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 the cowardly sheriff (Richard Boone) refuses to go
after the outlaws as they ride out. The local Catholic priest, Father John (Van Cleef), follows instead, and
brings back the murderer, Clayton’s nephew Jess, on his own. This provokes more mayhem as
the outlaws return, break Jess out of jail, gun down Father John, and go on a
further rampage of rape and murder. The sheriff still prefers to keep a low profile, so Jenny’s son Johnny
(Leif Garrett) sets off for Mexico. There the boy intends to find Father John’s twin brother Lewis, a
retired gunfighter, and bring him back to restore peace in Juno City. Those scenes give Leif Garrett
nearly as much screen time as Lee Van Cleef. This was probably welcomed by
the young actor’s rising fan base of thirteen-year-old girls in 1976. By Van Cleef’s leathery old
fans, not so much.
“God’s Gun” was designed to look like a Spaghetti
Western, still a viable if fading genre in the mid-'70s, even to the
extent of reuniting Lee Van Cleef with director Gianfranco Parolini (alias
“Frank Kramer”) from “Sabata” and “Return of Sabata.” Parolini employs many of the
stock techniques from his earlier Westerns, including sudden close-ups when
characters are shot, skewed camera angles from the victims’ perspective as they
fall dead, and noisy saloon brawls. In reality, the movie was produced in Israel by Menahem Golan and Yoram
Globus, who would later head the Cannon Group in the 1980s. Golan and Globus followed a
simple, commercially successful formula — take a popular genre, commission a
marginally functional script with plenty of action, headline two or three
well-known actors, hire an experienced B-list director, and keep the remaining
overhead as low as possible. Many
B-movies try to finesse their cheap budgets, but “God’s Gun” doesn’t bother. The Western costumes look like
remainders from the Party Store, Van Cleef is burdened with a bad toupee and
goatee, one exterior set doubles as two towns, and it’s painfully obvious that
neither Van Cleef nor Boone dubbed themselves in post-production. The secondary casting is
comparably haphazard. As
Alex Cox notes in his audio commentary for the Blu-ray, Palance’s skinny,
curly-haired bad guys look more like “a bunch of hippies” than bloodthirsty
frontier desperadoes. Not
that any of this would have mattered in your 2 o’clock stupor as you watched “God’s Gun” at the bottom of a
drive-in triple-feature in 1976.
Kino Lorber presents “God’s Gun” in a remastered 2K
edition at a 1.85:1 aspect. The
picture looks a little soft, but it’s probably the best the studio could do
with the materials at hand. Besides
Alex Cox’s droll, savvy commentary, the Blu-ray includes reversible cover art
from the original movie posters, as well as the vintage theatrical trailers for
“God’s Gun” and other Lee Van Cleef Westerns on Kino Lorber’s backlist. If you’re in a nostalgic mood
for a 1970s drive-in experience, you could do worse than select “God’s Gun” and
two or three others from the KL catalog. Augment with a couple of stale
hot dogs and watery Cokes, fill your TV room with the heady scent of week-old
popcorn, and then sit back and enjoy.
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Fred Blosser is the author of "Sons of Ringo: The Great Spaghetti Western Heroes". Click here to order from Amazon)