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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...

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...

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...