Re-inventing the past

I've been following the reinvention of a little 80's 3-D film called Comin' at Ya! for a few years now. It's a little Spaghetti Western that is widely acknowledged as leading the revival of 3-D in the 1980's. I've been planning to get a feature of it up. Looks like I should get to it soon.

After a successful screening at the 2011 Berlin Film Festival, Comin' at Ya! had its North American premiere this weekend at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas. Ain't It Cool posted an interview with Tony Anthony and I'm re-posting it hear. The producer and star of Comin' at Ya!, Anthony dropped out of the public eye shortly after his follow up 3-D film Treasure of the Four Crowns came out at the tail of the 80's 3-D wave, so it is an extreme pleasure to see his face again after all these years. I hope this reinvention gets a healthy North American release because I'm dying to see it on a big screen. Anthony and his new partner Tom Stern have spent almost as much money restoring this release of Comin' at Ya! as Anthony and the film's Italian director Ferdinando Baldi spent shooting it in Spain in the late seventies, devoting much of that to the Noir 3D effects (essentially a Black and White image with rotoscoped objects in full colour). Noir 3D is directly inspired by the Sin City aesthetic.  Anthony and Stern are going after the youth market with all this glitzy packaging and I personally they feel they could have left well enough alone. I would love to see it as it was originally made with the pristine projection of modern day digital 3D cinema.

As for the film itself. It's not one of Anthony's best, Comin' at Ya!'s plot being a lesser reworking of an earlier Anthony western Blindman, but Anthony knows this. It is a movie that is all about its 3-D, a spectacle event film and was never meant to be more. That is the reason Comin' at Ya! has never been released in a 2D flat version.