COMIN' AT YA!: ARTICLE #1

During this month long celebration, I will be posting several articles which appeared in various publications during the period in which "Comin' At Ya!" was released. Other articles, from various periods, will provide background.

This first article appeared in Excalibur Weekly on the day that "Comin' At Ya!" opened in Toronto, October 2, 1981. The author of the article is Roman "Shades" Pawlyszyn.









Comin' At Ya!
"Real rats in your laps"

It's 1953. Outside the movie theatre, the gaudy poster promises "a lion in your arms, a lover in your lap", or something like that. Inside, it's packed and every member of the audience is wearing a pair of paper-framed glasses for which each paid an extra dime. All lenses are glued to the action on screen: a rattlesnake is coiling his towards our sleeping cowboy-hero. Suddenly, the rattler lunges our directly at the audience and the bespectacled faces duck in unison under a chorus of gasps.

Scenes like this will again be common if Bill Bukowski had his way. And it looks like he might. The 29-year-old graduate of the NYU film school had spent the last seven years developing a modern process for the production of 3-D films; he's now watching his invention translate into box office success. The film is Comin' At Ya! and it opens in Toronto today.

In his pursuit of the third dimension, Bukowski found himself in quite an uphill struggle. "When I first started, there was nobody to learn from," he recounts. "I had to track people down in nursing homes."

Unlike the cumbersome, unreliable methods used in 3-D's golden age, Bukowski's new system can be attached to any camera with a minimum of fuss. However, Bukowski has not managed to dispense with necessity of special glasses for the audience.

"The Russians have developed a system that requires no glasses," he explains, "but only three people can watch it at once and get the 3-D effect, and it does require that you sit with a neck brace keeping your head absolutely still. It's sort of the 'you move, you die' principle."

Plot-wise, Comin' At Ya! is pretty lame - a weak spaghetti western interrupted occasionally by striking 3-D effects, and that's its problem. Comin' At Ya! is a special effect in search of a movie.

Bukowski agrees, but was unable to influence those in charge of the aesthetics, being limited to his role as 3-D Technical Advisor: I had so many arguments with the scriptwriters it got to the point where all I could do is throw my arms in the air."

It seems shortsighted not to utilize more of the possibilities of 3-D than just thrusting rats into the laps of viewers, especially since that was precisely the reason 3-D's novelty wore off so quickly in the 1950's. At that time, 3-D became synonymous with junky, gimmick-ridden 'B'-movies. With the upcoming follow-ups to Comin' At Ya! bearing such titles as Rottweiler ('Starring ten of the deadliest dogs in the world') and Louisiana Swamp Murders, it's not hard to envision the 3-D renaissance joining the electric back-scratcher revival in renaissance heaven.

Which would be too bad for Bukowski. In the future, he'd like to try combining 3-D and IMAX (the 70mm system used at Ontario Place's Cinesphere), and he'd also like to perfect the system used in Comin' At Ya!, which he insists was merely a prototype. If you'd like to hear about the cinematic possibilities of 3-D, talk to Bill Bukowski. If you'd like to see some amazing technology, go see Comin' At Ya!. And maybe, someday, Stanley Kubrick will make a 3-D film.