Film

Comin' at Ya!

A 1981 spaghetti western filmed in 3D, following a bridegroom's revenge chase across Mexico after outlaws massacre his wedding and kidnap his bride. It's a fever dream of a film—lurid, visceral, technically audacious for its time, and utterly committed to delivering spectacle over subtlety. For anyone curious how 3D was being used in exploitation cinema before the format went mainstream.

TMDb rating2.3

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you love old-fashioned spaghetti-Western swagger and don't mind your genre served with cheerful, gleeful excess, especially if you're curious about early-eighties 3D gimmickry at its most shameless.

Skip it if you want the 3D to be a restrained craft rather than a deliberate stunt, since the picture keeps hurling objects at the lens and the dialogue can sound stilted and wooden.

What it asks of you: Ninety-one minutes of brisk, broad action with few quiet pauses; the picture moves fast and plays its bloodshed and bravado loudly, so it rewards a light, forgiving attention.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

The Great Silence1968

Sergio Corbucci's masterpiece of Italian western nihilism: snow-covered villages, a mute hero, and a moral universe so bleak it makes most westerns look like Boy Scout stories. Technically brilliant and emotionally devastating.

But It's grim in a way that doesn't offer easy catharsis. The ending will sit with you in ways that aren't comfortable.

The Great Silence poster

My Name Is Nobody1973

Henry Fonda's final film, directed by Sergio Leone—a playful, mythic western about an aging gunslinger confronting his own legend. Funny, elegiac, and endlessly inventive in how it plays with genre conventions.

But It's slower and more reflective than a typical revenge western. The tone shifts between comedy and melancholy in ways that won't suit everyone.

My Name Is Nobody poster

The Beyond1981

Lucio Fulci's hallucinatory horror-western hybrid released the same year, dripping with atmosphere and practical effects. If you want Italian genre cinema that prioritizes pure sensation over logic, this is hypnotic.

But The plot barely exists and the last thirty minutes abandon narrative almost entirely. It's an experience more than a story.

The Beyond poster

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Comin' at Ya!

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

Vortex2021

Both films use technical format—3D, split-screen—to make the viewer physically uncomfortable inside the story rather than distanced from it. Form isn't decoration; it's the story.

Gaspar Noé's split-screen nightmare about an elderly married couple's final days, filmed in long takes with his camera planted in their apartment. It's death cinema—intimate, bewildering, sometimes beautiful, often unbearable. A technical and emotional gamble that paid off.

But It's a 90-minute unbroken formal experiment with minimal plot. The split-screen is deliberately disorienting and asks a lot from the viewer's patience.

Vortex poster
More like this (7)

Venom1981

Piers Haggard's kinetic thriller about criminals trapped in a townhouse with a deadly black mamba. Tense, darkly funny, and surprisingly inventive within its single-location constraint—proof that 1981 was a weird year for cinema.

But The snake isn't on screen as much as you'd hope. It's more about human desperation than animal terror.

Venom poster

Possession1981

Andrzej Żuławski's baroque breakup nightmare set in divided Berlin. Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill destroy each other across 127 minutes of pure emotional chaos. Raw, upsetting, unforgettable.

But It's deliberately alienating and the violence—both physical and psychological—is meant to repel as much as fascinate. Not for a casual evening.

Possession poster

Escape from New York1981

John Carpenter's dystopian pulp perfection: Kurt Russell as an eyepatch-wearing antihero rescuing the President from a Manhattan-turned-prison. It's lean, propulsive, and has no interest in being more than it needs to be.

But The budget was tiny and it shows. Some effects haven't aged gracefully and the pacing stutters in the second act.

Escape from New York poster

Thief1981

Michael Mann's debut, a heist film about a professional thief's meticulous life unraveling. James Caan's performance is ice-cold, the cinematography is gorgeous, and Mann's visual precision invented a whole language for crime cinema.

But It's deliberately controlled and distant—you're watching a machine disassemble itself, not connecting emotionally. Some find it cold.

Thief poster

Xtro1982

Harry Bromley Davenport's gloriously deranged sci-fi body-horror film about an alien impregnating a man who gives birth to a fully-grown version of himself. Utterly unhinged, visually grotesque, and weirdly moving about fatherhood.

But It's disgusting by design and the logic is psychedelic rather than coherent. If you need things to make sense, turn back now.

Xtro poster

Maniac1980

William Lustig's grimy, brutal New York slasher that treats its premise with ugly realism rather than exploitation winking. Joe Spinell's performance cracks open something genuinely disturbing about urban isolation and violence.

But It's relentlessly nasty and offers no relief or judgement—just an unflinching document of horror. Genuinely hard to sit through.

Maniac poster

Ruben Guthrie2015

Both center on a wedding catastrophe and a man's journey afterward, but one blasts outward with revenge and spectacle while this turns inward toward repair. They're opposite answers to the same rupture.

Brendan Gall's Australian indie about a man in recovery facing his own wedding—a quiet, funny, unexpectedly moving film about addiction and second chances. It understands that sometimes the violence we do is to ourselves.

But It's deliberately small and interior. After the visceral chaos of Comin' at Ya!, this will feel like a different planet entirely.

Ruben Guthrie poster

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