A Western in Your FACE!

COMIN' AT YA! (1981)

Reviewed By Jerry Saravia

The title says it all - everything on the screen comes at yah, in 3-D. Only the 3-D effects are not what they are nowadays - we are talking about cardboard glasses with red and cyan filters. That means anything red and cyan really popped out of the screen. "Comin' at Ya!" was a return to 3-D back in 1981, throwing everything at the audience except the kitchen sink. Is it a good movie? Heck, no! Is it another one of those good-bad movies? Heck, yes!

Oh, no!!! A Baby's bare ass in 3-D!

The movie directed by Ferdinando Baldi is a low-rent spaghetti western that begins with H.H. Hart (Tony Anthony) at his wedding ceremony which is interrupted by two villainous, gun-toting brothers. They kill the priest and kidnap Hart's bride who is sold as a prostitute. Hart is assumed to be dead but no - in a pure knockoff of Clint Eastwood's Man of No Name and Few Words, he is very much alive and intends to find the brothers and kill them and save his bride. That is the plot which is merely a springboard for endless 3-D effects that include flying bats, flying flaming arrows, characters who toss beans, coins and yo-yos at the audience from low-angle shots, hungry rats, snakes, guns that poke out of the screen, and there is a baby's bare ass as it sits on us! Oh, and I enjoyed the nifty opening credits which are emblazoned on several objects in a room.

On the plus side, "Comin' at Ya!" has some beautiful widescreen western landscapes (though this is the first western I've seen where palm trees show up in shots that look like they were filmed in Palm Springs). The movie is somewhat fun and has a simple-minded sense of humor, though it does drag on for a while until it gets to do the good stuff - the 3-D climax in particular is quite effective. "Comin at Ya! is not really a movie - it is just a test reel to prove that 3-D was back in a major way (all the 3-D effects are repeated at the end in case you didn't notice how cool they were). They are cool effects, but a more charismatic hero and something called a story might have been nice too.