It’s easy to get the impression during the first third of Alberto De Martino’s ‘Blazing Magnum’(1976) aka ‘Una Magnum Special per Tony Saitta’ aka ‘Strange Shadows in an Empty Room’ that you’re watching a load of crap because the opening thirty minutes or so are what I can only call…

Watching Dino Risi’s ‘Il Giovedi’ (1963), or ‘The Thursday’, it was easy to wonder if the Italian filmmaker might not’ve been firing on all cylinders with this one as despite containing the director’s usual tropes — a road trip, the deconstruction of the Italian man/child, social satire, etc — the…

I was scratching my head in bafflement watching ‘Outside the Law’ (1956) last night and not because of any impenetrable plot intricacies or convoluted narrative twists but simply at how much I was enjoying the bloody thing. After all, this is a noir that’s somewhat lightweight, reveals nothing about the…

Giovanni Fago’s ‘Vengeance is Mine’ (1967) opens in a deceptively stereotypical fashion as rugged bounty hunter, John Forest (the always awesome Gianni Garko), dispatches a group of bandits led by prolific character actor Fernando Sancho (a performer many Italian Western fans would presume is going to be the film’s main…

There was a British TV show that aired back in the early 1990’s called ‘Challenge Anneka’ where the jump-suited Anneka Rice would arrive in a local town or village and help them out by the sheer force of her charitable personality alone and a helicopter. ‘The Equalizer 3’ (2023) is…

A shifty looking man in a cheap looking hat and an even cheaper looking suit walks into the bus station of a small New Mexico town. He sits down, opens his only suitcase and “discreetly” takes out a gun which he slides into his breast-pocket. He then takes out a…

So I watched ‘Pillow Talk’ (1959) at the weekend and let’s just say I have some thoughts on the movie, and they are thoughts I’d like to share with you right now by means of the lazy writer’s greatest friend — a series of haphazardly banged-out bullet points! · —…

It doesn’t take long for Damiano Damiani’s ‘How to Kill a Judge’ (1975) to get all ‘meta’ on our asses as it opens with Franco Nero playing a film director, Giacomo Solaris, having just released a movie about the assassination of a corrupt Sicilian judge. When said magistrate turns up…

Okay look, I’ve made no bones over the years about not being the world’s biggest Ben Wheatley fan; I found ‘Kill List’ (2011) daft and overrated, ‘Free Fire’ (2016) irredeemably annoying and the less said about his staggeringly misguided ‘High-Rise’ (2015) the better. It’s not that I didn’t think he…