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Keeping up with his career plan of paying homage to every film genre going, Quentin Tarantino has moved onto the spaghetti western with Django Unchained (2012). It’s not a remake of the pasta classic Django (1966), or indeed a spaghetti western, but it has clearly taken its inspiration from those violent Italian productions that swamped the late sixties.

Hollywood may have dominated the field since the beginning of motion pictures but European westerns are not exactly new; the earliest known one was filmed in 1910. Sixties German cinema made good use of Kay May’s western heroes Shatterhand and Winnetou, and the British produced The Savage Guns (1961), Hannie Caulder (1971), A Town Called Bastard (1971), Catlow (1971), Chato’s Land (1972) and Eagle’s Wing (1979). When the genre showed signs of flagging in the mid-sixties, a clever Italian director named Sergio Leone took it upon himself to reinvent the western – spaghetti style!

What made the spaghettis...

Friday night in Hollywood, the first ever Hero Complex Film Festival kicked off with a screening of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home followed by a Q&A with star, director and legend Leonard Nimoy. The Voyage Home is simply known as “the one with the whales” for most Trek fans, but certainly holds a special place in their heart. Not being a major Trek fan myself, I enjoyed rewatching the film simply with the question in my head, “If I was a Star Trek fan in 1986, desperate for a new film, what would I have thought if I was presented with That?” Long story short, I probably would have been taken back. But today, it stands as a very entertaining, almost screwball environmental comedy.

Saturday, the festival features Insomnia and The Dark Knight with special guest Christopher Nolan and Sunday is Alien and Blade Runner and with Ridley Scott.

It’s been said that Westerns are to America what Shakespeare is to England. The Western genre has been an important and iconic part of our heritage, whether in film, TV or in print. And one of the most popular and prolific Western authors was Louis L’Amour.

L’Amour had a long career writing Western fiction, which he liked to call “Frontier Stories”. L’Amour wrote 89 books from 1930 to the late 1980s. Many of his stories were made into movies and all his books are still in print. He was a favorite author of Western film superstar John Wayne. “The Louis L’Amour Western Collection” brings three film adaptations of L’Amour novels to DVD for the first time.

The first of these L’Amour adaptations is The Sackets, a two-part made-for-tv retelling of two of L’Amour’s novels (The Daybreakers and Sackett) from “The Sacketts” series. The...

The weekend’s here. You’ve just been paid, and it’s burning a hole in your pocket. What’s a pop culture geek to do? In hopes of steering you in the right direction to blow some of that hard-earned cash, it’s time for the Fred Weekend Shopping Guide - your spotlight on the things you didn’t even know you wanted…

(Please support Fred by using the links below to make any impulse purchases - it helps to keep us going…)

While the MST3K version is still near and dear to my heart, it is fun to see the restored original Gamera: The Giant Monster (Shout Factory, Not Rated, DVD-$19.93 Srp) in its DVD debut, sporting an audio commentary and a retrospective featurette. It’s a giant turtle, for criminy’s sake!

Matt Smith’s tenure as the new Doctor on Doctor Who isn’t...

Back in the day, I think I must have devoured every Louis L’Amour book I could find at the public library. I’m pretty sure I read almost everything the man has ever written, but especially all of his Westerns, so it’s no surprise I was anxious to relive all those great reading days with the 3-dvd Louis L’Amour Western Collection, which comes packaged with two TV adaptations, “The Sacketts” and “Conagher”, as well as “Catlow”, starring Yul Brynner. Fans of Louis L’Amour can now own the collection from Warner Home Video on May 18, 2010. Click to Own it Now on DVD. Three hard-riding movie adaptations of the legendary author’s novels. Catlow – A renegade outlaw wants to pull off a gold heist but finds it hard because he’s such a wanted man – by the Mexican Army, his hellcat girlfriend, an Indian war party, a vengeful...

Yul Brynner stars in this western comedy along with Richard Crenna from the pen of Louis L.Amour. I.d imagine that L.Amour.s book wasn.t as comedic but the film also gave a certain television star a chance to break away from the character he.d become associated with. U.S. Marshall Ben Cowan (Richard Crenna) is going out to the desert to serve a warrant on his good friend Catlow (Yul Brynner). Unfortunately, he encounters an Indian and ends up with an arrow in his leg. Catlow and his man Merridew (Jeff Corey) find the Marshall and hold off on their cattle drive until he.s well again, losing valuable time. Catlow has been gathering .maverick. cattle and putting his brand on...