, experimenting and testing the technology.
They decided to make a Western instead of a horror movie as they believed the market was over-saturated with horror. They managed to get a distribution deal but had to raise the funds themselves. It took them three months. (Some said the budget was $2.5 million other sources say $3.5 million.)
Shooting
Filming started in Spain in September 1980 and took three months. Post production was done in Rome.
Anthony admitted the film was not ''
Citizen Kane
''Citizen Kane'' is a 1941 American Drama (film and television), drama film directed by, produced by and starring Orson Welles and co-written by Welles and Herman J. Mankiewicz. It was Welles's List of directorial debuts, first feature film. ...
'' in terms of quality. "You wouldn't make Citizen Kane' in 3-D", he said. "This is escapism. This is ''The Perils of Pauline''. It's a laugh. It's enjoyment. It's putting the audience in the theater in the picture. At one point in the picture, I'm running toward the camera with all kinds of things, tomahawks, arrows, being thrown at me. I go off to the right and you – you in the audience – think the tomahawk is going to hit you. They called it a gimmick 25 years ago. It may still be a gimmick, but today it's a gimmick for a new generation. Let's give it a try."
Stereoscopic 3-D process
''Comin' at Ya'' was filmed in the over-and-under, single-strip 35 mm 3-D format. Two
Techniscope
Techniscope or 2-perf is a 35 mm motion picture camera film format introduced by Technicolor Italia in 1960. The Techniscope format uses a two film- perforation negative pulldown per frame, instead of the standard four-perforation frame ...
-format frames, one for the left-eye image and one for the right-eye image, are stacked one above the other in the same area as one ordinary 'Scope-format frame. The resulting frames, though diminished in size, yielded a nominal aspect ratio of 2.39:1.
The lens system used was Optimax III (Bill Bukowski of Optimax III served as 3D Technical Advisor), notorious for introducing ''vertical parallax error'' owing to its flawed design (i.e., the optical axes of its twin lenses are not at the same horizontal level). The film's posters by turns heralded the 3-D process as ''SuperVision'' and ''WonderVision''.
Projection required prismatic or "mirror box" converters in front of an ordinary spherical projection lens. These converters were meant to converge the stacked left and right pictures on the screen, at the same time cross-polarizing them to match the filters in the 3-D glasses worn by the audience.
Gene Quintano was a producer. He says he appeared in the film "mostly as a matter of economics. Tony is the star and he's very good but this is not an actor's film. I mean, Robert Redford is not going to be sweating it out. The real star is supposed to be the 3-D."
Filmways
The movie was acquired for US release at the American Film Market in early 1981 by Filmways. Filmways had just bought out
American International Pictures
American International Pictures, LLC (AIP or American International Productions) is an American film production company owned by Amazon MGM Studios. In its original operating period, AIP was an independent film production and distribution c ...
and were in a state of flux at the time, having unloaded four major films, ''
The Fan'', ''
Blade Runner
''Blade Runner'' is a 1982 science fiction film directed by Ridley Scott from a screenplay by Hampton Fancher and David Peoples. Starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, Sean Young, and Edward James Olmos, it is an adaptation of Philip K. Di ...
'', ''
Halloween II'' and ''
Ragtime
Ragtime, also spelled rag-time or rag time, is a musical style that had its peak from the 1890s to 1910s. Its cardinal trait is its Syncopation, syncopated or "ragged" rhythm. Ragtime was popularized during the early 20th century by composers ...
''. President Robert Meyers had once been in business with the film's sales representative and offered to buy the film for the US if it had no other offers. Although the film sold well internationally, getting the producers their money back, no other offers came through and so Meyers honored his promise. "We thought if we were lucky we might show the film in someone's basement every few years", said Quintano.
Release
The film was previewed in March 1981 in only two cities, Phoenix and Kansas City. Anthony and Quintano ordered only 90,000 pairs of the 3-D glasses needed to watch the film. The film did spectacular business, the film easily out grossing per cinema Filmways' other film at the time, ''
Blow Out
''Blow Out'' is a 1981 American independent mystery thriller film written and directed by Brian De Palma. The film stars John Travolta as Jack Terry, a movie sound effects technician from Philadelphia who, while recording sounds for a low-bud ...
''. By August the studio decided to expand the film to as many cinemas that could take 3-D.
"They can't make the glasses fast enough", said Anthony. "They've been selling them at an average of 40,000-per-theater. At 1 in the morning the other day I got a call that we'll be opening in 200 theaters between now and the 21st. This isn't a film – it's a military operation!"
The order for glasses was increased to five million pairs. Arthur Silverstein, sales manager of the Hudson Printing Company in Manhattan, said he had to put his employees on overtime to turn out the disposable polarized glasses. "They give a remarkable special effect", he said, "and I don't even have anything to do with the movie. In fact, it's a dynamite effect. It literally puts you in the action, and you do see things coming at you."
The film did not sustain its original business however.
Legacy
The film kicked off a spate of movies in 3D including ''
Jaws 3-D
''Jaws 3-D'' (titled ''Jaws III'' in its 2-D form) is a 1983 American horror film directed by Joe Alves and starring Dennis Quaid, Bess Armstrong, Simon MacCorkindale and Louis Gossett Jr. As the second sequel to Steven Spielberg's '' Jaws' ...
'', ''
Amityville 3-D'', ''
Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone'', ''
Starchaser: The Legend of Orin'', ''
Abra Cadabra
Aaron Philips (born 3 May 1997), known professionally as Abra Cadabra, is a British rapper and singer. He is a member of the UK drill
UK drill is a subgenre of drill music and road rap that originated in the South London district of Bri ...
'', ''
Parasite
Parasitism is a Symbiosis, close relationship between species, where one organism, the parasite, lives (at least some of the time) on or inside another organism, the Host (biology), host, causing it some harm, and is Adaptation, adapted str ...
'', and ''
Friday the 13th Part III''.
Follow Up
Anthony said he wanted to make a sword and sorcery film as follow up ''Seeing is Believing''. "I've got to be very careful about my decisions from here on in", he said. "If I make a mistake, it could take me 10 years to get back to this point."
However Quintano wanted to make a ''
Topkapi'' type film about people stealing an item on an island. This became ''
Treasure of the Four Crowns''.
DVD release
This film was released on
DVD
The DVD (common abbreviation for digital video disc or digital versatile disc) is a digital optical disc data storage format. It was invented and developed in 1995 and first released on November 1, 1996, in Japan. The medium can store any ki ...
in the
Anaglyph 3D
Anaglyph 3D is the Stereoscopy, stereoscopic 3D effect achieved by means of encoding each eye's image using filters of different (usually Complementary colors, chromatically opposite) colors, typically red and cyan. Anaglyph 3D images contain ...
process. The conversion procedure involved separating the over and under images and digitally combining them as red and cyan images layered over each other.
Reissue & Blu-ray 3D Release
In May 2009, a new restoration of the film was announced. In late January 2011 it was announced by ''Fangoria'' magazine that they would be sponsoring the film's premiere screening. The premiere screening of this newly restored version was held at the Berlin Film Festival on February 12, 2011.
In January 2016, for the movie's 35th anniversary, a remastered version supervised by the film's producer and star Tony Anthony was released for home video in the Blu-ray 3D format, which includes new 5.1 surround sound.
Notes
References
External links
*
*
Tony Anthony interviewed on ''Zombie Popcorn''
{{DEFAULTSORT:Comin' At Ya!
1981 films
Spaghetti Western films
1980s 3D films
Spanish Western (genre) films
American Western (genre) films
1981 Western (genre) films
Films directed by Ferdinando Baldi
Films shot in Almería
Films with screenplays by Gene Quintano
Films scored by Carlo Savina
English-language Italian films
English-language Spanish films
1980s English-language films
1980s American films
1980s Italian films
English-language Western (genre) films